Plotinus — Enneads I–II

Ennead I, Treatise 1

i. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat ?

Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes : it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.

And what applies to the affections applies also to whatsoever acts, physical or mental, spring from them.

We have, therefore, to examine discursive-reason and the ordinary mental action upon objects of sense, and enquire whether these have the one seat with the affections and experiences, or perhaps sometimes the one seat, sometimes another.

And we must consider also our acts of Intellection, their mode and their seat.

And this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in these matters, must be brought to light.

Firstly, what is the seat of Sense-Perception ? This is the obvious beginning since the affections and experiences either are sensations of some kind or at least never occur apart from sensation.

2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the Soul — that is whether a distinction is to be made between Soul and

Essential Soul (between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind in itself).

If such a distinction holds, then the Soul (in man) is some sort of a composite and at once we may agree that it is a recipient and — if only reason allows — that all the affections and experiences really have their seat in the Soul, and with the affections every state and mood, good and bad alike.

But if Soul (in man) and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act of its own which Reason manifests.

If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of the Soul as an immortal — if the immortal, the imperishable, must be impassive, giving out something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except for what it receives from the Exis tents prior to itself from which Exis tents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered.

Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer ? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place for courage : courage implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are satisfied by the filling or voiding of the body, must be proper to something very different from the Soul, to that only which admits of replenishment and voidance.

And how could the Soul lend itself to any admixture ? An essential is not mixed. Or of the intrusion of anything alien ? If it did, it would be seeking the destruction of its own nature. Pain must be equally far from it. And Grief — how or for what could it grieve ? Whatever possesses Existence is supremely free, dwelling, unchangeable, within its own peculiar nature. And can any increase bring joy, where nothing, not even anything good, can accrue ? What such an Existent is, it is unchangeably.

Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul : for sensation is a receiving — whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body — and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation.

The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the intellections — whether these are to be assigned to the Soul — and as to

Pure-Pleasure (pleasure apart from sense), whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary state.

3- We may treat of the Soul as in the body — whether it be set above it or actually within it — since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.

Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences : a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

It may be objected that the Soul must, however, have Sense-Perception since its use of its instrument must acquaint it with the external conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. Thus, it will be argued, the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring distress to the soul : hence the Soul may feel sorrow and pain and every other affection that belongs to the body ; and from this again will spring desire, the Soul seeking the mending of its instrument.

But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from body to Soul ? Body may communicate qualities or conditions to another body : but — body to Soul ? Something happens to A ; does that make it happen to B ? As long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct entities ; if the Soul uses the body it is separate from it.

But apart from the philosophical separation how does Soul stand to body ?

Clearly there is a combination. And for this several modes are possible. There might be a complete coalescence : Soul might be interwoven through the body : or it might be an Ideal-Form detached or an Ideal-Form in governing contact like a pilot : or there might be part of the Soul detached and another part in contact, the disjoined part being the agent or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument or thing used.

In this last case it will be the double task of philosophy to direct this lower Soul towards the higher, the agent, and except in so far as the

conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from the instrument, the body, so that it need not forever have its Act upon or through this inferior.

4- Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a coalescence.

Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded ; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant in life ; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How can a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such as Sense-Perception ?

No : the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the body. And fear, too, will belong to the body alone ; for it is the body's doom to fail of its joys and to perish.

Then again we should have to examine how such a coalescence could be conceived : we might find it impossible : perhaps all this is like announcing the coalescence of things utterly incongruous in kind, let us say of a line and whiteness.

Next for the suggestion that the Soul is interwoven through the body : such a relation would not give woof and warp community of sensation : the interwoven element might very well suffer no change : the permeating soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body — as light goes always free of all it floods — and all the more so, since, precisely, we are asked to consider it as (not confined to any one part but) diffused throughout the entire frame.

Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul would not be subjected to the body's affections and experiences : it would be present rather as Ideal-Form in Matter.

Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if — the first possibility — the Soul is an essence, a self-existent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more decidedly be the Using-Principle (and therefore unaffected).

Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like axe-form on iron : here, no doubt, the form is all important but it is still (not the one member but) the axe, the complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the iron thus modified : on this analogy, therefore, we are even more strictly compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination to the body : their natural seat is the material member, the instrument, the potential recipient of life (and not the Life-Principle itself).

Compare the passage (in Plato) where we read that " it is absurd to suppose that the Soul weaves " ; equally absurd to think of it as desiring, grieving. All this is rather in the province of something which we may call the Animate.

5- Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life : it might be the Couplement of Soul and body : it might be a third and different entity formed from both.

The Soul in turn — apart from the nature of the Animate — must be either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow, or sympathetic ; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical experiences with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences : desire for example in the Animate may be something quite distinct from the accompanying movement or state in the desiring faculty.

The body, the live-body as we know it, we will consider later.

Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this Couplement ?

It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a distress which reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in turn merges into Soul. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation unexplained.

Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement : some evil seems to have befallen the man or his belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in the entire Animate. But this account leaves still a question as to the source and seat of the judgement : does it belong to the Soul or to the Couplement ? Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling

of grief : the judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow : one may think oneself slighted and yet not be angry ; and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer than before to any warrant for assigning these affections to the Couplement.

Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a Faculty-ofdesire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and, collectively, that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty ? Such a statement of the facts does not help towards making the affections common to the Couplement ; they might still be seated either in the Soul alone or in the body alone. On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal passion, there must be a heating of the blood and the bile, a well-defined state of the body ; on the other hand, the impulse towards The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to the Soul alone.

Reason, then, does not permit us to assign all the affections to the Couplement.

In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly be the Man that desires, and yet, on the other hand, there must be desire in the Desiring-Faculty as well. How can this be ? Are we to suppose that, when the man originates the desire, the Desiring-Faculty moves to the order ? How could the Man have come to desire at all unless through a prior activity in the Desiring-Faculty ? Then it is the Desiring-Faculty that takes the lead ? Yet how, unless the body be first in the appropriate condition ?

6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law that when any powers are contained by a recipient, every action or state expressive of them must be the action or state of that recipient, they themselves remaining unaffected as merely furnishing efficiency.

But if this were so, then, since the Animate is the recipient of the Causing-Principle (i.e. the Soul) which brings life to the Couplement, this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences and expressive activities of the life being vested in the recipient, the Animate.

But this would mean that life itself belongs not to the Soul but to the Couplement ; or at least the life of the Couplement would not be the life of the Soul ; Sense-Perception would belong not to the Sensitive-Faculty but to the container of the faculty.

But if sensation is a movement traversing the body and culminating in Soul, how can the soul lack sensation ? The very presence of the Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul.

Once again, where is Sense-Perception seated ?

In the Couplement.

Yet how can the Couplement have sensation independently of action in the Sensitive-Faculty, the Soul left out of count and the Soul-Faculty ?

7- The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's presence.

This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body.

No ; from the organised body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle, the Animate ; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate.

But the " We " ? How have We Sense-Perception ?

By the fact that We are not separate from the Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler elements go to make up the entire many-sided nature of Man.

The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation : these impressions are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other (of that in the Soul) which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms.

And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We : before this there was only the " Ours " ; but at this stage stands the WE (the authentic Human-Principle) loftily presiding over the Animate.

There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be described as the Animate or Living-Being — mingled in a lower phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from all that is kin to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in that the use and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the Soul.

8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation ? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself (Divine-Mind).

This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either as common to all or as our own immediate possession : or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible — one, everywhere and always Its entire self — and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the First-Soul (i.e. in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul).

Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes : in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate ; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one.

And how do we possess the Divinity ?

In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence ; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul — we read — and that Soul which is divided among (living) bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one and undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division : in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses ; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that

it shines into them : it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many minors.

The first of these images is (the faculty of) Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement ; and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognised as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring — offspring efficient in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering Soul which (has no direct action within matter but) produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions.

9- That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that

can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers ; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement.

But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are vested in it : for all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is evil.

When we have done evil it is because we have been worsted by our baser side — for a man is many — by desire or rage or some evil image : the misnamed reasoning that takes up with the false, in reality fancy, has not stayed for the judgement of the Reasoning-Principle: we have acted at the call of the less worthy, just as in matters of the sense-sphere we sometimes see falsely because we credit only the lower perception, that of the Couplement, without applying the tests of the Reasoning-Faculty.

The Intellectual-Principle has held aloof from the act and so is guiltless ; or, as we may state it, all depends on whether we ourselves have or have not put ourselves in touch with the Intellectual-Realm either in the Intellectual-Principle or within ourselves ; for it is possible at once to possess and not to use.

Thus we have marked off what belongs to the Couplement from what stands by itself : the one group has the character of body and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its

manifestation belongs peculiarly to Soul : and the Understanding, as passing judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the point of the vision of Ideal-Forms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (i.e. with consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable Soul. For Understanding, the true, is the Act of the Intellections : in many of its manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the inner.

Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as to itself and within itself : all the changes and all the turmoil we experience are the issue of what is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as we have said, the states and experiences of this elusive " Couplement."

10. It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We (the personality) and We are subject to these states then the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the Soul.

But it has been observed that the Couplement, too — especially before our emancipation — is a member of this total We, and in fact what the body experiences we say We experience. This We then covers two distinct notions ; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends the brute. The body is brute touched to life ; the true man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which even in its dwelling here may be kept apart. (This Soul constitutes the human being) for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul which is a radiation (or emanation) from it withdraws also, drawn after it.

Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring not from contemplative wisdom but from custom or practical discipline belong to the Couplement : to the Couplement, too, belong the vices ; they are its repugnances, desires, sympathies.

And Friendship ?

This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower part, sometimes to the interior man.

11. In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and there is but little irradiation from the higher principles of our being : but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us their action is directed towards the Supreme ; they work upon us only when they stand at the mid-point.

But does not the We include that phase of our being which stands above the mid-point ?

It does, but on condition that we lay hold of it : our entire nature is not ours at all times but only as we direct the mid-point upwards or downwards, or lead some particular phase of our nature from potentiality or native character into act.

And the animals, in what way or degree do they possess the Animate ?

If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have sinned, then the Animating-Principle in its separable phase does not enter directly into the brute ; it is there but not there to them ; they are aware only of the image of the Soul (only of the lower Soul) and of that only by being aware of the body organised and determined by that image.

If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted for them by a radiation from the All-Soul.

12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations ? Here surely is a contradiction ; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt ; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation ; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body.

We may take either view at will : they are easily reconciled.

When we tell of the sinless Soul we make Soul and Essential-Soul one and the same : it is the simple unbroken Unity.

By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the states and passions : the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive : it falls under the conditions of the entire living experience : this compound it is that sins ; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty.

It is in this sense that we read of the Soul " We saw it as those others saw the sea-god Glaukos." " And," reading on, " if we mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it, examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what Existences it is what it is."

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at birth ; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other (lower) phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth has been indicated elsewhere ; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul other than that actually coming down in the declension.

Then the Soul has let this image fall ? And this declension is it not certainly sin ?

If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin : the shadow is to be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated ; if the object were not there, the light could cause no shadow.

And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up ; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be : the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.

The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image separate existence ; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself among the gods : treating the hero as existing in the two realms at once, he gives us a twofold Hercules.

It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not the Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of him remains below.

13. And the principle that reasons out these matters ? Is it We or the Soul?

We, but by the Soul.

But how " by the Soul " ? Does this mean that the Soul reasons by possession (by contact with the matters of enquiry) ?

No ; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists without movement ; or any movement that can be ascribed to it must be utterly distinct from all corporal movement and be simply the Soul's own life.

And Intellection in us is twofold : since the Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we have Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the Intellectual-Principle upon us — for this Intellectual-Principle is part of us no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising.

Ennead I, Treatise 2

1. Since Evil is here, " haunting this world by necessary law," and it is the Soul's design to escape from Evil, we must escape hence.

But what is this escape ?

" In attaining Likeness to God," we read. And this is explained as " becoming just and holy, living by wisdom," the entire nature grounded in Virtue.

But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply Likeness to some being that has Virtue ? To what Divine Being, then, would our Likeness be ? To the Being — must we not think ? — in Which, above all, such excellence seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the Principle ruling within it, the Principle endowed with a wisdom most wonderful. What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should become Like to its ruler ?

But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt whether even in this Divine-Being all the virtues find place — Moral- Balance (Sophrosyny),'

for example ; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since nothing is alien ; where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce the desire of possession.

If, indeed, that aspiration towards the Intelligible which is in our nature exists also in this Ruling-Power, then we need not look elsewhere for the source of order and of the virtues in ourselves.

But does this Power possess the Virtues ?

We cannot expect to find There what are called the Civic Virtues, the Prudence which belongs to the reasoning faculty ; the Fortitude which conducts the emotional and passionate nature ; the Sophrosyny which consists in a certain pact, in a concord between the passionate faculty and the reason ; or Rectitude which is the due application of all the other virtues as each in turn should command or obey.

Is Likeness, then, attained, perhaps, not by these virtues of the social order but by those greater qualities known by the same general name ? And if so do the Civic Virtues give us no help at all ?

It is against reason, utterly to deny Likeness by these while admitting it by the greater : tradition at least recognises certain men of the civic excellence as divine, and we must believe that these too had in some sort attained Likeness : on both levels there is virtue for us, though not the same virtue.

Now, if it be admitted that Likeness is possible, though by a varying use of different virtues and though the civic virtues do not suffice, there is no reason why we should not, by virtues peculiar to our state, attain Likeness to a model in which virtue has no place.

But is that conceivable ?

When warmth comes in to make anything warm, must there needs be something to warm the source of the warmth ?

If a fire is to warm something else, must there be a fire to warm that fire?

Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not by an infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the argument would make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an

essential constituent of the Principle from which the Soul attaining Likeness absorbs it.

Against the illustration drawn from the fire, it may be urged that the analogy would make that Principle identical with virtue, whereas we hold it to be something higher.

The objection would be valid if what the soul takes in were one and the same with the source, but in fact virtue is one thing, the source of virtue quite another. The material house is not identical with the house conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness : the material house has distribution and order while the pure idea is not constituted by any such elements ; distribution, order, symmetry are not parts of an idea.

So with us : it is from the Supreme that we derive order and distribution and harmony, which are virtues in this sphere : the Existences There, having no need of harmony, order or distribution, have nothing to do with virtue ; and, none the less, it is by our possession of virtue that we become like to Them.

Thus much to show that the principle that we attain Likeness by virtue in no way involves the existence of virtue in the Supreme. But we have not merely to make a formal demonstration : we must persuade as well as demonstrate.

2. First, then, let us examine those good qualities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek to establish what is this thing which, as we possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Supreme possesses it, is in the nature of an exemplar or archetype and is not virtue.

We must first distinguish two modes of Likeness.

There is the likeness demanding an identical nature in the objects which, further, must draw their likeness from a common principle : and there is the case in which B resembles A, but A is a Primal, not concerned about B and not said to resemble B. In this second case, likeness is understood in a distinct sense : we no longer look for identity of nature,

but, on the contrary, for divergence since the likeness has come about by the mode of difference.

What, then, precisely is Virtue, collectively and in the particular ? The clearer method will be to begin with the particular, for so the common element by which all the forms hold the general name will readily appear.

The Civic Virtues, on which we have touched above, are a principle or order and beauty in us as long as we remain passing our life here : they ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and to our entire sensibility, and dispelling false judgement — and this by sheer efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the bounds, by the fact that the measured is lifted outside of the sphere of the unmeasured and lawless.

And, further, these Civic Virtues — measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which is as Matter to their forming — are like to the measure reigning in the over-world, and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness : the Soul nearer than the body, therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the delusion that in the Soul we see God entire.

This is the way in which men of the Civic Virtues attain Likeness.

3- We come now to that other mode of Likeness which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier virtues : discussing this we shall penetrate more deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and be able to define the nature of the higher kind whose existence we shall establish beyond doubt.

To Plato, unmistakably, there are two distinct orders of virtue, and the civic does not suffice for Likeness : " Likeness to God," he says, " is a flight from this world's ways and things " : in dealing With

the qualities of good citizenship he does not use the simple term Virtue but adds the distinguishing word civic : and elsewhere he declares all the virtues without exception to be purifications.

But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness ?

As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body's states and to think the body's thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body's moods and devoted itself to its own Act — the state of Intellection and Wisdom — never allowed the passions of the body to affect it — the virtue of Sophrosyny — knew no fear at the parting from the body — the virtue of Fortitude — and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled — in which state is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the Soul, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God ; for the Divine, too, is pure and the Divine- Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom.

But would not this make virtue a state of the Divine also ?

No : the Divine has no states ; the state is in the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in the Divine : of things in the Supreme, Soul grasps come after a mode of its own, some not at all.

Then yet again, the one word, Intellection, covers two distinct Acts ?

Rather there is primal Intellection and there is Intellection deriving from the Primal and of other scope.

As speech is the echo of the thought in the Soul, so thought in the Soul is an echo from elsewhere : that is to say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a thought above itself and is the interpreter of the higher sphere.

Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul : it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence.

4- We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon which virtue follows ? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does

the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is almost the Term ?

To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien : but Goodness is something more.

If before the impurity entered there was Goodness, the Goodness suffices ; but even so, not the act of cleansing but the cleansed thing that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish what (in the case of the cleansed Soul) this emergent is.

It can scarcely prove to be The Good : The Absolute Good cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and unable to rest in the Authentic Good.

The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its kin ; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its own ; the new phase begins by a new orientation.

After the Purification, then, there is still this orientation to be made ? No : by the purification the true alignment stands accomplished.

The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment ? No : it is what the alignment brings about within.

And this is ... ?

That it sees ; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it, of the vision it has come to.

But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten ?

What i$ now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it : to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the light.

Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures ; and these it must bring into closer accord with the verities they represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's sight is turned towards It :

otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.

5- So we come to the scope of the purification : that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle ? Identity with what God ?

The question is substantially this : how far does purification dispel the two orders of passion — anger, desire and the like, with grief and its kin — and in what degree the disengagement from the body is possible.

Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own place.

It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check : the suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its own precincts and rare and weak at that. The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too : fear therefore must cease, except so far as it is purely monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile ; even the food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the Soul's attention, and not less the sexual appetite : or if such desire there must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control ; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.

The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul's presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the neighbourhood,

either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.

There will be no battling in the Soul : the mere intervention of Reason is enough : the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord.

6. In all this there is no sin — there is only matter of discipline — but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God.

As long as there is any such involuntary action, the nature is twofold, God and Demi-God, or rather God in association with a nature of a lower power : when all the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled, a Divine Being of those that follow upon The First.

For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the essential man is There : entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning phase of his nature and this he will lead up into likeness with his highest self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible it shall never be inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course displeasing to its over-lord.

What form, then, does virtue take in one so lofty ?

It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and as the immediate presence of the Intellectual-Principle itself.

And each of these has two modes or aspects : there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul ; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul : this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not Virtue.

In the Supreme, then, what is it ?

Its proper Act and Its Essence.

That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the Supreme is not self-existent

Justice, or the Absolute of any denned virtue : it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue : for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself ; the Supreme is self -standing, independent.

But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering of faculty, does it not always imply the existence of diverse parts ?

No : There is a Rectitude of Diversity appropriate to what has parts, but there is another, not less Rectitude than the former though it resides in a Unity. And the authentic Absolute-Rectitude is the Act of a Unity upon itself, of a Unity in which there is no this and that and the other.

On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle : its Restraint (Sophrosyny) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle ; its Fortitude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less noble companion.

7- The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that

existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle .

In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes Knowledge and Wisdom ; self-concentration is Sophrosyny ; Its proper Act is Its Dutifulness ; Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate within Itself, is the equivalent of Fortitude.

In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have similar correspondences.

And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then the purification of the Soul must produce all the virtues ; if any are lacking, then not one of them is perfect.

And to possess the greater is potentially to possess the minor, though the minor need not carry the greater with them.

Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the life of the Sage ; but whether his possession of the minor virtues be actual as well as potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to qualities higher still, must be decided afresh in each several case.

Take, for example, Contemplative- Wisdom. If other guides of conduct must be called in to meet a given need, can this virtue hold its ground even in mere potentiality ?

And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in scope and province ? Where, for example, Sophrosyny would allow certain acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them off altogether ? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once Contemplative- Wisdom comes into action ?

The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give : thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in turn will define his conduct : for example, Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him ; he will work for the final Disengagement ; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man — " such as Civic Virtue commends — but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.

For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look : to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image : we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.

Ennead I, Treatise 3

i. What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us there

where we must go ?

The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed : we

have established elsewhere, by many considerations, that our journey is

to the Good, to the Primal-Principle ; and, indeed, the very reasoning which discovered the Term was itself something like an initiation.

But what order of beings will attain the Term ?

Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most things, those who at their first birth have entered into the life-germ from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover, the metaphysician taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the nature peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside guidance.

But how lies the course ? Is it alike for all, or is there a distinct method for each class of temperament ?

For all there are two stages of the path, as they are making upwards or have already gained the upper sphere.

The first degree is the conversion from the lower life ; the second — held by those that have already made their way to the sphere of the Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint there but must still advance within the realm — lasts until they reach the extreme hold of the place, the Term attained when the topmost peak of the Intellectual realm is won.

But this highest degree must bide its time : let us first try to speak of the initial process of conversion.

We must begin by distinguishing the three types. Let us take the musician first and indicate his temperamental equipment for the task.

The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it : somewhat slow to stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus : as the timid are sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey ; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies and rhythms repels him ; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.

This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man ; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design in things of sense : he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the source of all these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art : he must be led to the

Beauty that manifests itself through these forms ; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty ; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths are we will show later.

2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain — and then either come to a stand or pass beyond — has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it : spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form ; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organised social system may be pointed out to him — a first training this in the loveliness of the immaterial — he must learn to recognise the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues ; then these severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent ; thence onward, he treads the upward way.

3- The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not like those others, in need of disengagement, stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a guide. He must be shown, then, and instructed, a willing wayfarer by his very temperament, all but self-directed.

Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the

unembodied ; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect ; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.

4- But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three classes alike,

what, in sum, is it ?

It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of things — what each is, how it differs from others, what common quality all have, to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many Beings there are, and how many non-Beings to be distinguished from Beings.

Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-Good, and of the particulars that fall under each, and of what is the Eternal and what the not-Eternal — and of these, it must be understood, not by seemingknowledge (" sense-knowledge ") but with authentic science.

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act : it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures the Soul in the " Meadows of Truth " : it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence and of the First- Kinds (or Categories of Being) : it establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm : then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point from which it starts.

Now it rests : instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that sphere, it is no longer busy about many things : it has arrived at Unity and it contemplates : it leaves to another science all that coil of premisses and conclusions called the art of reasoning, much as it leaves the art of writing : some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it considers necessary — to clear the ground — but it makes itself the judge, here as in everything else ; where it sees use, it uses ; anything it finds superfluous, it leaves

to whatever department of learning or practice may turn that matter to account.

5- But whence does this science derive its own initial laws ?

The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. What else is necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached perfect Intellection. " For," we read, "it is the purest (perfection) of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom." And, being the noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with Authentic-Existence, The Highest there is : as Contemplative- Wisdom (or trueknowing) it deals with Being, as Intellection with what transcends Being.

What, then, is Philosophy ?

Philosophy is the supremely precious.

Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy ?

It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician : Dialectic does not consist of bare theories and rules : it deals with verities ; Existences are, as it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the realities.

Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside itself, something which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself ; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions — collections of words — but it knows the truth and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions : it knows above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether propositions agree or differ ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises.

6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialectic is its precious part : in its study of the laws of the universe, Philosophy draws on Dialectic much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic, though, of course, the alliance between Philosophy and Dialectic is closer.

And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic : by Dialectic it comes to contemplation, though it originates of itself the moral state or rather the discipline from which the moral state develops.

Our reasoning faculties employ the data of Dialectic almost as their proper possession for they are mainly concerned about Matter (whose place and worth Dialectic establishes).

And while the other virtues bring the reason to bear upon particular experiences and acts, the virtue of Wisdom (i.e. the virtue peculiarly induced by Dialectic) is a certain super-reasoning much closer to the Universal ; for it deals with (such abstract ideas as) correspondence and sequence, the choice of time for action and inaction, the adoption of this course, the rejection of that other : Wisdom and Dialectic have the task of presenting all things as Universals and stripped of matter for treatment by the Understanding.

But can these inferior kinds of virtue exist without Dialectic and philosophy ?

Yes — but imperfectly, inadequately.

And is it possible to be a Sage, a Master in Dialectic, without these lower virtues ?

It would not happen : the lower will spring either before or together with the higher. And it is likely that everyone normally possesses the natural virtues from which, when Wisdom steps in, the perfected virtue develops. After the natural virtues, then, Wisdom and, so the perfecting of the moral nature. Once the natural virtues exist, both orders, the natural and the higher, ripen side by side to their final excellence : or as the one advances it carries forward the other towards perfection.

But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in vision and in strength — and to both orders of virtue the essential matter is from what principles we derive them.

Ennead I, Treatise 4

i. Are we to make True Happiness one and the same thing with Welfare or Prosperity and therefore within the reach of the other living beings as well as ourselves ?

There is certainly no reason to deny well-being to any of them as long as their lot allows them to flourish unhindered after their kind.

Whether we make Welfare consist in pleasant conditions of life, or in the accomplishment of some appropriate task, by either account it may fall to them as to us. For certainly they may at once be pleasantly placed and engaged about some function that lies in their nature : take for an instance such living beings as have the gift of music ; finding themselves well-off in other ways, they sing, too, as their nature is, and so their day is pleasant to them.

And if, even, we set Happiness in some ultimate Term pursued by inborn tendency, then on this head, too, we must allow it to animals from the moment of their attaining this Ultimate : the nature in them comes to a halt, having fulfilled its vital course from a beginning to an end.

It may be a distasteful notion, this bringing-down of happiness so low as to the animal world — making it over, as then we must, even to the vilest of them and not withholding it even from the plants, living they too and having a life unfolding to a Term.

But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to deny that good of life to animals only because they do not appear to man to be of great account. And as for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what we accord to the other forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is true people might be found to declare prosperity possible to the very plants : they have life, and life may bring good or evil ; the plants may thrive or wither, bear or be barren.

No : if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the good of life, it is impossible to deny the good of life to any order of living things ; if the

Term be 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 wellbeing 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 pleasure is the Good.

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

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.

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.

3- 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 comrilon 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

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.

For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best life ? If anyone should answer " The nature of Good " (The Good, as a Divine Hypostasis), the reply would certainly be near our thought, but we are not seeking the Cause but the main constituent.

It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not pure, not more truly life than they are its contrary : here let it be said succinctly that since all living things proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle must be the first life and the most complete.

4- If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness : if not, happiness must be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.

But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be stated thus : —

It has been shown elsewhere that man when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life.

But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported into his nature ?

No : there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which we hold to constitute happiness.

But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent of his entire nature ?

We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere portion of their total being — in those, namely, that have it potentially — there is,

too, the man, already in possession of true felicity, who is this perfection realised, who has passed over into actual identification with it. All else is now mere clothing about the man, not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to himself by any act of the will.

To the man in this state, what is the Good ?

He himself by what he has and is.

And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode.

The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else.

What indeed could he be seeking ? Certainly none of the less worthy things ; and the Best he carries always within him.

He that has such a life as this has all he needs in life.

Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.

Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity : the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends ; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.

5- But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity ?

What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about ? Could either welfare or happiness be present under such conditions ? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing " Miseries of Priam."

"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodilyprinciple in the total of the being : he will, no doubt, take all bravely . . . until the body's appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be ? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods ; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part ; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate's distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness."

6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted by such trials : but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good, why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into happiness ? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many ; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms ; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul.

The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards

freedom from this sphere : the reason which disciplines away our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order ; it merely resents their interference ; sometimes, even, it must seek them ; essentially all the aspiration is not so much away from evil as towards the Soul's own highest and noblest : this attained, all is won and there is rest — and this is the veritably willed state of life.

There can be no such thing as " willing " the acquirement of necessaries, if Will is to be taken in its strict sense, and not misapplied to the mere recognition of need.

It is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what we should have willed ; to have no occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste ; but the things we seek tell the story as soon as they are ours. For instance, health and freedom from pain ; which of these has any great charm ? As long as we possess them, we set no store upon them.

Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to happiness, which when lacking is desired because of the presence of an annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good.

Such things can never make part of our final object : our Term must be such that though these pleasanter conditions be absent and their contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.

7- Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries repelled by the man established in happiness ?

Here is our answer : —

These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any particle towards the Sage's felicity : but they do serve towards the integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his Being or complicates the Term : it is not that the Sage can be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but simply that he that holds the highest good desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time, something which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take place by its side.

In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or falling from day to day ; the death of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession. No : a thousand mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave him still in the tranquil possession of the Term.

But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty daily chances !

What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer to anything below ?

If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter — kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork — how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland ? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or . . . Zeus ... by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body.

But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice ?

Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars ?

But if he go unburied ?

Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always rot.

But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument ?

The littleness of it !

But if he falls into his enemies' hands, into prison ?

There is always the way towards escape, if none towards well-being.

But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons and daughters dragged away to captivity ?

What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong ? Could he have quitted the world in the calm conviction that nothing of all this could happen ? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that

it is possible for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of what may occur ? In the knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease ; so, too, when the evil has come about.

He would reflect that the nature of this All is such as brings these things to pass and man must bow the head.

Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an advantage ; and those that suffer have their freedom in their hands : if they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real grievance, or they stay against reason, when they should not, and then they have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of his neighbours, however near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil : his state cannot hang upon the fortunes good or bad of any other men.

8. As for violent personal sufferings, he will carry them off as well as he can ; if they overpass his endurance they will carry him off.

And so in all his pain he asks no pity : there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.

But what if he be put beyond himself ? What if pain grow so intense and so torture him that the agony all but kills ? Well, when he is put to torture he will plan what is to be done : he retains his freedom of action.

Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently from the average man ; neither ordinary experiences nor pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold. To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul.

And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die before they come : this is not concern for others' welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our imperfection : we must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease to tremble over what perhaps may be.

Anyone that says that it is in human nature to grieve over misfortune to our household must learn that this is not so with all, and that, precisely, it is virtue's use to raise the general level of nature towards the better and finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is to set at nought what terrifies the common mind.

We cannot be indolent : this is an arena for the powerful combatant holding his ground against the blows of fortune, and knowing that, sore though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing dreadful, nursery terrors.

So, the Sage would have desired misfortune ?

It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable soul.

9- But when he is out of himself, reason quenched by sickness or by magic arts ?

If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why should he not equally remain happy ? No one rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep ; no one counts up that time and so denies that he has been happy all his life.

If they say that, failing consciousness, he is no longer the Sage, then they are no longer reasoning about the Sage : but we do suppose a Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in the state of felicity.

" Well, a Sage let him remain," they say, " still, having no sensation and not expressing his virtue in act, how can he be happy ? "

But a man unconscious of his health may be, none the less, healthy : a man may not be aware of his personal attraction, but he remains handsome none the less : if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he be any the less wise ?

It may perhaps be urged that sensation and consciousness are essential to wisdom and that happiness is only wisdom brought to act.

Now, this argument might have weight if prudence, wisdom, were something fetched in from outside : but this is not so : wisdom is, in its

essential nature, an Authentic-Existence, or rather is The Authentic-Existent — and this Existent does not perish in one asleep or, to take the particular case presented to us, in the man out of his mind : the Act of this Existent is continuous within him ; and is a sleepless activity : the Sage, therefore, even unconscious, is still the Sage in Act.

This activity is screened not from the man entire but merely from one part of him : we have here a parallel to what happens in the activity of the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made known by the sensitive faculty to the rest of the man : if our physical life really constituted the " We," its Act would be our Act : but, in the fact, this physical life is not the " We " ; the " We " is the activity of the Intellectual-Principle so that when the Intellective is in Act we are in Act.

10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use : but why should there not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception ? For, if Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical, this " Earlier-thanperception " must be a thing having Act.

Let us explain the conditions under which we become conscious of this Intellective-Act.

When the Intellect is in upward orientation that (lower part of it) which contains (or, corresponds to) the life of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and shining surface of a mirror ; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place the image appears but, though the mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists ; so in the case of the Soul ; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and Intellectual-Principles these images appear. Then, side by side with the primal

knowledge of the activity of the Rational and the Intellectual-Principles, we have also as it were a sense-perception of their operation.

When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body, Reason and the Intellectual-Principle act unpictured : intellection is unattended by imagination.

In sum we may safely gather that while the Intellective- Act may be attended by the Imaging Principle, it is not to be confounded with it.

And even in our conscious life we can point to many noble activities, of mind and of hand alike, which at the time in no way compel our consciousness. A reader will often be quite unconscious when he is most intent : in a feat of courage there can be no sense either of the brave action or of the fact that all that is done conforms to the rules of courage. And so in cases beyond number.

So that it would even seem that consciousness tends to blunt the activities upon which it is exercised, and that in the degree in which these pass unobserved they are purer and have more effect, more vitality, and that, consequently, the Sage arrived at this state has the truer fulness of life, life not spilled out in sensation but gathered closely within itself.

II. We shall perhaps be told that in such a state the man is no longer alive : we answer that these people show themselves equally unable to understand his inner life and his happiness.

If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them to keep in mind a living Sage and, under these terms, to enquire whether the man is in happiness : they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether he has the happy life ; they must not take away the man and then look for the happiness of a man : once they allow that the Sage lives within, they must not seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the outer world for the object of his desires. To consider the outer world to be a field to his desire, to fancy the Sage desiring any good external, would be to deny Substantial-Existence to happiness ; for the Sage would like to see all men prosperous and no evil befalling anyone ; but though it prove otherwise, he is still content.

If it be admitted that such a desire would be against reason, since evil cannot cease to be, there is no escape from agreeing with us that the Sage's will is set always and only inward.

12. The pleasure demanded for the Sage's life cannot be in the enjoyments of the licentious or in any gratifications of the body — there is no place for these, and they stifle happiness — nor in any violent emotions — what could so move the Sage ? — it can be only such pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and the Sage is present to himself : his pleasure, his contentment, stands, immovable.

Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life ever untroubled : his state is fixedly happy and nothing whatever of all that is known as evil can set it awry — given only that he is and remains a Sage.

If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleasure in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is looking for.

13. The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining always fine, and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular cases and things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without searching and thinking, but the one greatest principle is ever present to him, like a part of his being — most of all present, should he be even a victim in the much-talked-of Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite all that has been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an agreeable lodging ; but what cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the torture ; in the Sage there is something else as well, The Self-Gathered which, as long as it holds itself by main force within itself, can never be robbed of the vision of the All-Good.

14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and body : the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods.

It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the living-body : happiness is the possession of the good of life : it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul — and not of all the Soul at that : for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth ; that would at once connect it with the body.

A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of temperament, these surely do not make felicity ; in the excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and forced more and more within their power. There must be a sort of counter-pressure in the other direction, towards the noblest: the body must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the appearances.

Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race : still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage ; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has any care for his true life ; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away by inattention to its claims ; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain : if such troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least : in old age, it is true, he will desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him ; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful ; his one desire will be to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it ; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their contraries destroy or lessen it.

When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the negative take away ?

15- But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is supposed

to be naturally welcome, while the other meets only with the very

reverse : do we assert that they have an equal happiness ?

We do, if they are equally wise.

What though the one be favoured in body and in all else that does not help towards wisdom, still less towards virtue, towards the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to ? The man commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself that he is more truly happy than the man without them : the utmost profusion of such boons would not help even to make a fluteplayer.

We discuss the happy man after our own feebleness ; we count alarming and grave what his felicity takes lightly : he would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such things and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through ; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue ; the man is some sort of a half-thing.

As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps are elsewhere, the Sage will attack it and drive it out ; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory child within him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of severity.

This does not make the Sage unfriendly or harsh : it is to himself and in his own great concern that he is the Sage : giving freely to his intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of friends by his very union with the Intellectual-Principle.

16. Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental, dreading accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether ; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of

mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of happiness ; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That.

He can care for no other Term than That : all else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not in expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention to the differing conditions surrounding him as he lives here or there.

He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of another order, not prevented from abandoning the body, and necessarily leaving it at nature's hour, he himself always the master to decide in its regard.

Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul's satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the Term's sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve him : when the lyre fails him, he will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him in the beginning : he has found it useful until now, many a time.

Ennead I, Treatise 5

i. Is it possible to think that Happiness increases with Time, Happiness which is always taken as a present thing ?

The memory of former felicity may surely be ruled out of count, for Happiness is not a thing of words, but a definite condition which must be actually present like the very fact and act of life.

2. It may be objected that our will towards living and towards expressive activity is constant, and that each attainment of such expression is an increase in Happiness.

But in the first place, by this reckoning every to-morrow's well-being will be greater than to-day's, every later instalment successively larger than an earlier ; at once time supplants moral excellence as the measure of felicity.

Then again the Gods to-day must be happier than of old : and their bliss, too, is not perfect, will never be perfect. Further, when the will attains what it was seeking, it attains something present : the quest is always for something to be actually present until a standing felicity is definitely achieved. The will to life which is will to Existence aims at something present, since Existence must be a stably present thing. Even when the act of the will is directed towards the future, and the furthest future, its object is an actually present having and being : there is no concern about what is passed or to come : the future state a man seeks is to be a now to him ; he does not care about the forever : he asks that an actual present be actually present.

3- Yes, but if the well-being has lasted a long time, if that present spectacle has been a longer time before the eyes ?

If in the greater length of time the man has seen more deeply, time has certainly done something for him, but if all the process has brought him no further vision, then one glance would give all he has had.

4- Still the one life has known pleasure longer than the other ?

But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in with Happiness — unless indeed by pleasure is meant the unhindered Act (of the true man), in which case this pleasure is simply our " Happiness." And even pleasure, though it exist continuously, has never anything but the present ; its past is over and done with.

5- We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, that if one man

has been happy from first to last, another only at the last, and a third, beginning with happiness, has lost it, their shares are equal ?

This is straying from the question : we were comparing the happy among themselves : now we are asked to compare the not-happy at the time when they are out of happiness with those in actual possession of happiness. If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of happiness against men without it and their advantage is always by something in the present.

6. Well, but take the unhappy man : must not increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness ? Do not all troubles — long-lasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type — yield a greater sum of misery in the longer time ? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time why should not time equally augment happiness when all is well ?

In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase : for example, in a lingering malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought lower and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there would be no trouble but that of the present moment : we cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state — in the sense that, the evil in the sufferer's condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is due to the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time.

It may be pointed out also that this greater length of time is not a thing existent at any given moment ; and surely a " more " is not to be made out by adding to something actually present something that has passed away.

No : true happiness is not vague and fluid : it is an unchanging state.

If there is in this matter any increase besides that of mere time, it is in the sense that a greater happiness is the reward of a higher virtue : this is not counting up to the credit of happiness the years of its continuance ; it is simply noting the high-water mark once for all attained.

7- But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in the

past to make the total, why do we not reckon so in the case of time itself,

where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the present and call

the total greater ? Why not suppose a quantity of happiness equivalent

to a quantity of time ? This would be no more than taking it lap by lap

to correspond with time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as an

indivisible, measurable only by the content of a given instant.

There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to be : we are merely counting what is past and finished, as we might count the dead : but to treat past happiness as actually existent and as outweighing present happiness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must be an achieved and existent state, whereas any time over and apart from the present is non-existent : all progress of time means the extinction of all the time that has been.

Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of eternity that seeks to break up in its fragmentary flight the permanence of its exemplar. Thus whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what stands permanent in eternity is annihilated — saved only in so far as in some degree it still belongs to eternity, but wholly destroyed if it be unreservedly absorbed into time.

If Happiness demands the possession of the good of life, it clearly has to do with the life of Authentic-Existence for that life is the Best. Now the life of Authentic-Existence is measurable not by time but by eternity ; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any magnitude but is the unchangeable, the indivisible, is timeless Being.

We must not muddle together Being and Non-Being, time and eternity, not even everlasting time with the eternal ; we cannot make laps and stages of an absolute unity ; all must be taken together, wheresoever and howsoever we handle it ; and it must be taken at that, not even as an undivided block of time but as the Life of Eternity, a stretch not made up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time.

8. It may be urged that the actual presence of past experiences, kept present by Memory, gives the advantage to the man of the longer felicity.

But, Memory of what sort of experiences ?

Memory either of formerly attained wisdom and virtue — in which case we have a better man and the argument from memory is given up — or memory of past pleasures, as if the man that has arrived at felicity must roam far and wide in search of gratifications and is not contented by the bliss actually within him.

And what is there pleasant in the memory of pleasure ? What is it to recall yesterday's excellent dinner ? Still more ridiculous, one of ten years ago. So, too, of last year's morality.

9- But is there not something to be said for the memory of the various forms of beauty ?

That is the resource of a man whose life is without beauty in the present, so that, for lack of it now, he grasps at the memory of what has been.

10. But, it may be said, length of time produces an abundance of good actions missed by the man whose attainment of the happy state is recent — if indeed we can think at all of a state of happiness where good actions have been few.

Now to make multiplicity, whether in time or in action, essential to Happiness is to put it together by combining non-existents, represented by the past, with some one thing that actually is. This consideration it

was that led us at the very beginning to place Happiness in the actually existent and on that basis to launch our enquiry as to whether the higher degree was determined by the longer time. It might be thought that the Happiness of longer date must surpass the shorter by virtue of the greater number of acts it included.

But, to begin with, men quite outside of the active life may attain the state of felicity, and not in a less but in a greater degree than men of affairs.

Secondly, the good does not derive from the act itself but from the inner disposition which prompts the noble conduct : the wise and good man in his very action harvests the good not by what he does but by what he is.

A wicked man no less than a Sage may save the country, and the good of the act is for all alike, no matter whose was the saving hand. The contentment of the Sage does not hang upon such actions and events : it is his own inner habit that creates at once his felicity and whatever pleasure may accompany it.

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul ; for the Soul's expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself ; and this, this alone, is Happiness.

Ennead I, Treatise 6

i. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight ; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful ; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect ; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our argument will bring to light.

What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws

the ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul ?

Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless ? Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be ?

Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by something communicated, while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue.

The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not ; so that there is a good deal between being body and being beautiful.

What, then, is this something that shows itself in certain material forms ? This is the natural beginning of our enquiry.

What is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls them, lures them, towards it, and fills them with joy at the sight ? If we possess ourselves of this, we have at once a standpoint for the wider survey.

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognised by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned.

But think what this means. £ Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts ; and only a whole ; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details ; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness ; its law must run throughout.

All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing ? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair ?

In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself.

Again since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes

fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle ?

Turn to what is attractive in methods of life or in the expression of thought ; are we to call in symmetry here ? What symmetry is to be found in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental pursuit ?

What symmetry can there be in points of abstract thought ?

The symmetry of being accordant with each other ? But there may be accordance or entire identity where there is nothing but ugliness : the proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the most perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness of will ; the accordance is complete.

Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others ; but how does symmetry enter here ? The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the symmetry of size or of number : what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the soul's faculties or purposes ?

Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary ?

2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material things.

Undoubtedly this Principle exists ; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.

But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it.

Our interpretation is that the soul — by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being —

when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.

But, is there any such likeness between the loveliness of this world and the splendours in the Supreme ? Such a likeness in the particulars would make the two orders alike : but what is there in common between beauty here and beauty There ?

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form.

All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly : an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form.

But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity : it has rallied confusion into co-operation : it has made the sum one harmonious coherence : for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may.

And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum : when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some natural quality may give to a single stone.

This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful — by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine.

3- And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty — one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own, never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement.

Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful

where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision.

But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter ?

On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful ? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity ?

So with the perceptive faculty : discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend : the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul.

The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification : it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form.

Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied ; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it : for they take warmth but this is never cold ; it has colour primally ; they receive the Form of colour from it : hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains outside of beauty, as not having absorbed the plenitude of the Form of colour.

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind : for the measures of our sensible music are not

arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being.

Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense, images and shadowpictures, fugitives that have entered into Matter — to adorn, and to ravish, where they are seen.

4- But there are earlier and loftier beauties than these. In the sensebound life we are no longer granted to know them, but the soul, taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. To the vision of these we must mount, leaving sense to its own low place.

As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the material world who have never seen them or known their grace — men born blind, let us suppose— in the same way those must be silent upon the beauty of noble conduct and of learning and all that order who have never cared for such things, nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and of Dawn.

Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul's sight — and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth.

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen ; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love — just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

5- These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.

What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions,

in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls ? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful within, what do you feel ? What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your Soul, this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self ?

These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of love.

But what is it that awakens all this passion ? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass : all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit ; righteousness of life ; disciplined purity ; courage of the majestic face ; gravity ; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless ; and, shining down upon all, the light of godlike Intellection.

All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful ?

They exist : they manifest themselves to us : anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being ; and is not Real-Being, really beautiful ?

But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought the Soul to loveliness : what is this grace, this splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues ?

Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul, and set that against its beauty : to understand, at once, what this ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way before us.

Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous : teeming with all the lusts ; torn by internal discord ; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness ; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perishable and the base ; perverse in all its impulses ; the friend of unclean pleasures ; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity.

What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so

that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil ; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark ?

An unclean thing, I dare to say ; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself ; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature its own essential Idea.

If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing him : his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.

So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly — by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles ; if these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the Soul ; let it be but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again — in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away.

6. For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purification.

Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of body find their joy in foulness.

What else is Sophrosyny, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the

pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean ? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above.

The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.

Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul's beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.

We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence : and the Ugly is also the primal evil ; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good and Beauty : and hence the one method will discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.

And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First : directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower order — actions and pursuits for instance — comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.

7- Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say

that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good. To attain it is for those that will take the upward path, who will set all their forces towards it, who will divest themselves of all that we have put on in our descent : — so, to those that approach the Holy Celebrations of the Mysteries, there are appointed purifications and the laying aside of the garments worn before, and the entry in nakedness — until, passing, on the upward way, all that is other than the God, each in the solitude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from Which all things depend, for Which all look and live and act and know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being.

And one that shall know this vision — with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight ! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very Beauty ; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror ; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire ; all other loves than this he must despise, and disdain all that once seemed fair.

This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel the old delight in the comeliness of material forms : what then are we to think of one that contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens — so perfect Its purity — far above all such things in that they are non-essential, composite, not primal but descending from This ?

Beholding this Being — the Choragos of all Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth and never takes — resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack ? For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them also worthy of love.

And for This, the sternest and the uttermost combat is set before the Souls ; all our labour is for This, lest we be left without part in this

noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly.

For not he that has failed of the joy that is in colour or in visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or of kingdom has failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for Whose winning he should renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky, if only, spurning the world of sense from beneath his feet, and straining to This, he may see.

8. But what must we do ? How lies the path ? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane ?

He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of grace that show in body, let him not pursue : he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water — is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness ? So too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the Lower- World, he shall have commerce only with shadows, there as here.

" Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland " : this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight ? How are we to gain the open sea ? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso — not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days.

The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.

What then is our course, what the manner of our flight ? This is not a journey for the feet ; the feet bring us only from land to land ; nor

need you think of coach or ship to carry you away ; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see : you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.

9- And this inner vision, what is its operation ?

Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour. Therefore the Soul must be trained — to the habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness : lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful forms.

But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness ?

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful : he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also : cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity — when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision : now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step — you need a guide no longer — strain, and see.

This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that

adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, by the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we af&nn to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful : if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere ; and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty : the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty's seat is There.

Ennead I, Treatise 7

1. We can scarcely conceive that for any entity the Good can be other than the natural Act expressing its life-force, or in the case of an entity made up of parts the Act, appropriate, natural and complete, expressive of that in it which is best.

For the Soul, then, the Good is its own natural Act.

But the Soul itself is natively a " Best " ; if, further, its Act be directed towards the Best, the achievement is not merely the " Soul's good " but " The Good " without qualification.

Now, given an Existent which — as being itself the best of existences and even transcending the existences — directs its Act towards no other, but is the object to which the Act of all else is directed, it is clear that this must be at once the Good and the means through which all else may participate in Good.

This Absolute Good other entities may possess in two ways — by becoming like to It and by directing the Act of their being towards It.

Now, if all aspiration and Act whatsoever are directed towards the Good, it follows that the Essential-Good neither need nor can look outside itself or aspire to anything other than itself : it can but remain unmoved, as being, in the constitution of things, the wellspring and firstcause of all Act : whatsoever in other entities is of the nature of Good cannot be due to any Act of the Essential-Good upon them ; it is for them on the contrary to act towards their source and cause. The Good must, then, be the Good not by any Act, not even by virtue of its Intellection, but by its very rest within Itself.

Existing beyond and above Being, it must be beyond and above the Intellectual-Principle and all Intellection.

For, again, that only can be named the Good to which all is bound and itself to none : for only thus is it veritably the object of all aspiration. It must be unmoved, while all circles around it, as a circumference around a centre from which all the radii proceed. Another example would be the sun, central to the light which streams from it and is yet linked to it, or at least is always about it, irremoveably ; try all you will to separate the light from the sun, or the sun from its light, for ever the light is in the sun.

2. But the Universe outside ; how is it aligned towards the Good ?

The soul-less by direction toward Soul : Soul towards the Good itself, through the Intellectual-Principle.

Everything has something of the Good, by virtue of possessing a certain degree of unity and a certain degree of Existence and by participation in Ideal-Form : to the extent of the Unity, Being, and Form which are present, there is a sharing in an image, for the Unity and

Existence in which there is participation are no more than images of the Ideal-Form.

With Soul it is different ; the First-Soul, that which follows upon the Intellectual-Principle, possesses a life nearer to the Verity and through that Principle is of the nature of good ; it will actually possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the Intellectual-Principle since this follows immediately upon the Good.

In sum, then, life is the Good to the living, and the Intellectual-Principle to what is intellective ; so that where there is life with intellection there is a double contact with the Good.

3- But if life is a good, is there good for all that lives ?

No : in the vile, life limps : it is like the eye to the dim-sighted ; it fails of its task.

But if the mingled strand of life is to us, though entwined with evil, still in the total a good, must not death be an evil ?

Evil to What ? There must be a subject for the evil : but if the possible subject is no longer among beings, or, still among beings, is devoid of life . . . why, a stone is not more immune.

If, on the contrary, after death life and soul continue, then death will be no evil but a good ; Soul, disembodied, is the freer to ply its own Act.

If it be taken into the All-Soul — what evil can reach it There ? And as the Gods are — possessed of Good and untouched by evil — so, certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. And if it should lose its purity, the evil it experiences is not in its death but in its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower world, even there the evil thing is its life and not its death ; the misfortune is still life, a life of a definite character.

Life is a partnership of a Soul and^body ; death is the dissolution ; in either life or death, then, the Soul wuTfeel itself at home.

But, again, if life is good, how can deathjbe anything but evil ?

Remember that the good of life, where it has any good at all,

is not due to anything in the partnership but to the repelling of evil by virtue ; death, then, must be the greater good.

In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the Couplement but holding itself apart, even here.

Ennead I, Treatise 8

i. Those enquiring whence Evil enters into beings, or rather into a certain order of beings, would be making the best beginning if they established, first of all, what precisely Evil is, what constitutes its Nature. At once we should know whence it comes, where it has its native seat and where it is present merely as an accident ; and there would be no further question as to whether it has Authentic-Existence.

But a difficulty arises. By what faculty in us could we possibly know Evil ?

All knowing comes by likeness. The Intellectual-Principle and the Soul, being Ideal-Forms, would know Ideal-Forms and would have a natural tendency towards them ; but who could imagine Evil to be an Ideal-Form, seeing that it manifests itself as the very absence of Good ?

If the solution is that the one act of knowing covers contraries, and that as Evil is the contrary to Good the one act would grasp Good and Evil together, then to know Evil there must be first a clear perception and understanding of Good, since the nobler existences precede the baser and are Ideal-Forms while the less good hold no such standing, are nearer to Non-Being.

No doubt there is a question in what precise way Good is contrary to Evil — whether it is as First-Principle to last of things or as Ideal-Form to utter Lack (to Non-entity) : but this subject we postpone.

2. For the moment let us define the Nature of the Good as far as the immediate purpose demands.

The Good is that on which all else depends, towards which all Existences aspire as to their source and their need, while Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure and Term of all, giving out from itself the Intellectual-Principle and Existence and Soul and Life and all Intellective- Act.

All until The Good is reached is beautiful ; The Good is beyondbeautiful, beyond the Highest, holding kingly state in the Intellectual-Kosmos, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as Intelligence in us. Our intelligence is nourished on the propositions of logic, is skilled in following discussions, works by reasonings, examines links of demonstration, and comes to know the world of Being also by the steps of logical process, having no prior grasp of Reality but remaining empty, all Intelligence though it be, until it has put itself to school.

The Intellectual-Principle we are discussing is not of such a kind : It possesses all : It is all : It is present to all by Its self-presence : It has all by other means than having, for what It possesses is still Itself, nor does any particular of all within It stand apart ; for every such particular is the whole and in all respects all, while yet not confused in the mass but still distinct, apart to the extent that any participant in the Intellectual-Principle participates not in the entire as one thing but in whatsoever lies within its own reach.

And the First Act is the Act of The Good stationary within Itself, and the First Existence is the self-contained Existence of The Good ; but there is also an Act upon It, that of the Intellectual-Principle which, as it were, lives about It.

And the Soul, outside, circles around the Intellectual-Principle, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of It, through It sees God.

Such is the untroubled, the blissful, life of divine beings, and Evil has no place in it ; if this were all, there would be no Evil but Good only, the first, the second and the third Good. All, thus far, is with the King

of All, unfailing Cause of Good and Beauty and controller of all ; and what is Good in the second degree depends upon the Second-Principle and tertiary Good upon the Third.

3- If such be the Nature of Beings and of That which transcends all the realm of Being, Evil cannot have place among Beings or in the Beyond-Being ; these are good.

There remains, only, if Evil exist at all, that it be situate in the realm of Non-Being, that it be some mode, as it were, of the Non-Being, that it have its seat in something in touch with Non-Being or to a certain degree communicate in Non-Being.

By this Non-Being, of course, we are not to understand something that simply does not exist, but only something of an utterly different order from Authentic-Being : there is no question here of movement or position with regard to Being ; the Non-Being we are thinking of is, rather, an image of Being or perhaps something still further removed than even an image.

Now this (the required faint image of Being) might be the sensible universe with all the impressions it engenders, or it might be something of even later derivation, accidental to the realm of sense, or again, it might be the source of the sense-world or something of the same order entering into it to complete it.

Some conception of it would be reached by thinking of measurelessness as opposed to measure, of the unbounded against bound, the unshaped against a principle of shape, the ever-needy against the selfsufficing : think of the ever-undefined, the never at rest, the all-accepting but never sated, utter dearth ; and make all this character not mere accident in it but its equivalent for essential-being, so that, whatsoever fragment of it be taken, that part is all lawless void, while whatever participates in it and resembles it becomes evil, though not of course to the point of being, as itself is, Evil- Absolute.

In what substantial-form (hypostasis) then is all this to be found — not as accident but as the very substance itself ?

For if Evil can enter into other things, it must have in a certain sense a prior existence, even though it may not be an essence. As there is Good, the Absolute, as well as Good, the quality, so, together with the derived evil entering into something not itself, there must be the Absolute Evil.

But how ? Can there be Unmeasure apart from an unmeasured object ?

Does not Measure exist apart from unmeasured things ? Precisely as there is Measure apart from anything measured, so there is Unmeasure apart from the unmeasured. If Unmeasure could not exist independently, it must exist either in an unmeasured object or in something measured ; but the unmeasured could not need Unmeasure and the measured could not contain it.

There must, then, be some Undetermination-Absolute, some Absolute Formlessness ; all the qualities cited as characterising the Nature of Evil must be summed under an Absolute Evil ; and every evil thing outside of this must either contain this Absolute by saturation or have taken the character of evil and become a cause of evil by consecration to this Absolute.

What will this be ?

That Kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes, measurements and limits, that which has no trace of good by any title of its own, but (at best) takes order and grace from some Principle outside itself, a mere image as regards Absolute-Being but the Authentic Essence of Evil — in so far as Evil can have Authentic Being. In such a Kind Reason recognises the Primal Evil, Evil Absolute.

4- The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue form : they are without life : by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other ; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act ; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being.

Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is evil, is not an evil Kind.

What, then, is the evil Soul ?

It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil — unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or evil not by their true value but by the mere test of like and dislike.

But what is the root of this evil state ? how can it be brought under the causing principle indicated ?

Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut out from the Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and this because it is merged into a body made of Matter.

Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken hurt, the Soul's seeing is baulked by the passions and by the darkening that Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no longer to Essence but to Process — whose principle or source is, again, Matter, the Kind so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even that which is not in it but merely looks towards it.

For, wholly without part in Good, the negation of Good, unmingled Lack, this Matter-Kind makes over to its own likeness whatsoever comes in touch with it.

The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed towards the Intellectual-Principle is steadfastly pure : it has turned away from Matter ; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws near ; it endures in its purity, only, and wholly, determined by the Intellectual-Principle.

The Soul that breaks away from this source of its reality to the non-perfect and non-primal is, as it were, a secondary, an image, to the loyal Soul. By its falling-away — and to the extent of the fall — it is stripped of Determination, becomes wholly indeterminate, sees darkness. Looking to what repels vision, as we look when we are said to see darkness, it has taken Matter into itself.

5- But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the Soul's evil has its source in that very lack ; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause — and at once the Principle of Evil is removed from Matter, is made anterior to Matter.

No : Evil is not in any and every lack ; it is in absolute lack. What falls in some degree short of the Good is not Evil ; considered in its own kind it might even be perfect, but where there is utter dearth, there we have Essential Evil, void of all share in Good ; this is the case with Matter.

Matter has not even existence whereby to have some part in Good : Being is attributed to it by an accident of words : the truth would be that it has Non-Being.

Mere lack brings merely Not-Goodness : Evil demands the absolute lack — though, of course, any very considerable shortcoming makes the ultimate fall possible and is already, in itself, an evil.

In fine we are not to think of Evil as some particular bad thinginjustice, for example, or any other ugly trait — but as a principle distinct from any of the particular forms in which, by the addition of certain elements, it becomes manifest. Thus there may be wickedness in the Soul ; the forms this general wickedness is to take will be determined by the environing Matter, by the faculties of the Soul that operate and by the nature of their operation, whether seeing, acting, or merely admitting impression.

But supposing things external to the Soul are to be counted Evil — sickness, poverty and so forth — how can they be referred to the principle we have described ?

Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body, which as a material organism rebels against order and measure ; ugliness is but matter not mastered by Ideal-Form ; poverty consists in our need and lack of goods made necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature is to be one long want.

If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves, the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves ; Evil was before we came to be ; the Evil which

holds men down binds them against their will ; and for those that have the strength — not found in all men, it is true — there is a deliverance from the evils that have found lodgement in the soul.

In a word since Matter belongs only to the sensible world, vice ii? men is not the Absolute Evil ; not all men are vicious ; some overcome vice, some, the better sort, are never attacked by it ; and those who master it win by means of that in them which is not material.

6. If this be so, how do we explain the teaching that evils can never pass away but " exist of necessity," that " while evil has no place in the divine order, it haunts mortal nature and this place for ever " ?

Does this mean that heaven is clear of evil, ever moving its orderly way, spinning on the appointed path, no injustice There or any flaw, no wrong done by any power to any other but all true to the settled plan, while injustice and disorder prevail on earth, designated as " the Mortal Kind and this Place " ?

Not quite so : for the precept to " flee hence " does not refer to earth and earthly life. The flight we read of consists not in quitting earth but in living our earth-life " with justice and piety in the light of philosophy " ; it is vice we are to flee, so that clearly to the writer Evil is simply vice with the sequels of vice. And when the disputant in that dialogue says that, if men could be convinced of the doctrine advanced, there would be an end of Evil, he is answered, " That can never be : Evil is of necessity, for there must be a contrary to good."

Still we may reasonably ask how can vice in man be a contrary to The Good in the Supernal : for vice is the contrary to virtue and virtue is not The Good but merely the good thing by which Matter is brought to order.

How can there be any contrary to the Absolute Good, when the absolute has no quality ?

Besides, is there any universal necessity that the existence of one of two contraries should entail the existence of the other ? Admit that the existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of the other

— sickness and health, for example — yet there is no universal compulsion.

Perhaps, however, our author did not mean that this was universally true ; he is speaking only of The Good.

But then, if The Good is an essence, and still more, if It is that which transcends all existence, how can It have any contrary ?

That there is nothing contrary to essence is certain in the case of particular existences — established by practical proof — but not in the quite different case of the Universal.

But of what nature would this contrary be, the contrary to universal existence and in general to the Primals ?

To essential existence would be opposed the non-existence ; to the nature of Good, some principle and source of evil. Both these will be sources, the one of what is good, the other of what is evil ; and all within the domain of the one principle is opposed, as contrary, to the entire domain of the other, and this in a contrariety more violent than any existing between secondary things.

For these last are opposed as members of one species or of one genus, and, within that common ground, they participate in some common quality.

In the case of the Primals or Universals there is such complete separation that what is the exact negation of one group constitutes the very nature of the other ; we have diametric contrariety if by contrariety we mean the extreme of remoteness.

Now to the content of the divine order, the fixed quality, the measuredness and so forth — there is opposed the content of the evil principle, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so forth : total is opposed to total. The existence of the one genus is a falsity, primarily, essentially, a falseness : the other genus has Essence- Authentic : the opposition is of truth to lie ; essence is opposed to essence.

Thus we see that it is not universally true that an Essence can have no contrary.

In the case of fire and water we would admit contrariety if it were not for their common element, the Matter, about which are gathered the

warmth and dryness of one and the dampness and cold of the other : if there were only present what constitutes their distinct kinds, the common ground being absent, there would be, here also, essence contrary to essence.

In sum, things utterly sundered, having nothing in common, standing at the remotest poles, are opposites in nature : the contrariety does not depend upon quality or upon the existence of a distinct genus of beings, but upon the utmost difference, clash in content, clash in effect.

7- But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessarily

comport the existence of a Principle of Evil ? Is it because the All

necessarily comports the existence of Matter ? Yes : for necessarily this

All is made up of contraries : it could not exist if Matter did not. The

Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend ; it is blended from the

Intellectual-Principle and Necessity : what comes into it from God

is good ; evil is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying

Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form.

But, since the expression " this place " must be taken to mean the All, how explain the words " mortal nature " ?

The answer is in the passage (in which the Father of Gods addresses the Divinities of the lower sphere), " Since you possess only a derivative being, you are not immortals . . . but by my power you shall escape dissolution."

The escape, we read, is not a matter of place, but of acquiring virtue, of disengaging the self from the body ; this is the escape from Matter. Plato explains somewhere how a man frees himself and how he remains bound ; and the phrase " to live among the gods " means to live among the Intelligible-Existents, for these are the Immortals.

There is another consideration establishing the necessary existence of Evil.

Given that The Good is not the only existent thing, it is inevitable that, by the outgoing from it or, if the phrase be preferred, the continuous down-going or away-going from it, there should be produced a Last, something after which nothing more can be produced : this will be Evil.

As necessarily as there is Something after the First, so necessarily there is a Last : this Last is Matter, the thing which has no residue of good in it : here is the necessity of Evil.

8. But there will still be some to deny that it is through this Matter that we ourselves become evil.

They will say that neither ignorance nor wicked desires arise in Matter. Even if they admit that the unhappy condition within us is due to the pravity inherent in body, they will urge that still the blame lies not in the Matter itself but with the Form present in it — such Form as heat, cold, bitterness, saltness and all other conditions perceptible to sense, or again such states as being full or void — not in the concrete signification but in the presence or absence of just such forms. In a word, they will argue, all particularity in desires and even in perverted judgements upon things, can be referred to such causes, so that Evil lies in this Form much more than in the mere Matter.

Yet, even with all this, they can be compelled to admit that Matter is the Evil.

For, the quality (form) that has entered into Matter does not act as an entity apart from the Matter, any more than axe-shape will cut apart from iron. Further, Forms lodged in Matter are not the same as they would be if they remained within themselves ; they are Reason-Principles Materialised, they are corrupted in the Matter, they have absorbed its nature : essential fire does not burn, nor do any of the essential entities effect, of themselves alone, the operation which, once they have entered into Matter, is traced to their action.

Matter becomes mistress of what is manifested through it : it corrupts and destroys the incomer, it substitutes its own opposite character and kind, not in the sense of opposing, for example, concrete cold to concrete warmth, but by setting its own formlessness against the

Form of heat, shapelessness to shape, excess and defect to the duly ordered. Thus, in sum, what enters into Matter ceases to belong to itself, comes to belong to Matter, just as, in the nourishment of living beings, what is taken in does not remain as it came, but is turned into, say, dog's blood and all that goes to make a dog, becomes, in fact, any of the humours of any recipient.

No, if body is the cause of Evil, then there is no escape ; the cause of Evil is Matter.

Still, it will be urged, the incoming Idea should have been able to conquer the Matter.

The difficulty is that Matter's master cannot remain pure itself except by avoidance of Matter.

Besides, the constitution determines both the desires and their violence so that there are bodies in which the incoming idea cannot hold sway : there is a vicious constitution which chills and clogs the activity and inhibits choice ; a contrary bodily habit produces frivolity, lack of balance. The same fact is indicated by our successive variations of mood : in times of stress, we are not the same — either in desires or in ideas — as when we are at peace, and we differ again with every several object that brings us satisfaction.

To resume : the Measureless is evil primarily ; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal — primarily, the darkness ; secondarily, the darkened. Now, Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The Good, or participation in it.

9- But what approach have we to the knowing of Good and Evil ?

And first of the Evil of soul : Virtue, we may know by the Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit ; but Vice ?

As a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by its divergence from the line of Virtue.

But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision we can have of it, or is there some other way of knowing it ?

Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vision, for it is utterly outside of bound and measure ; this thing which is nowhere can be seized only by abstraction ; but any degree of evil falling short of The Absolute is knowable by the extent of that falling short.

We see partial wrong ; from what is before us we divine that which is lacking to the entire form (or Kind) thus indicated ; we see that the completed Kind would be the Indeterminate ; by this process we are able to identify and affirm Evil. In the same way when we observe what we feel to be an ugly appearance in Matter — left there because the Reason-Principle has not become so completely the master as to cover over the unseemliness — we recognise Ugliness by the falling-short from Ideal-Form.

But how can we identify what has never had any touch of Form ?

We utterly eliminate every kind of Form ; and the object in which there is none whatever we call Matter : if we are to see Matter we must so completely abolish Form that we take shapelessness into our very selves.

In fact it is another Intellectual-Principle, not the true, this which ventures a vision so uncongenial.

To see darkness the eye withdraws from the light ; it is striving to cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the light which would make the darkness invisible ; away from the light its power is rather that of not-seeing than of seeing and this not-seeing is its nearest approach to seeing Darkness. So the Intellectual-Principle, in order to see its contrary (Matter), must leave its own light locked up within itself, and as it were go forth from itself into an outside realm, it must ignore its native brightness, and submit itself to the very contradiction of its being.

10. But if Matter is devoid of quality how can it be evil ?

It is described as being devoid of quality in the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the qualities which it admits and

which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has no nature ; and if it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be evil though not in the sense of quality ?

Quality qualifies something not itself : it is therefore an accidental ; it resides in some other object. Matter does not exist in some other object but is the substratum in which the accidental resides. Matter, then, is said to be devoid of Quality in that it does not in itself possess this thing which is by nature an accidental. If, moreover, Quality itself be devoid of Quality, how can Matter, which is the unqualified, be said to have it ?

Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that Matter is without Quality and that it is evil : it is Evil not in the sense of having Quality but, precisely, in not having it ; give it Quality and in its very Evil it would almost be a Form, whereas in Truth it is a Kind contrary to Form.

" But," it may be said, " the Kind opposed to all Form is Privation or Negation, and this necessarily refers to something other than itself, it is no Substantial-Existence : therefore if Evil is Privation or Negation it must be lodged in some Negation of Form : there will be no Self-Existent Evil."

This objection may be answered by applying the principle to the case of Evil in the Soul ; the Evil, the Vice, will be a Negation and not anything having a separate existence ; we come to the doctrine which denies Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil ; we need not seek elsewhere ; we may at once place Evil in the Soul, recognising it as the mere absence of Good. But if the negation is the negation of something that ought to become present, if it is a denial of the Good by the Soul, then the Soul produces vice within itself by the operation of its own Nature, and is devoid of good and, therefore, Soul though it be, devoid of life : the Soul, if it has no life, is soulless ; the Soul is no Soul.

No ; the Soul has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The Good : it has much good in it ; it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and is not essentially evil : neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil present in it even as an accidental, for the Soul is not wholly apart from the Good.

Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should be described not as an entire, but as a partial, negation of good.

But if this were so, part of the Soul must possess The Good, part be without it ; the Soul will have a mingled nature and the Evil within it will not be unblended : we have not yet lighted on the Primal, Unmingled Evil. The Soul would possess the Good as its Essence, the Evil as an Accidental.

Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the Soul like something affecting the eye and so hindering sight.

But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is something quite different. If then Vice is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not Evil- Absolute. Virtue is not the Absolute Good, but a co-operator with it ; and if Virtue is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the Absolute Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beauty or the Absolute Good ; neither, therefore, is Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil.

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute Good and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil : from Vice as the startingpoint we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud : for if the Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still human, still carries some trace of good : it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is twofold : while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it ; when it has left the body, to he in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud : and this is our " going down to Hades and slumbering there."

ii. It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness in the Soul.

We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat.

Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it comes.

For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul : the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy — unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter.

But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we call it, in the Soul, which is certainly not made weak as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything like a disease, like a fever.

Now this weakness must be seated either in Souls utterly disengaged or in Souls bound to Matter or in both.

It cannot exist in those apart from Matter, for all these are pure and, as we read, winged and perfect and unimpeded in their task : there remains only that the weakness be in the fallen Souls, neither cleansed nor clean ; and in them the weakness will be, not in any privation but in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm or bile in the organs of the body.

If we form an acute and accurate notion of the cause of the fall we shall understand the weakness that comes by it.

Matter exists ; Soul exists ; and they occupy, so to speak, one place. There is not one place for Matter and another for Soul, — Matter, for instance, kept to earth, Soul in the air : the soul's " separate place " is simply its not being in Matter ; that is, its not being united with it ; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of Soul and Matter ; that is that Soul be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix j this is the Soul's apartness.

But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter appears, importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within ; but all the ground is holy, nothing there without part in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and takes light : but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to, for the Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it invisible. On the contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand.

This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into Matter : thence its weakness : not all the faculties of its being retain free play, for Matter hinders their manifestation ; it encroaches upon the Soul's territory and, as it were, crushes the Soul back ; and it turns to evil all that it has stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance again.

Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of Soul and of all its evil is Matter.

The evil of Matter precedes the weakness, the vice ; it is Primal Evil. Even though the Soul itself submits to Matter and engenders to it ; if it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause is still the presence of Matter : the Soul would never have approached Matter but that the presence of Matter is the occasion of its earth-life.

12. If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this Principle must be demonstrated from the treatises " On Matter " where the question is copiously treated.

To deny Evil a place among realities is necessarily to do away with the Good as well, and even to deny the existence of anything desirable ; it is to deny desire, avoidance and all intellectual act ; for desire has Good for its object, aversion looks to Evil, all intellectual act, all Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is itself one of the things that are good.

There must then be The Good — good unmixed — and the Mingled Good and Bad, and the Rather Bad than Good, this last ending with the

Utterly Bad we have been seeking, just as that in which Evil constitutes the lesser part tends, by that lessening, towards the Good.

What, then, must Evil be to the Soul ?

What Soul could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower Kind ? There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear : fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution ; pain and sorrow are the accompaniments of the dissolution j desires spring from something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against trouble threatened ; all impression is the stroke of something unreasonable outside the Soul, accepted only because the Soul is not devoid of parts or phases ; the Soul takes up false notions through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be purely itself.

One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this condemnation ; it is the aspiration towards the Intellectual-Principle : this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined within that place of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower.

Evil is not alone : by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only : it appears, necessarily, bound around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold ; and beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of Images of the Good and Beautiful for their Remembrance.

Ennead I, Treatise 9

" You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth ..." (taking something with it) .

For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it ; then it makes no departure ; it simply finds itself free.

But how does the body come to be separated ?

The separation takes place when nothing of Soul remains bound up with it : the harmony within the body, by virtue of which the Soul was retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest.

But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has used violence and torn himself away, not the body that has let the Soul slip from it. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion ; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful to indulge.

But if a man feel himself to be losing his reason ?

That is not likely in the Sage, but if it should occur, it must be classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at the bidding of the fact though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the release of the Soul seems a strange way of assisting its purposes.

And if there be a period allotted to all by fate, to anticipate the hour could not be a happy act, unless, as we have indicated, under stern necessity.

If everyone is to hold in the other world a standing determined by the state in which he quitted this, there must be no withdrawal as long as there is any hope of progress.

Ennead II, Treatise 1

I. We hold that the ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed for ever and will for ever endure : but simply to refer this perdurance to the Will of God, however true an explanation, is utterly inadequate.

The elements of this sphere change ; the living beings of earth pass away ; only the Ideal-form (the species) persists : possibly a similar process obtains in the All.

The Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known forms in new sub stances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to the unity of idea : now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no more than duration of form, why should celestial objects, and the celestial system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular entity ?

Let us suppose this persistence to be the result of the all-inclusiveness of the celestial and universal — with its consequence, the absence of any outlying matter into which change could take place or which could break in and destroy.

This explanation would, no doubt, safeguard the integrity of the Whole, of the All ; but our sun and the individual being of the other heavenly bodies would not on these terms be secured in perpetuity : they are parts ; no one of them is in itself the whole, the all ; it would still be probable that theirs is no more than that duration in form which belongs to fire and such entities.

This would apply even to the entire ordered universe itself. For it is very possible that this too, though not in process of destruction from

outside, might have only formal duration ; its parts may be so wearing each other down as to keep it in a continuous decay while, amid the ceaseless flux of the Kind constituting its base, an outside power cease lessly restores the form : in this way the living All may lie under the same conditions as man and horse and the rest — man and horse persisting but not the individual of the type.

With this, we would have no longer the distinction of one order, the heavenly system, stable for ever, and another, the earthly, in process of decay : all would be alike except in the point of time ; the celestial would merely be longer lasting. If, then, we accepted this duration of type alone as a true account of the All equally with its partial members, our difficulties would be eased — or indeed we should have no further problem — once the Will of God were shown to be capable, under these conditions and by such communication, of sustaining the Universe.

But if we are obliged to allow individual persistence to any definite entity within the Kosmos then, firstly, we must show that the Divine Will is adequate to make it so ; secondly, we have to face the question, What accounts for some things having individual persistence and others only the persistence of type ? and, thirdly, we ask how the partial entities of the celestial system hold a real duration which would thus appear possible to all partial things.

2. Supposing we accept this view and hold that, while things below the moon's orb have merely type-persistence, the celestial realm and all its several members possess individual eternity ; it remains to show how this strict permanence of the individual identity — the actual item eternally unchangeable — can belong to what is certainly corporeal, seeing that bodily substance is characteristically a thing of flux.

The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no less than by the other philosophers who have dealt with physical matters, and is applied not only to ordinary bodies but to those, also, of the heavenly sphere.

" How," he asks, " can these corporeal and visible entities continue eternally unchanged in identity ? " —evidently agreeing, in this matter

also, with Herakleitos who maintained that even the sun is perpetually coming anew into being. To Aristotle there would be no problem ; it is only accepting his theories of a fifth-substance.

But to those who reject Aristotle's Quintessence and hold the material mass of the heavens to consist of the elements underlying the living things of this sphere, how is individual permanence possible ? And the difficulty is still greater for the parts (than for the whole), for the sun and the heavenly bodies (than for the celestial sphere as a unit) .

Every living thing is a combination of soul and body-kind : the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of one of them, by the combination of soul and body or by soul only or by body only.

Of course anyone that holds body to be incorruptible secures the desired permanence at once ; no need, then, to call on a soul or on any perdurable conjunction to account for the continued maintenance of a living being.

But the case is different when one holds that body is, of itself, perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence : this view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself fatal either to the coherence or to the lasting stability which are imperative : it must be shown that the two elements of the union envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the contrary (in the heavens) even Matter must conduce to the scheme of the standing result.

3- We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this entity of ceaseless flux constituting the physical mass of the universe, could serve towards the immortality of the Kosmos.

And our answer is " Because the flux is not outgoing " : where there is motion within but not outwards and the total remains unchanged, there is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Kosmos never ages.

We have a parallel in our earth, constant from eternity to pattern and to mass ; the air, too, never fails ; and there is always water : all

the changes of these elements leave unchanged the Principle of the total living thing, our world. In our own constitution, again, there is a ceaseless shifting of particles — and that with outgoing loss — and yet the individual persists for a long time : where (as in the case of the All) there is no ques tion of an outside region, the body-principle cannot clash with soul as against the identity and endless duration of the living thing.

Of these material elements — for example — fire, the keen and swift, co-operates by its upward tendency as earth by its lingering below ; for we must not imagine that the fire, once it finds itself at the point where its ascent must stop, settles down as in its appropriate place, no longer seeking, like all the rest, to expand in both directions. No : but higher is not possible ; lower is repugnant to its Kind ; all that remains for it is to be tractable and, answering to a need of its nature, to be drawn by the Soul to the activity of life, and so to move — to move in a glorious place, in the Soul. Anyone that dreads its falling may take heart ; the circuit of the Soul provides against any declination, embracing, sustain ing ; and since fire has of itself no downward tendency it accepts that guiding without resistance. The partial elements constituting our persons do not suffice for their own cohesion ; once they are brought to human shape, they must borrow elsewhere if the organism is to be maintained : but in the upper spheres since there can be no loss by flux no such replenishment is needed.

Suppose such loss, suppose fire extinguished there, then a new fire must be kindled ; so also if such loss by flux could occur in some of the superiors from which the celestial fire depends, that too must be replaced : but with such transmutations, while there might be something con tinuously similar, there would be, no longer, a Living All abidingly selfidentical.

4- But matters are involved here which demand specific investigation and cannot be treated as incidental merely to our present problem. We are faced with several questions : Is the heavenly system exposed to any such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration correspondn. i.4J THE KOSMOS 147

ing to nourishment ; or do its members, once set in their due places, suffer no loss of substance, permanent by Kind ? Does it consist of fire only, or is it mainly of fire with the other elements, as well, taken up and carried in the circuit by the dominant Principle ?

(For the present we may say that) Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting ; but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars.

Still, the great argument remains, the Soul, moving in its marvellous might second only to the very loftiest Existents : how could anything once placed within this Soul break away from it into non-being ? No one that understands this principle, the support of all things, can fail to see that, sprung from God, it is a stronger stay than any bonds.

And is it conceivable that the Soul, valid to sustain for a certain space of time, could not so sustain for ever ? This would be to assume that it holds things together by violence ; that there is a " natural course " at variance with what actually exists in the nature of the universe and in these exquisitely ordered beings ; and that there is some power able to storm the established system and destroy its ordered coherence, some kingdom or dominion that may shatter the order founded by the Soul.

Further : The Kosmos has had no beginning — the impossibility has been shown elsewhere — and this is warrant for its continued existence. Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred ? The elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters : they hold sound for ever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists : the ground of all the change must itself be changeless.

As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul (such as might lead it to

bring the Kosmos to an end) we have already shown the emptiness of that fancy : the administration of the universe entails neither labour nor loss ; and, even supposing the possibility of annihilating all that is material, the Soul would be no whit the better or the worse.

5- But how explain the permanence There, while the content of this sphere — its elements and its living things alike — are passing ?

The reason is given by Plato : the celestial order is from God, the living things of earth from the gods sprung from God ; and it is law that the offspring of God endures.

In other words, the celestial soul — and our souls with it — springs directly next from the Creator, while the animal life of this earth is produced by an image which goes forth from that celestial soul and may be said to flow downwards from it.

A soul, then, of the minor degree — reproducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but lacking in power inasmuch as it must exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region — the substances taken up into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to duration ; with such an origin the living things of this realm cannot be of strength to last for ever ; the material constituents are not as firmly held and con trolled as if they were ruled immediately by a Principle of higher potency.

The heavens, on the contrary, must have persistence as a whole, and this entails the persistence of the parts, of the stars they contain : we could not imagine that whole to endure with the parts in flux — though, of course, we must distinguish things sub-celestial from the heavens themselves whose region does not in fact extend so low as to the moon.

Our own case is different : physically we are formed by that (inferior) soul, given forth (not directly from God but) from the divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves ; it is by way of that inferior soul that we are associated with the body (which therefore will not be persistent) ; for the higher soul which constitutes the We is the

principle not of our existence but of our excellence — or, if also of our existence, then only in the sense that, when the body is already consti tuted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the Divine Reason in support of the existence.

6. We may now consider the question whether fire is the sole element existing in that celestial realm and whether there is any outgoing thence with the consequent need of renewal.

Timaeus pronounced the material frame of the All to consist primarily of earth and fire — fire for visibility, earth for solidity — and deduced that the stars must be mainly composed of fire, but not solely since there is no doubt they are solid.

And this is probably a true account. Plato accepts it as indicated by all the appearances. And, in fact, to all our perception — as we see them and derive from them the impression of illumination — the stars appear to be mostly, if not exclusively, fire : but on reasoning into the matter we judge that since solidity cannot exist apart from earth-matter, they must contain earth as well.

But what place could there be for the other elements ? It is impos sible to imagine water amid so vast a conflagration ; and if air were present it would be continually changing into fire.

Admitting (with Timaeus ; as a logical truth) that two self-contained entities, standing as extremes to each other need for their coherence two intermediaries ; we may still question whether this holds good with regard to physical bodies. Certainly water and earth can be mixed without any such intermediate. It might seem valid to object that the intermediates are already present in the earth and the water ; but a possible answer would be, " Yes, but not as agents whose meeting is necessary to the coherence of those extremes."

None the less we will take it that the coherence of extremes is produced by virtue of each possessing all the intermediates. It is still not proven that fire is necessary to the visibility of earth and earth to the solidarity of fire.

On this principle, nothing possesses an essential-nature of its very own ; every several thing is a blend, and its name is merely an indication of the dominant constituent.

Thus we are told that earth cannot have concrete existence without the help of some moist element — the moisture in water being the necessary adhesive — but admitting that we so find it, there is still a contradiction in pretending that any one element has a being of its own and in the same breath denying its self-coherence, making its subsistence depend upon others, and so, in reality, reducing the specific element to nothing. How can we talk of the existence of the definite Kind, earth — earth essential — if there exists no single particle of earth which actually is earth without any need of water to secure its self-cohesion ? What has such an adhesive to act upon if there is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth to which it may bind particle after particle in its business of producing the continuous mass ? If there is any such given magnitude, large or small, of pure earth, then earth can exist in its own nature, independently of water : if there is no such primary particle of pure earth, then there is nothing whatever for the water to bind. As for air — air unchanged, retaining its distinctive quality — how could it conduce to the subsistence of a dense material like earth ?

Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks of it as necessary not to the existence but to the visibility of earth and the other elements ; and certainly light is essential to all visibility — we cannot say that we see darkness, which implies, precisely, that nothing is seen, as silence means nothing being heard.

But all this does not assure us that the earth to be visible must contain fire : light is sufficient : snow, for example, and other extremely cold substances gleam without the presence of fire — though of course it might be said that fire was once there and communicated colour before disappearing.

As to the composition of water, we must leave it an open question whether there can be such a thing as water without a certain proportion of earth.

But how can air, the yielding element, contain earth ?

Fire, again : is earth perhaps necessary there since fire is by its own nature devoid of continuity and not a thing of three dimensions ?

Supposing it does not possess the solidity of the three dimensions, it has that of its thrust ; now, cannot this belong to it by the mere right and fact of its being one of the corporeal entities in nature ? Hardness is another matter, a property confined to earth-stuff. Remember that gold — which is water — becomes dense by the accession not of earth but of denseness or consolidation : in the same way fire, with Soul present within it, may consolidate itself upon the power of the Soul ; and there are living beings of fire among the Celestials.

But, in sum, do we abandon the teaching that all the elements enter into the composition of every living thing ?

For this sphere, no : but to lift clay into the heavens is against nature, contrary to the laws of her ordaining : it is difficult, too, to think of that swiftest of circuits bearing along earthly bodies in its course— nor could such material conduce to the splendour and white glint of the celestial fire.

7- We can scarcely do better, in fine, than follow Plato.

Thus : —

In the universe as a whole there must necessarily be such a degree of solidity, that is to say, of resistance, as will ensure that the earth, set in the centre, be a sure footing and support to the living beings moving over it, and inevitably communicate something of its own density to them : the earth will possess coherence by its own unaided quality, but visibility by the presence of fire : it will contain water against the dryness which would prevent the cohesion of its particles ; it will hold air to lighten its bulky matters ; it will be in contact with the celestial firenot as being a member of the sidereal system but by the simple fact that the fire there and our earth both belong to the ordered universe so that something of the earth is taken up by the fire as something of the fire by the earth and something of everything by everything else.

This borrowing, however, does not mean that the one thing taking-up

from the other enters into a composition, becoming an element in a total of both : it is simply a consequence of the kosmic fellowship ; the par ticipant retains its own being and takes over not the thing itself but some property of the thing, not air but air's yielding softness, not fire but fire's incandescence : mixing is another process, a complete surrender with a resultant compound not, as in this case, earth — remaining earth, the solidity and density we know — with something of fire's qualities superadded.

We have authority for this where we read :—

" At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a light " : he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the all-glowing and, again, the all-gleaming : thus he prevents us imagining it to be anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind ; in other words it is light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm : this light is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that other " light " which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the veritable " incandescent body." Plato's word " earthy " is commonly taken in too depreciatory a sense : he is thinking of earth as the principle of solidity ; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the concrete clay.

Fire of this order, giving forth this purest light, belongs to the upper realm, and there its seat is fixed by nature ; but we must not, on that account, suppose the flame of earth to be associated with the beings of that higher sphere.

No : the flame of this world, once it has attained a certain height, is extinguished by the currents of air opposed to it. Moreover, as it carries an earthy element on its upward path, it is weighed downwards and cannot reach those loftier regions. It comes to a stand somewhere below the moon — making the air at that point subtler — and its flame, if any flame can persist, is subdued and softened, and no longer retains its first intensity, but gives out only what radiance it reflects from the light above.

And it is that loftier light—falling variously upon the stars ; to each in a certain proportion — that gives them their characteristic

differences, as well in magnitude as in colour ; just such light constitutes also the still higher heavenly bodies which, however, like clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and unresisting transparency of their material substance and also by their very distance.

8. Now : given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at its appointed station, pure light in purest place, what mode of outflow from it can be conceived possible ?

Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow downwards of its own accord ; and there exists in those regions no power to force it down. Again, body in contact with soul must always be very different from body left to itself ; the bodily substance of the heavens has that contact and will show that difference.

Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to the heavens would be air or fire : air has no destructive quality ; fire would be powerless there since it could not enter into effective contact : in its very rush it would change before its attack could be felt ; and, apart from that, it is of the lesser order, no match for what it would be opposing in those higher regions.

Again, fire acts by imparting heat : now it cannot be the source of heat to what is already hot by nature ; and anything it is to destroy must as a first condition be heated by it, must be brought to a pitch of heat fatal to the nature concerned.

In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to the heavens to ensure their permanence — or to produce their circular movement, for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line ; on the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle ; all other movement indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of replenishment ; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration necessary in this realm of composite bodies always in flux : we must

recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here represent a slipping-away from the being (a phenomenon not incident to the celestial sphere) and take place at the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess the unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm.

Ennead II, Treatise 2

i. But whence that circular movement ?

In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle.

And does this movement belong to the material part or to the Soul ? Can we account for it on the ground that the Soul has itself at once for centre and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly moving ; or that, being self-centred it is not of unlimited extension (and consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent), and that its revolution carries the material mass with it ?

If the Soul had been the moving power (by any such semi-physical action) it would be so no longer ; it would have accomplished the act of moving and have brought the universe to rest ; there would be an end of this endless revolution.

In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least cannot have spatial movement ; how then, having itself a movement of quite another order, could it communicate spatial movement ?

But perhaps the circular movement (of the Kosrnos as soul and body) is not spatial or is spatial not primarily but only incidentally.

What, by this explanation, would be the essential movement of the kosmic soul ?

A movement towards itself, the movement of self-awareness, of selfintellection, of the living of its life, the movement of its reaching to all

tilings so that nothing shall lie outside of it, nothing anywhere but within its scope.

The dominant in a living thing is what compasses it entirely and makes it a unity.

If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it would not vitally compass the Kosmos nor would the Kosmos, a thing of body, keep its content alive, for the life of body is movement.

Any spatial motion there is will be limited ; it will be not that of Soul untrammelled but that of a material frame ensouled, an animated organism ; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the body tending to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul restraining it'; the resultant will be the compromise movement of a thing at once carried forward and at rest.

But supposing that the circular movement is to be attributed to the body, how is it to be explained, since all body, including fire (which constitutes the heavens) has straightforward motion ?

The answer is that forthright movement is maintained only pending arrival at the place for which the moving thing is destined : where a thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its nature, to come for its rest ; its motion is its tendence to its appointed place.

Then, since the fire of the sidereal system has attained its goal, why does it not stay at rest ?

Evidently because the very nature of fire is to be mobile : if it did not take the curve, its straight line would finally fling it outside the universe : the circular course, then, is imperative.

But this would imply an act of providence ?

Not quite : rather its own act under providence ; attaining to that realm, it must still take the circular course by its indwelling nature ; for it seeks the straight path onwards but finds no further space and is driven back so that it recoils on the only course left to it : there is nothing beyond ; it has reached the ultimate ; it runs its course in the regions it occupies, itself its own sphere, not destined to come to rest there, existing to move.

Further, the centre of a circle (and therefore of the Kosmos) is distinctively a point of rest : if the circumference outside were not in motion, the universe would be no more than one vast centre. And movement around the centre is all the more to be expected in the case of a living thing whose nature binds it within a body. Such motion alone can constitute its impulse towards its centre : it cannot coincide with the centre, for then there would be no circle ; since this may not be, it whirls about it ; so only can it indulge its tendence.

If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is due to the Soul, we are not to think of a painful driving (wearing it down at last) ; the soul does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for " Nature " is no other than the custom the All-Soul has established. Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe communicates that quality of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing towards it.

If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Kosmos, too, brought so far, would halt : but the Soul encompasses all, and so the Kosmos moves, seeking everything.

Yet never to attain ?

On the contrary this very motion is its eternal attainment.

Or, better ; the Soul is ceaselessly leading the Kosmos towards itself : the continuous attraction communicates a continuous movement —not to some outside space but towards the Soul and in the one sphere with it, not in the straight line (which would ultimately bring the moving body outside and below the Soul), but in the curving course in which the moving body at every stage possesses the Soul that is attracting it and bestowing itself upon it.

If the soul were stationary, that is if (instead of presiding over a Kosmos) it dwelt wholly and solely in the realm in which every member is at rest, motion would be unknown ; but, since the Soul is not fixed in some one station There, the Kosmos must travel to every point in quest of it, and never outside it : in a circle, therefore.

2. And what of lower things ? (Why have they not this motion ?)

(Their case is very different) : the single thing here is not an all but a part and limited to a given segment of space ; that other realm is all, is space, so to speak, and is subject to no hindrance or control, for in itself it is all that is.

And men ?

As a self, each is a personal whole, no doubt ; but as member of the universe, each is a partial thing.

But if, wherever the circling body be, it possesses the Soul, what need of the circling ?

Because everywhere it finds something else besides the Soul (which it desires to possess alone).

The circular movement would be explained, too, if the Soul's power may be taken as resident at its centre.

Here, however, we must distinguish between a centre in reference to the two different natures, body and Soul.

In body, centre is a point of place ; in Soul it is a source, the source of some other nature. The word, which without qualification would mean the midpoint of a spheric mass, may serve in the double reference ; and, as in a material mass so in the Soul, there must be a centre, that around which the object, Soul or material mass, revolves.

The Soul exists in revolution around God to whom it clings in love, holding itself to the utmost of its power near to Him as the Being on which all depends ; and since it cannot coincide with God it circles about Him.

Why then do not all souls (i.e. the lower, also, as those of men and animals) thus circle about the Godhead ?

Every Soul does in its own rank and place.

And why not our very bodies, also ?

Because the forward path is characteristic of body and because all the body's impulses are to other ends and because what in us is of this circling nature (the soul) is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it, while in the higher realm everything flows on its course,

lightly and easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion in it at all.

And it may very well be that even in us the Spirit which dwells with the Soul does thus circle about the divinity. For since God is omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union must take the circular course : God is not stationed.

Similarly Plato attributes to the stars not only the spheric move ment belonging to the universe as a whole but also to each a revolution around their common centre ; each — not by way of thought but by links of natural necessity — has in its own place taken hold of God and exults.

3- The truth may be resumed in this way : —

There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth, and this is interwoven throughout the entire universe : another phase possesses sensation, while yet another includes the Reason which is concerned with the objects of sensation : this higher phase holds itself to the spheres, poised towards the Above but hovering over the lesser Soul and giving forth to it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital.

The lower Soul is moved by the higher which, besides encircling and supporting it, actually resides in whatsoever part of it has thrust upwards and attained the spheres. The lower then, ringed round by the higher and answering its call, turns and tends towards it ; and this upward tension communicates motion to the material frame in which it is in volved : for if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree moved, without being drawn away from the rest, it moves the whole, and the sphere is set in motion. Something of the same kind happens in the case of our bodies : the unspatial movement of the Soul — in happiness, for instance, or at the idea of some pleasant event — sets up a spatial move ment in the body : the Soul, attaining in its own region some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what pleases it ; and so, by force of the union established in the order of nature, it moves the body, in the body's region, that is in space.

As for that phase of the Soul in which sensation is vested, it, too, (like the higher) takes its good from the Supreme above itself and moves, rejoicingly, in quest of it : and since the object of its desire is every where, it too ranges always through the entire scope of the universe.

The Intellectual-Principle has no. such progress in any region ; its movement is a stationary act, for it turns upon itself.

And this is why the All, circling as it does, is at the same time at rest.

Ennead II, Treatise 3

i. That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but without being the cause direct (as the general opinion holds) of all that happens, has been elsewhere affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument : but the subject demands more precise and detailed investi gation for to take the one view rather than the other is of no small moment.

The belief is that the planets in their courses actually produce not merely such conditions as poverty, wealth, health and sickness but even ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all, vices and virtue and the very acts that spring from these qualities, the definite doings of each moment of virtue or vice. We are to suppose the stars to be annoyed with men— and upon matters in which men, moulded to what they are by the stars themselves, can surely do them no wrong.

They will be distributing what pass for their good gifts, not out of kindness towards the recipients but as they themselves are affected pleasantly or disagreeably at the various points of their course ; so that they must be supposed to change their plans as they stand at their zeniths or are declining.

More absurdly still, some of them are supposed to be malicious and others to be helpful, and yet the evil stars will (in certain positions) bestow favours and the benevolent act harshly : further, their action alters as they see each other or not, so that, after all, they possess no

definite nature but vary according to their angles of aspect ; a star is kindly when it sees one of its fellows but changes at sight of another : and there is even a distinction to be made in the seeing as it occurs in this figure or in that. Lastly, all acting together, the fused influence is different again from that of each single star, just as the blending of distinct fluids gives a mixture unlike any of them.

Since these opinions and others of the same order are prevalent, it will be well to examine them carefully one by one, beginning with the fundamental question :—

2. Are these planets to be thought of as soulless or unsouled ?

Suppose them, first, to be without Soul.

In that case they can purvey only heat or cold — if cold from the stars can be thought of — that is to say, any communication from them will affect only our bodily nature, since all they have to communicate to us is merely corporeal. This implies that no considerable change can be caused in the bodies affected since emanations merely corporeal cannot differ greatly from star to star, and must, moreover, blend upon earth into one collective resultant : at most the differences would be such as depend upon local position, upon nearness or farness with regard to the centre of influence. This reasoning, of course, is as valid of any cold emanation there may be as of the warm.

Now, what is there in such corporeal action to account for the vari ous classes and kinds of men, learned and illiterate, scholars as against orators, musicians as against people of other professions ? Can a power merely physical make rich or poor ? Can it bring about such conditions as in no sense depend upon the interaction of corporeal elements ? Could it, for example, bring a man such and such a brother, father, son, or wife, give him a stroke of good fortune at a particular moment, or make him generalissimo or king ?

Next, suppose the stars to have life and mind and to be effective by deliberate purpose.

In that case, what have they suffered from us that they should, in

free will, do us hurt, they who are established in a divine place, them selves divine ? There is nothing in their nature of what makes men base, nor can our weal or woe bring them the slightest good or ill.

3- Possibly, however, they act not by choice but under stress of their several positions and collective figures ?

But if position and figure determined their action each several one would necessarily cause identical effects with every other on entering any given place or pattern.

And that raises the question what effect for good or bad can be produced upon any one of them by its transit in the parallel of this or that section of the Zodiac circle — for they are not in the Zodiacal figure itself but considerably beneath it — especially since, whatever point they touch, they are always in the heavens.

It is absurd to think that the particular grouping under which a star passes can modify either its character or its earthward influences. And can we imagine it altered by its own progression as it rises, stands at centre, declines ? Exultant when at centre ; dejected or enfeebled in declension ; some raging as they rise and growing benignant as they set, while declension brings out the best in one among them ; surely this cannot be ?

We must not forget that invariably every star, considered in itself, is at centre with regard to some one given group and in decline with regard to another and vice versa ; and, very certainly, it is not at once happy and sad, angry and kindly. There is no reasonable escape in representing some of them as glad in their setting, others in their rising : they would still be grieving and glad at one and the same time.

Further, why should any distress of theirs work harm to us ?

No : we cannot think of them as grieving at all or as being cheerful upon occasions : they must be continuously serene, happy in the good they enjoy and the Vision before them. Each lives its own free life ; each finds its Good in its own Act ; and this Act is not directed towards us.

Like the birds of augury, the living beings of the heavens, having no

lot or part with us, may serve incidentally to foreshow the future, but they have absolutely no main function in our regard.

4- It is again not in reason that a particular star should be gladdened by seeing this or that other while, in a second couple, such an aspect is distressing : what enmities can affect such beings ? what causes of enmity can there be among them ?

And why should there be any difference as a given star sees certain others from the corner of a triangle or in opposition or at the angle of a square ?

Why, again, should it see its fellow from some one given position and yet, in the next Zodiacal figure, not see it, though the two are actually nearer ?

And, the cardinal question ; by what conceivable process could they affect what is attributed to them ? How explain either the action of any single star independently or, still more perplexing, the effect of their combined intentions ?

We cannot think of them entering into compromises, each renouncing something of its efficiency and their final action in our regard amounting to a concerted plan.

No one star would suppress the contribution of another, nor would star yield to star and shape its conduct under suasion.

As for the fancy that while one is glad when it enters another's region, the second is vexed when in its turn it occupies the place of the first, surely this is like starting with the supposition of two friends and then going on to talk of one being attracted to the other who, however, abhors the first.

5- When they tell us that a certain cold star is more benevolent to us

in proportion as it is further away, they clearly make its harmful influence depend upon the coldness of its nature ; and yet it ought (by this reason ing) to be beneficent to us when it is in the opposed Zodiacal figures.

When the cold planet, we are told, is in opposition to the cold, both become menacing : but the natural effect would be a compromise.

And we are asked to believe that one of them is happy by day and grows kindly under the warmth, while another, of a fiery nature, is most cheerful by night — as if it were not always day to them, light to them, and as if the first one could be darkened by night at that great distance above the earth's shadow.

Then there is the notion that the moon, in conjunction with a certain star, is softened at her full but is malignant in the same conjunction when her light has waned ; yet, if anything of this order could be admitted, the very opposite would be the case. For when she is full to us she must be dark on the further hemisphere, that is to that star which stands above her ; and when dark to us she is full to that other star, upon which only then, on the contrary, does she look with her light. To the moon itself, in fact, it can make no difference in what aspect she stands, for she is always lit on the upper or on the under half : to the other star, the warmth from the moon, of which they speak, might make a difference ; but that warmth would reach it precisely when the moon is without light to us ; at its darkest to us it is full to that other, and therefore (by the theory) beneficent. The darkness of the moon to us is of moment to the earth, but brings no trouble to the planet above. That planet, it is alleged, can give no help on account of its remoteness and therefore seems less well disposed ; but the moon at its full suffices to the lower realm so that the distance of the other is of no importance. When the moon, though dark to us, is in aspect with the Fiery Star she is held to be favourable : the reason alleged is that the force of Mars is all-sufficient since it contains more fire than it needs.

The truth is that while the material emanations from the living beings of the heavenly system are of various degrees of warmth — planet differing from planet in this respect — no cold comes from them : the nature of the space in which they have their being is voucher for that.

The star known as Jupiter includes a due measure of fire (and warmth), in this resembling the Morning-star and therefore seeming to be in alliance with it. In aspect with what is known as the Fiery Star,

Jupiter is beneficent by virtue of the mixing of influences : in aspect with Saturn unfriendly by dint of distance. Mercury, it would seem, is (in itself) indifferent whatever stars it be in aspect with ; for it adopts any and every character.

But (again, the truth is that) all the stars are serviceable to the Universe, and therefore can stand to each other only as the service of the Universe demands, in a harmony like that observed in the members of any one animal form. They exist essentially for the purpose of the Universe, just as the gall exists for the purposes of the body as a whole not less than for its own immediate function : it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits but without allowing the entire organism and its own especial region to run riot. Some such balance of function was indis pensable in the All — bitter with sweet. There must be differentiation — eyes and so forth — but all the members will be in sympathy with the entire animal frame to which they belong. Only so can there be a unity and a total harmony.

And in such a total, analogy will make every part a Sign.

6. But that this same Mars, or Aphrodite, in certain aspects should cause adulteries — as if they could thus, through the agency of human incontinence, satisfy their own mutual desires — is not such a notion the height of unreason ? And who could accept the fancy that their happiness comes from their seeing each other in this or that relative position and not from their own settled nature ?

Again : countless myriads of living beings are born and continue to be : to minister continuously to every separate one of these ; to make them famous, rich, poor, lascivious ; to shape the active tendencies of every single one — what kind of life is this for the stars, how could they possibly handle a task so huge ?

They are to watch, we must suppose, the rising of each several constellation and upon that signal to act ; such a one, they see, has risen by so many degrees, representing so many of the periods of its upward path ; they reckon on their fingers at what moment they must

take the action which, executed prematurely, would be out of order : and in the sum, there is no One Being controlling the entire scheme ; all is made over to the stars singly, as if there were no Sovereign Unity, standing as source of all the forms of Being in subordinate association with it, and delegating to the separate members, in their appropriate Kinds, the task of accomplishing its purposes and bringing its latent potentiality into act.

This is a separatist theory, tenable only by minds ignorant of the nature of a Universe which has a ruling principle and a first cause operative downv/ards through every member.

7- But, if the stars announce the future — as we hold of many other

things also — what explanation of the cause have we to offer ? What explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied ? Obviously, unless the particular is included under some general principle of order, there can be no signification.

We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them : upon these main tasks will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying any living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we : in different ways the one law applies.

All teems with symbol ; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another, a process familiar to all of us in not a few examples of everyday experience.

But what is the comprehensive principle of co-ordination ? Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not only by stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive guidance in our varied concerns.

All things must be enchained ; and the sympathy and correspond ence obtaining in any one closely knit organism must exist, first, and most

intensely, in the All. There must be one principle constituting this unit of many forms of life and enclosing the several members within the unity, while at the same time, precisely as in each thing of detail the parts too have each a definite function, so in the All (the higher All) each several member must have its own task — but more markedly so since in this case the parts are not merely members but themselves Alls, members of the loftier Kind.

Thus each entity takes its origin from one Principle and, therefore, while executing its own function, works in with every other member of that All from which its distinct task has by no means cut it off : each performs its act, each receives something from the others, every one at its own moment bringing its touch of sweet or bitter. And there is nothing undesigned, nothing of chance, in all the process : all is one scheme of differentiation, starting from the Firsts and working itself out in a con tinuous progression of Kinds.

8. Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own ; alike in its direct course (its tendence towards the divine ?) and in its divagation (its activity towards the lower ?) it is the cause of all by its possession of the Thought of the First Principle : thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise, would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is guided as much by the order liness as by the power of the controlling force. And in this order the stars, as being no minor members of the heavenly system, are co-operators contributing at once to its stately beauty and to its symbolic quality. Their symbolic power extends to the entire realm of sense, their efficacy only to what they patently do.

For our part, nature keeps us upon the work of the Soul as long as we are not wrecked in the multiplicity of the Universe : once thus sunk and held we pay the penalty, which consists both in the fall itself and in the lower rank thus entailed upon us : riches and poverty are caused (not by the stars but) by the combinations of external fact.

And what of virtue and vice ?

That question has been amply discussed elsewhere : in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient staple of the Soul ; vice is due to the commerce of a Soul with the outer world.

9- This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit : the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos (the stars) that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity — our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain — and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul (as total of Principle and affections) takes shape ; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world : our temperament will be of the stars' ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.

What, after all this, remains to stand for the " We " ?

The " We " is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us ; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled — the bodily element domi nant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body — for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It — unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.

For every human Being is of twofold character ; there is that com promise-total and there is the Authentic Man : and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole ; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body ; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul : and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system.

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no base ness. In their efficacy upon the (material) All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it ; and they act only upon what is partial ; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star's will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.

But (with every allowance to the lower forces) all follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It — we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe — or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul (the divine first Soul) to the other, its Kin (the Soul of any particular being) . All that is graceless is admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it ; " the rest," we read, " is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine."

10. If all this be true, we must at once admit signification, though, neither singly nor collectively, can we ascribe to the stars any efficacy except in what concerns the (material) All and in what is of their own function.

We must admit that the Soul before entering into birth presents itself bearing with it something of its own, for it could never touch body except under stress of a powerful inner impulse ; we must admit some element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit : and we must admit some effective power in that circuit itself ; it is co-operative, and com pletes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit takes the rank and function of a part.

ii. And we must remember that what comes from the supernals does not enter into the recipients as it left the source ; fire, for instance, will be duller ; the loving instinct will degenerate and issue in ugly forms of the passion ; the vital energy in a subject not so balanced as to display the mean of manly courage, will come out as either ferocity or faint heartedness ; and ambition ... in love . . . ; and the instinct towards good sets up the pursuit of semblant beauty ; intellectual power at its lowest produces the extreme of wickedness, for wickedness is a miscal culating effort towards Intelligence (= towards the highest principle in the man).

Any such quality, modified at best from its supreme form, de teriorates again within itself : things of any kind that approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their blending with bodies, with Matter, with each other.

12. All that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity (in the subject concerned) and every existing entity takes something from this blended infusion so that the result is the thing itself plus some quality. The effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it ; for horse comes by horse, and man by man : the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping, but the man has his origin in the Human-Principle. Outer things have their effect, sometimes to hurt and some times to help ; like a father, they often contribute to good but sometimes

also to harm ; but they do not wrench the human being from the foun dations of its nature ; though sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the human principle takes the second place so that there is a failure to achieve perfection ; the Ideal has been attenuated.

Of phenomena of this sphere some derive from the Kosmic Circuit and some not : we must take them singly and mark them off, assigning to each its origin.

The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions ; the entire force of the Soul is repre sented in the All but, in the parts, Soul is present only in proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such partial objects. Surrounding every separate entity there are other entities, whose approach will sometimes be hostile and sometimes helpful to the purpose of its nature ; but to the All taken in its length and breadth each and every separate existent is an adjusted part, holding its own characteristic and yet contributing by its own native tendency to the entire life-history of the Universe.

The soulless parts of the All are merely instruments ; all their action is effected, so to speak, under a compulsion from outside themselves.

The ensouled fall into two classes. The one kind has a motion of its own, but haphazard like that of horses between the shafts but before their driver sets the course ; they are set right by the whip. In the Living-Being possessed of Reason, the nature-principle includes the driver ; where the driver is intelligent, it takes in the main a straight path to a set end. But both classes are members of the All and co-operate towards the general purpose.

The greater and most valuable among them have an important operation over a wide range : their contribution towards the life of the whole consists in acting, not in being acted upon ; others, but feebly

equipped for action, are almost wholly passive ; there is an intermediate order whose members contain within themselves a principle of pro ductivity and activity and make themselves very effective in many spheres or ways and yet serve also by their passivity.

Thus the All stands as one all-complete Life, whose members, to the measure in which each contains within itself the Highest, effect all that is high and noble : and the entire scheme must be subordinate to its Dirigeant as an army to its general, " following upon Zeus " —it has been said— " as he proceeds towards the Intelligible Kind."

Secondary in the All are those of its parts which possess a less exalted nature just as in us the members rank lower than the Soul ; and so all through, there is a general analogy between the things of the All and our own members — none of quite equal rank.

All living things, then — all in the heavens and all elsewhere — fall under the general Reason-Principle of the All — they have been made parts with a view to the whole : not one of these parts, however exalted, has power to effect any alteration of these Reason-Principles or of things shaped by them and to them ; some modification one part may work upon another, whether for better or for worse ; but there is no power that can wrest anything outside of its distinct nature.

The part effecting such a modification for the worse may act in several ways.

It may set up some weakness restricted to the material frame. Or it may carry the weakness through to the sympathetic Soul which by the medium of the material frame, become a power to debasement, has been delivered over, though never in its essence, to the inferior order of being. Or, in the case of a material frame ill-organised, it may check all such action (of the Soul) upon the material frame as demands a certain collaboration in the part acted upon : thus a lyre may be so ill-strung as to be incapable of the melodic exactitude necessary to musical effect.

14- What of poverty and riches, glory and power ?

In the case of inherited fortune, the stars merely announce a rich

man, exactly as they announce the high social standing of the child born to a distinguished house.

Wealth may be due to personal activity : in this case if the body has contributed, part of the effect is due to whatever has contributed towards the physical powers, first the parents and then, if place has had its influence, sky and earth ; if the body has borne no part of the burden, then the success, and all the splendid accompaniments added by the Recompensers, must be attributed to virtue exclusively. If fortune has come by gift from the good then the source of the wealth is, again, virtue : if by gift from the evil, but to a meritorious recipient, then the credit must be given to the action of the best in them : if the recipient is himself unprincipled, the wealth must be attributed primarily to the very wickedness and to whatsoever is responsible for the wickedness, while the givers bear an equal share in the wrong.

When the success is due to labour, tillage for example, it must be put down to the tiller, with all his environment as contributory. In the case of treasure trove, something from the All has entered into action ; and if this be so, it will be foreshown — since all things make a chain, so that we can speak of things universally. Money is lost : if by robbery, the blame lies with the robber and the native principle guiding him : if by shipwreck, the cause is the chain of events. As for good fame, it is either deserved and then is due to the services done and to the merit of those appraising them, or it is undeserved, and then must be attributed to the injustice of those making the award. And the same principle holds as regards power — for this also may be rightly or unrightly placed — it depends either upon the merit of the dispensers of place or upon the man himself who has effected his purpose by the organisation of supporters or in many other possible ways. Marriages, similarly, are brought about either by choice or by chance interplay of circumstance. And births are determined by marriages : the child is moulded true to type when all goes well ; otherwise it is marred by some inner detriment, something due to the mother personally or to an environment unfavourable to that particular conception.

IS-According to Plato lots and choice play a part (in the determination

of human conditions) before the Spindle of Necessity is turned ; that once done, only the Spindle-destiny is valid ; it fixes the chosen con ditions irretrievably since the elected guardian-spirit becomes accessory to their accomplishment.

But what is the significance of the Lots ?

By the Lots (implying the unchosen element) we are to understand birth into the conditions actually existent in the All at the particular moment of each entry into body, birth into such and such a physical frame, from such and such parents, in this or that place, and generally all that in our phraseology is the External.

For Particulars and Universals alike it is established that to the first 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

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

16. 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 repro duction 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.

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.

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 con tained 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.

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 ante cedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good.

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.

17. 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 forma tion 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.

It creates, then, on the model of the Ideas ; for, what it has received from the Intellectual-Principle it must pass on in turn.

In sum, then, the Intellectual-Principle gives from itself to the Soul of the All which follows immediately upon it : this again gives forth from itself to its next, illuminated and imprinted by it ; and that secondary Soul at once begins to create, as under order, unhindered in some of its creations, striving in others against the repugnance of Matter.

It has a creative power, derived ; it is stored with Reason-Principles not the very originals : therefore it creates, but not in full accordance with the Principles from which it has been endowed : something enters from itself ; and, plainly, this is inferior. The issue then is something living, yes ; but imperfect, hindering its own life, something very poor and reluctant and crude, formed in a Matter that is the fallen sediment of the Higher Order, bitter and embittering. This is the Soul's contri bution to the All.

18. Are the evils in the Universe necessary because it is of later origin than the Higher Sphere ?

Perhaps rather because without evil the All would be incomplete. For most or even all forms of evil serve the Universe — much as the poisonous snake has its use — though in most cases their function is un known. Vice itself has many useful sides : it brings about much that is beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it stirs us to thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security.

If all this is so, then (the secret of creation is that) the Soul of the All abides in contemplation of the Highest and Best, ceaselessly striving towards the Intelligible Kind and towards God : but, thus absorbing and filled full, it overflows — so to speak — and the image it gives forth, its last utterance towards the lower, will be the creative puissance.

This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker, secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is primarily saturated from the Divine Intelligence. But the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle, as giver, to the Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the Third Kind.

Rightly, therefore, is this Kosmos described as an image continuously being imaged, the First and the Second Principles immobile, the Third, too, immobile essentially, but, accidentally and in Matter, having motion.

For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the divine Thought-Forms will pour forth into that phase of the Soul : as long as there is a sun all that streams from it will be some form of Light.

Ennead II, Treatise 4

i. By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception

of such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far all go the same way. But departure begins with the attempt to establish what this basic Kind is in itself, and how it is a recipient and of what.

To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are the Real Beings ; existence is limited to bodies ; there is one only Matter, the stuff under lying the primal-constituents of the Universe : existence is nothing but this Matter : everything is some modification of this ; the elements of the Universe are simply this Matter in a certain condition.

The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of Matter — and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body void of quality, but a magnitude.

Another school makes it incorporeal : among these, not all hold the theory of one only Matter ; some of them while they maintain the one Matter, in which the first school believes, the foundation of bodily forms, admit another, a prior, existing in the divine-sphere, the base of the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings.

2. We are obliged, therefore, at the start, both to establish the existence

of this other Kind and to examine its nature and the mode of its Being. Now (it will be reasoned) if Matter must characteristically be un determined, void of shape, while in that sphere of the Highest there can be nothing that lacks determination, nothing shapeless, there can be no Matter there. Further, if all that order is simplex, there can be no need of Matter, whose function is to join with some other element to form a compound : it will be found of necessity in things of derived existence and shifting nature — the signs which lead us to the notion of Matter — but it is unnecessary to the primal.

And again, where (it will be asked) could it have come from ? whence did it take its being ? If it is derived, it has a source : if it is eternal, then the Primal-Principles are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea, the union constitutes a body ; and, so, there is Body in the Supreme.

3- Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and (through them) to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form.

Further, a compound in the Intellectual order is not to be con founded with a compound in the realm of Matter ; the Divine Reasons are compounds and their Act is to produce a compound, namely that (lower) Nature which works towards Idea. And there is not only a differ ence of function ; there is a still more notable difference of source. Then, too, the Matter of the realm of process ceaselessly changes its form : in the eternal, Matter is immutably one and the same, so that the two are diametrically opposites. The Matter of this realm is all things in turn, a new entity hi every separate case, so that nothing is permanent and one thing ceaselessly pushes another out of being : Matter has no identity here. In the Intellectual it is all things at once : and therefore has nothing to change into : it already and ever contains all. This means that not even in its own Sphere is the Matter there at any moment shapeless : no doubt that is true of the Matter here as well ; but shape is held by a very different right in the two orders of Matter.

As to whether Matter is eternal or a thing of process, this will be clear when we are sure of its precise nature.

4- The present existence of the Ideal-Forms has been demonstrated

elsewhere : we take up our argument from that point.

If, then, there is more than one of such forming Ideas, there must of necessity be some character common to all and equally some peculiar character in each keeping them distinct.

This peculiar characteristic, this distinguishing difference, is the individual shape. But if shape, then there is the shaped, that in which the difference is lodged.

There is, therefore, a Matter accepting the shape, a permanent substratum.

Further, admitting that there is an Intelligible Realm beyond, of which this world is an image, then, since this world-compound is based on Matter, there must be Matter there also.

And how can you predicate an ordered system without thinking of form, and how think of form apart from the notion of something in which the form is lodged ?

No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact, utterly without parts, but in some sense there is part there too. And in so far as these parts are really separate from each other, any such division and difference can be no other than a condition of Matter, of a something divided and differentiated : in so far as that realm, though without parts, yet consists of a variety of entities, these diverse entities, residing in a unity of which they are variations, reside in a Matter ; for this unity, since it is also a diversity, must be conceived of as varied and multiform ; it must have been shapeless before it took the form in which variation occurs. For if we abstract from the Intellectual-Principle the variety and the particular shapes, the Reason-Principles and the Thoughts, what precedes these was something shapeless and undetermined, nothing of what is actually present there.

5- It may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses its con tent in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there.

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm : body without shape has never existed,

always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two — Matter and Idea — by sheer force of our reasoning which dis tinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there ; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and dis misses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter.

The dark element in the Intelligible, however, differs from that in the sense-world : so therefore does the Matter — as much as the forming-Idea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine Matter, though (like the Matter here) it is the object of determination has, of its own nature, a life denned and intellectual ; the Matter of this sphere while it does accept determination is not living or intellective, but a dead thing decorated : any shape it takes is an image, exactly as the Base is an image. There on the contrary the shape is a real-existent as is the Base. Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must be admitted to be right as long as they keep to the Matter of the Intelligible Realm : for the Base there is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the higher that accompanies it, is illuminated Being.

But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm, possess eternal exist ence ?

The solution of that question is the same as for the Ideas.

Both, are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning, but unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time : they have a derived being but by an eternal derivation : they are not, like the Kosmos, always in process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their Being permanently. For that differentiation within the Intelligible which pro duces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which produces the Matter there : it is the first movement ; and movement and differentiation are convertible terms since the two things arose as one : this motion, this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination (= Matter), needing The First to its determination which it achieves by its Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good ; unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all light comes, and, until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of light can be authentic ; any light from elsewhere is of another order than the true.

6. We are led thus to the question of receptivity in things of body.

An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different from themselves, is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over is not complete — if it were we would have a Principle of Being wrecked in Non-being — nor does an engendered thing pass from utter non-being into Being : what happens is that a new form takes the place of an old. There is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one form to receive the form of the incoming entity.

The same fact is clearly established by decay, a process implying a compound object ; where there is decay there is a distinction between Matter and Form.

And the reasoning which shows the destructible to be a compound is borne out by practical examples of reduction : a drinking vessel is reduced to its gold, the gold to liquid ; analogy forces us to believe that the liquid too is reducible.

The basic-constituents of things must be either their Form-Idea or that Primal Matter (of the Intelligible) or a compound of the Form and Matter.

Form-Idea, pure and simple, they cannot be : for without Matter how could things stand in their mass and magnitude ?

Neither can they be that Primal Matter for they are not indestruc tible.

They must, therefore, consist of Matter and Form-Idea — Form for

quality and shape, Matter for the base, indeterminate as being other than Idea.

7- Empedokles in identifying his " elements " with Matter is refuted by their decay.

Anaxagoras, in identifying his " primal-combination " with Matter —to which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all — withdraws in this way the very In tellectual-Principle he had introduced ; for this Mind is not to him the bestower of shape, of Forming Idea ; and it is co-aeval with Matter, not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible : for if the com bination derives Being by participation, Being is the prior ; if both are Authentic Existents, then an additional Principle, a third, is imperative (a ground of unification). And if this Creator, Mind, must pre-exist, why need Matter contain the Forming-Ideas parcelwise for the Mind, with unending labour, to assort and allot ? Surely the undetermined could be brought to quality and pattern in the one comprehensive act ?

As for the notion (of Anaxagoras) that all is in all, this clearly is impossible.

Those who (with Anaximander) make the base to be " the infinite " must define the term.

If this " infinite " means " of endless extension " there is no infinite among beings ; there is neither an infinity-in-itself (Infinity Abstract) nor an infinity as an attribute to some body ; for in the first case every part of that infinity would be infinite and in the second an object in which the infinity was present as an attribute could not be infinite apart from that attribute, could not be simplex, could not therefore be Matter.

Atoms again (Democritus) cannot meet the need of a base.

There are no atoms ; all body is divisible endlessly : besides neither the continuity nor the ductility of corporeal things is explicable apart from Mind, or apart from the Soul which cannot be made up of atoms ; and, again, out of atoms creation could produce nothing but atoms : a creative power could produce nothing from a material devoid of continuity. Any number of reasons might be brought, and have been brought, against this hypothesis and it need detain us no longer.

8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, con tinuous and without quality ?

Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal ; bodiliness would be quality.

It must be the basic stuff of all the entities of the sense-world and not merely base to some while being to others achieved form.

Clay, for example, is matter to the potter but is not Matter pure and simple. Nothing of this sort is our object : we are seeking the stuff which underlies all alike. We must therefore refuse to it all that we find in things of sense — not merely such attributes as colour, heat or cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness or thinness, shape and therefore magnitude ; though notice that to be present within magnitude and shape is very different from possessing these qualities.

It cannot be a compound, it must be a simplex, one distinct thing in its nature ; only so can it be void of all quality. The Principle which gives it form gives this as something alien : so with magnitude and all really-existent things bestowed upon it. If, for example, it possessed a magnitude of its own, the Principle giving it form would be at the mercy of that magnitude and must produce not at will, but only within the limit of the Matter's capacity : to imagine that Will keeping step with its material is fantastic.

The Matter must be of later origin than the forming-power, and there fore must be at its disposition throughout, ready to become anything, ready therefore to any bulk ; besides, if it possessed magnitude, it would necessarily possess shape also : it would be doubly inductile.

No : all that ever appears upon it is brought in by the Idea : the Idea alone possesses : to it belongs the magnitude and all else that goes with the Reason-Principle or follows upon it. Quantity is given with the Ideal-Form in all the particular species — man, bird, and particular kind of bird.

The imaging of Quantity upon Matter by an outside power is not more surprising than the imaging of Quality ; Quality is no doubt a Reason-Principle, but Quantity also — being measure, number — is equally so.

9- But how can we conceive a thing having existence without having magnitude ?

We have only to think of things whose identity does not depend on their quantity — for certainly magnitude can be distinguished from existence as can many other forms and attributes.

In a word, every unembodied Kind must be classed as without quantity, and Matter is unembodied.

Besides quantitativeness itself (the Absolute-Principle) does not possess quantity, which belongs only to things participating in it, a con sideration which shows that Quantitativeness is an Idea-Principle. A white object becomes white by the presence of whiteness ; what makes an organism white or of any other variety of colour is not itself a specific colour but, so to speak, a specific Reason-Principle : in the same way what gives an organism a certain bulk is not itself a thing of magnitude but is Magnitude itself, the abstract Absolute, or the Reason-Principle.

This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and beats the Matter out into Magnitude ?

Not at all : the Matter was not previously shrunken small : there was no littleness or bigness : the Idea gives Magnitude exactly as it gives every quality not previously present.

10. But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter ?

How do you form the concept of any absence of quality ? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case ?

The secret is Indetermination.

Likeness knows its like : the indeterminate knows the indeterminate.

Around this indefinite a definite conception will be realised, but the way lies through indefiniteness.

All knowledge comes by Reason and the Intellectual Act ; in this case Reason conveys information in any account it gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its failure : therefore (in this crippled approach) the representation of Matter must be spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up with the alien reason.

This is Plato's meaning where he says that Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning.

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul ? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn ?

No : the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it : so the Mind, putting aside all attributes per ceptible to sense — all that corresponds to light — comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination : it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darknesr, has become in some way identical with the object of its spurious vision.

There is vision, then, in this approach of the Mind towards Matter ?

Some vision, yes ; of shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unlit, and therefore of the sizeless. More than this would mean that the Soul is already bestowing Form.

But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever ?

No : in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience : but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the shapeless ; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds (i.e. as possessing with these forms a formless base) for they appear as things that have accepted colour and other quality.

It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two components ; it has a clear Knowledge or perception of the overlie (the Ideas) but only

a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an Ideal-Principle.

With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else : what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own ; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing.

And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw over it the thing-form ; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being.

ii. " But, given Magnitude and the properties we know, what else can be necessary to the existence of body ? '

Some base to be the container of all the rest.

" A certain mass then ; and if mass, then Magnitude ? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant. And suppose it sizeless ; then, what end does it serve ? It never helped Idea or quality ; now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude, though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to find its way into embodied entities by way of Matter."

" Or, taking a larger view, observe that actions, productive opera tions, periods of time, movements, none of these have any such sub stratum and yet are real things ; in the same way the most elementary body has no need of Matter ; things may be, all, what they are, each after its own kind, in their great variety, deriving the coherence of their being from the blending of the various Ideal-Forms. This Matter with its sizelessness seems, then, to be a name without a content."

Now, to begin with : extension is not an imperative condition of being a recipient ; it is necessary only where it happens to be a property inherent to the recipient's peculiar mode of being. The Soul, for example, contains all things but holds them all in an unextended unity ; if mag nitude were one of its attributes it would contain things in extension. \ Matter does actually contain in spatial extension what it takes in ; but

this is because itself is a potential recipient of spatial extension : animals and plants, in the same way, as they increase in size, take quality in parallel development with quantity, and they lose in the one as the other lessens.

No doubt in the case of things as we know them there is a certain mass lying ready beforehand to the shaping power : but that is no reason for expecting bulk in Matter strictly so called ; for in such cases Matter is not the absolute ; it is that of some definite object ; the Absolute Matter must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside itself.

A thing then need not have magnitude in order to receive form : it may receive mass with everything else that comes to it at the moment of becoming what it is to be : a phantasm of mass is enough, a primary aptness for extension, a magnitude of no content — whence the identifica tion that has been made of Matter with The Void.

But I prefer to use the word phantasm as hinting the indefiniteness into which the Soul spills itself when it seeks to communicate with Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it, neither encompassing it nor able to penetrate to any fixed point of it, either of which achievements would be an act of delimitation.

In other words we have something which is to be described not as small or great but as the great-and-small : for it is at once a mass and a thing without magnitude, in the sense that it is the Matter on which Mass is based and that, as it changes from great to small and small to great, it traverses magnitude. Its very undeterminateness is a mass in the same sense — that of being a recipient of Magnitude — though of course only in the visible object.

In the order of things without Mass, all that is Ideal-Principle possesses delimitation, each entity for itself, so that the conception of Mass has no place in them : Matter, not delimited, having in its own nature no stability, swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go here, there and everywhere, becQmes^^a, ..thing of multiplicity : driven into all shapes, becoming all things, it has that much~oTthe character of mass.

12. It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude : the Ideal-Forms of body are Ideas installed in Mass.

But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose them entering into Magnitude — and not into Matter — is to represent them as being either without Magnitude and without Real-Existence (and therefore undistinguishable from the Matter) or not Ideal-Forms (apt to body) but Reason-Principles (utterly removed) whose sphere could only be Soul ; at this, there would be no such thing as body (i.e. instead of Ideal-Forms shaping Matter and so producing body, there would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling remote in Soul.)

The multiplicity here must be based upon some unity which, since it has been brought to Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct from Magni tude. Matter is the base of Identity to all that is composite : once each of the constituents comes bringing its own Matter with it, there is no need of any other base. No doubt there must be a container, as it were a place, to receive what is to enter, but Matter and even body precede place and space ; the primal necessity, in order to the existence of body, is Matter.

There is no force in the suggestion that since production and act are immaterial, corporeal entities also must be immaterial.

Bodies are compound, actions not. Further, Matter does in some sense underlie action ; it supplies the substratum to the doer : it is permanently within him though it does not enter as a constituent into the act where, indeed, it would be a hindrance. Doubtless, one act does not change into another — as would be the case if there were a specific Matter of actions — but the doer directs himself from one act to another so that he is the Matter, himself, to his varying actions.

Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and, there fore, to body.

It is, thus, no name void of content ; we know there is such a base, invisible and without bulk though it be.

If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning reject qualities and

mass : for quality, or mass, or any such entity, taken by itself apart, might be said not to exist. But these do exist, though in an obscure existence : there is much less ground for rejecting Matter, however it lurk, discerned by none of the senses.

It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of colour : it is not heard, for it is no sound : it is no flavour or savour for nostrils or palate : can it, perhaps, be known to touch ? No : for neither is it corporeal ; and touch deals with body, which is known by being solid, fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry — all properties utterly lacking in Matter.

It is grasped only by a mental process, though that not an act of the intellective mind but a reasoning that finds no subject ; and so it stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called. No bodiliness belongs to it ; bodiliness is itself a phase of Reason-Principle and so is something different from Matter, as Matter, therefore, from it : bodiliness already operative and so to speak made concrete would be body manifest and not Matter unelaborated.

Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or quality present to all the elements in common ?

Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum.

The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there is neither base nor bulk ?

Again, if the quality possesses determination, it is not Matter the undetermined ; and anything without determination is not a quality but is the substratum — the very Matter we are seeking.

It may be suggested that perhaps this absence of quality means simply that, of its own nature, it has no participation in any of the set and familiar properties, but takes quality by this very non-participation, holding thus an absolutely individual character, marked off from every thing else, being as it were the negation of those others. Deprivation we will be told comports quality : a blind man has the quality of his lack of sight. If then — it will be urged — Matter exhibits such a negation,

surely it has a quality, all the more so, assuming any deprivation to be a quality, in that here the deprivation is all comprehensive.

But this notion reduces all existence to qualified things or qualities : Quantity itself becomes a Quality and so does even Existence. Now this cannot be : if such things as Quantity and Existence are qualified, they are, by that very fact, not qualities : Quality is an addition to them ; we must not commit the absurdity of giving the name Quality to something distinguishable from Quality, something therefore that is not Quality.

Is it suggested that its mere Alienism is a quality in Matter ?

If this Alienism is difference-absolute (the abstract entity) it possesses no Quality : absolute Quality cannot jbe itself a qualified thing.

If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself (since it is certainly not an absolute) but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so (not by themselves but) by virtue of Identicalness (the Absolute principle of Identity) .

An absence is neither a Quality nor a qualified entity ; it is the negation of a Quality or of something else, as noiselessness is the negation of noise and so on. A lack is negative ; Quality demands something positive. The distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the lack of qualification and of form ; surely then it is absurd to pretend that it has Quality in not being qualified ; that is like saying that sizelessness constitutes a certain size.

The distinctive character of Matter, then, is simply its manner of being — not something definite inserted in it but, rather a relation towards other things, the relation of being distinct from them.

Other things possess something besides this relation of Alienism : their form makes each an entity. Matter may with propriety be de scribed as merely alien ; perhaps, even, we might describe it as " The Aliens," for the singular suggests a certain definiteness while the plural would indicate the absence of any determination.

14- But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this

Privation is lodged ?

Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in reason from the other : that which defines Matter must be kept quite apart from that defining the Privation and vice versa.

There are three possibilities : Matter is not in Privation and Priva tion is not in Matter ; or each is in each ; or each is in itself alone.

Now if they should stand quite apart, neither calling for the other, they are two distinct things : Matter is something other than Privation even though Privation always goes with it : into the principle of the one, the other cannot enter even potentially.

If their relation to each other is that of a snubnose to snubness, here also there is a double concept ; we have two things.

If they stand to each other as fire to heat — heat in fire, but fire not included in the concept of heat — if Matter is Privation in the way in which fire is heat, then the Privation is a form under which Matter appears but there remains a base distinct from the Privation and this base must be the Matter. Here, too, they are not one thing.

Perhaps the identity in substance with differentiation in reason will be defended on the ground that Privation does not point to something present but precisely to an absence, to something absent, to the negation or lack of Real-being : the case would be like that of the affirmation of non-existence, where there is no real predication but simply a denial.

Is, then, this Privation simply a non-existence ?

If a non-existence in the sense that it is not a thing of Real-being, but belongs to some other Kind of existent, we have still two Principles, one referring directly to the substratum, the other merely exhibiting the relation of the Privation to other things (as their potentiality).

Or we might say that the one concept defines the relation of sub stratum to what is not substratum (but realised entity) while that of Privation, in bringing out the indeterminateness of Matter, applies to

the Matter in itself (and not in its relationships) : but this still makes Privation and Matter two in reason though one in substratum.

Now if Matter possesses an identity — though only the identity of being indeterminate, unfixed and without quality — how can we bring it so under two principles ?

The further question, therefore, is raised whether boundlessness and ^determination are things lodging in something other than them selves as a sort of attribute and whether Privation (or Negation of quality) is also an attribute residing in some separate substratum.

Now all that is Number and Reason-Principle is outside of bound lessness (is fully delimited) : these (Number and Reason) bestow bound and settlement and order in general upon all else : neither anything that has been brought under order nor any Order-Absolute (apart from themselves) is needed to bring them under order. The thing that has to be brought under order (e.g. Matter) is other than the Ordering Principle which is Limit and Definiteness and Reason-Principle. There fore, necessarily, the thing to be brought under order and to definiteness must be in itself a thing lacking delimitation.

Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order — like all that shares its nature by participation or by possessing the same principle — therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited (the Absolute, the " thing " Indefiniteness) and not merely the recipient of a non-essential quality of Indefiniteness entering as an attribute.

For, first, any attribute to any subject must be a Reason-Principle ; and Indefiniteness is not a Reason-Principle.

Secondly, what must a thing be to take Indefiniteness as an attribute? Obviously it must, beforehand, be either Definiteness (the Principle) or a defined thing. But Matter is neither.

Then again Indefiniteness entering as an attribute into the definite must cease to be indefinite : but (since Matter remains true to its Kind, i.e. is indefinite as long as it is Matter) Indefiniteness has not entered as an attribute into Matter : that is, Matter is essentially Indefiniteness.

The Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is the Indefinite, (the undelimited) ; it must be a thing generated by the undefined nature, the illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The One — an illimitableness, however, not possessing native existence There (not inherent) but engendered by The One.

But how can Matter be common to both spheres, be here and be There ?

Because even Indefiniteness has two phases.

But what difference can there be between phase and phase of In definiteness ?

The difference of archetype and image.

So that Matter here (as only an image of Indefiniteness) would be less indefinite ?

On the contrary, more indefinite as an Image-thing remote from true being. Indefiniteness is the greater in the less ordered object ; the less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The Indeterminate in the Intellectual Realm, where there is truer being, might almost be called merely an Image of Indefiniteness : in this lower Sphere where there is less Being, where there is a refusal of the Authentic, and an adoption of the Image-Kind, Indefiniteness is more authentically indefinite.

But this argument seems to make no difference between the indefinite object and Indefiniteness-essential. Is there none ?

In any object in which Reason and Matter co-exist we distinguish between Indeterminateness and the Indeterminate subject : but where Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we would say right out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not present; for it is a Reason-Principle and could not lodge in the indeterminate object without at once annulling the indeterminateness.

Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite of itself, by its natural opposition to Reason-Principle. Reason is Reason and nothing else ; just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to Reason, is Indeter minateness and nothing else.

16. Then Matter is simply Alienism (the Principle of Difference) ?

No : it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are Reason-Principles. So under stood, this non-existent has a certain measure of existence ; for it is identical with Privation, which also is a thing standing in opposition to the things that exist in Reason.

But must not Privation cease to have existence, when what has been lacking is present at last ?

By no means : the recipient of a state or character is not a state but the (negation or) Privation of the state ; and that into which deter mination enters is neither a determined object nor determination itself, but simply the wholly or partly undetermined.

Still, must not the nature of this Undetermined be annulled by the entry of Determination, especially where (as in Matter) this is no mere attribute (but the very nature of the recipient) ?

No doubt to introduce quantitative determination into an undeter mined object would annul the original state ; but in the particular case, the introduction of determination only confirms the original state, bring ing it into actuality, into full effect, as sowing brings out the natural quality of land or as a female organism impregnated by the male is not defeminised but becomes more decidedly of its sex ; the thing becomes more emphatically itself.

But on this reasoning must not Matter owe its evil to having in some degree participated in good ?

No : its evil is in its first lack : it was not a possessor (as the land or the female organism are, of some specific character) .

To lack one thing and to possess another, in something like equal proportions, is to hold a middle state of good and evil : but whatsoever (like this substratum) possesses nothing and so is in destitution — and especially what is essentially destitution — must be evil in its own Kind.

For in Matter we have no mere absence of means or of strength ; it is utter destitution — of sense, of virtue, of beauty, of pattern, of Ideal

principle, of quality. This is surely ugliness, utter disgracefulness, unredeemed evil.

The Matter in the Intellectual Realm is an Existent, for there is nothing previous to it except the Beyond-Existence ; but what precedes the Matter of this sphere is Existence ; by its alienism in regard to the beauty and good of Existence, Matter is therefore a non-existent.

Ennead II, Treatise 5

i. A distinction is made between things existing actually and things existing potentially ; a certain Actuality, also, is spoken of as a really existent entity. We must consider what content there is in these terms.

Can we distinguish between Actuality (an absolute, abstract Prin ciple) and the state of being-in-act ? And if there is such an Actuality, is this itself in Act, or are the two quite distinct so that this actually existent thing need not be, itself, an Act ?

It is indubitable that Potentiality exists in the Realm of Sense : but does the Intellectual Realm similarly include the potential or only the actual ? and if the potential exists there, does it remain merely potential for ever ? And, if so, is this resistance to actualisation due to its being precluded (as a member of the Divine or Intellectual world) from time-processes ?

First we must make clear what potentiality is.

We cannot think of potentiality as standing by itself ; there can be no potentiality apart from something which a given thing may be or become. Thus bronze is the potentiality of a statue : but if nothing could be made out of the bronze, nothing wrought upon it, if it could never be anything as a future to what it has been, if it rejected all change, it would be bronze and nothing else : its own character it holds already as a present thing, and that would be the full of its capacity : it would be destitute of potentiality. Whatsoever has a potentiality mu I first

have a (definite) character of its own ; and its potentiality will consist in its having a reach beyond that character to some other.

Sometimes after it has turned its potentiality into actuality it will remain what it was ; sometimes it will sink itself to the fullest extent in the new form and itself disappear : these two different modes are exemplified in (i) bronze as potentially a statue and (2) water (= primalliquid) as potentially bronze or, again, air as potentially fire.

But if this be the significance of potentiality, may we describe it as a Power towards the thing that is to be ? Is the Bronze a power towards a statue ?

Not in the sense of an effectively productive force : such a power could not be called a potentiality. Of course Potentiality may be a power, as, for instance, when we are referring not merely to a thing which may be brought into actualisation but to Actuality itself (the Principle or Abstract in which potentiality and the power of realising potentiality may be thought of as identical) : but it is better, as more conducive to clarity, to use " Potentiality " in regard to the process of Actualisation and " Power " in regard to the Principle, Actuality.

Potentiality may be thought of as a Substratum to states and shapes and forms which are to be received, which it welcomes by its nature and even strives for — sometimes in gain but sometimes, also, to loss, to the annulling of some distinctive manner of Being already actually achieved.

2. Then the question rises whether Matter — potentially what it becomes by receiving shape — is actually something else or whether it has no actuality at all. In general terms : When a potentiality has taken a definite form, does it retain its being ? Is the potentiality, itself, in actualisation ? The alternative is that, when we speak of the " Actual Statue " and of the " Potential Statue," the Actuality is not predicated of the same subject as the " Potentiality." If we have really two different subjects, then the potential does not really become the actual : all that happens is that an actual entity takes the place of a potential.

The actualised entity is not the Matter (the Potentiality, merely) but a combination, including the Form-Idea upon the Matter.

This is certainly the case when a quite different thing results from the actualisation — the statue, for example, the combination, is distinctly different from the bronze, the base ; where the resultant is something quite new, the Potentiality has clearly not, itself, become what is now actualised. But take the case where a person with a capacity for educa tion becomes in fact educated : is not potentiality, here, identical with actualisation ? Is not the potentially wise Socrates the same man as the Socrates actually wise ?

But is an ignorant man a being of knowledge because he is so potentially ? Is he, in virtue of his non-essential ignorance, potentially an instructed being ?

It is not because of his accidental ignorance that he is a being of Knowledge : it is because, ignorant though he be by accident, his mind, apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through which he may become so. Thus, in the case of the potentially instructed who have become so in fact, the potentiality is taken up into the actual ; or, if we prefer to put it so, there is on the one side the potentiality while, on the other, there is the power in actual possession of the form.

If, then, the Potentiality is the Substratum while the thing in actuali sation — the Statue for example — is a combination, how are we to describe the form that has entered the bronze ?

There will be nothing unsound in describing this shape, this Form which has brought the entity from potentiality to actuality, as the actualisation ; but of course as the actualisation of the definite particular entity, not as Actuality the abstract : we must not confuse it with the other actualisation, strictly so called, that which is contrasted with the power producing actualisation. The potential is led out into realisation by something other than itself ; power accomplishes, of itself, what is within its scope, but by virtue of Actuality (the abstract) : the relation is that existing between a temperament and its expression in act, between courage and courageous conduct. So far so good : —

3- We come now to the purpose of all this discussion ; to make clear in what sense or to what degree Actualisation is predicable in the Intel lectual Realm and whether all is in Actualisation there, each and every member of that realm being an Act, or whether Potentiality also has place there.

Now : if there is no Matter there to harbour potentiality : if nothing there has any future apart from its actual mode : if nothing there generates, whether by changes or in the permanence of its identity ; if nothing goes outside of itself to give being to what is other than itself ; then, potentiality has no place there : the Beings there possess actuality as belonging to eternity, not to time.

Those, however, who (with us) assert Matter in the Intellectual Realm will be asked whether the existence of that Matter does not imply the potential there too ; for even if Matter there exists hi another mode than here, every Being there will have its Matter, its form and the union of the two (and therefore the potential, separable from the actual). What answer is to be made ?

Simply, that even the Matter there is Idea, just as the Soul, an Idea, is Matter to another (a higher) Being.

But relatively to that higher, the Soul is a potentiality ?

No : for the Idea (to which it is Matter) is integral to the Soul and does not look to a future ; the distinction between the Soul and its Idea is purely mental : the Idea and the Matter it includes are conceived as a conjunction but are essentially one Kind : remember that Aristotle makes his Fifth Body immaterial.

But surely Potentiality exists in the Soul ? Surely the Soul is potentially the living-being of this world before it has become so ? Is it not potentially musical, and everything else that it has not been and becomes ? Does not this imply potentiality even in the Intellectual Existences ?

No : the Soul is not potentially these things ; it is a Power towards them.

But after what mode does Actualisation exist in the Intellectual Realm ?

Is it the Actualisation of a statue, where the combination is realised because the Form-Idea has mastered each separate constituent of the total?

No : it is that every constituent there is a Form-Idea and, thus, is perfect in its Being.

There is in the Intellectual Principle no progression from some power capable of intellection to the Actuality of intellection : such a progression would send us in search of a Prior Principle not progressing from Power to Act ; there all stands ever realised. Potentiality requires an intervention from outside itself to bring it to the actualisation which otherwise cannot be ; but what possesses, of itself, identity unchangeable for ever is an actualisation : all the Firsts then are actualisations, simply because eternally and of themselves they possess all that is necessary to their completion.

This applies equally to the Soul, not to that in Matter but to that in the Intellectual Sphere ; and even that in Matter, the Soul of Growth, is an actualisation in its difference ; it possesses actually (and not, like material things, merely in image) the Being that belongs to it.

Then, everything, in the intellectual is in actualisation and so all There is Actuality ?

Why not ? If that Nature is rightly said to be " Sleepless," and to be Life and the noblest mode of Life, the noblest Activities must be there ; all then is actualisation there, everything is an Actuality, for every thing is a Life, and all Place there is the Place of Life, in the true sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the Intellectual Principle.

4- Now, in general anything that has a potentiality is actually some thing else, and this potentiality of the future mode of being is an existing mode.

But what we think of as Matter, what we assert to be the poten tiality of all things, cannot be said to be actually any one being among beings : if it were of itself any definite being, it could not be potentially all.

If, then, it is not among existences, it must necessarily be without existence.

How, therefore, can it be actually anything ?

The answer is that while Matter can not be any of the things which are founded upon it, it may quite well be something else, admitting that all existences are not rooted in Matter.

But once more, if it is excluded from the entities founded upon it and all these are Beings, it must itself be a Non-Being.

It is, further, by definition, formless and therefore not an Idea : it cannot then be classed among things of the Intellectual Realm, and so is, once more, a Non-Being. Falling, as regards both worlds, under Non-Being, it is all the more decidedly the Non-Being.

It has eluded the Nature of the Authentic Existences ; it has even failed to come up with the things to which a spurious existence can be attributed — for it is not even a phantasm of Reason as these are — how is it possible to include it under any mode of Being ?

And if it falls under no mode of Being, what can it actually be ?

5- How can we talk of it ? How can it be the Matter of real things ?

It is talked of, and it serves, precisely, as a Potentiality.

And, as being a Potentiality, it is not of the order of the thing it is to become : its existence is no more than an announcement of a future, as it were a thrust forward to what is to come into existence.

As Potentiality then, it is not any definite thing but the potentiality of everything: being nothing in itself— beyond what being Matter amounts to — it is not in actualisation. For if it were actually something, that actualised something would not be Matter, or at least not Matter out and out, but merely Matter in the limited sense in which bronze is the matter of the statue.

And its Non-Being must be no mere difference from Being.

Motion, for example, is different from Being, but plays about it, springing from it and living within it : Matter is, so to speak, the out-2 D

cast of Being, it is utterly removed, irredeemably what it was from the beginning : in origin it was Non-Being and so it remains.

Nor are we to imagine that, standing away at the very beginning from the universal circle of Beings, it was thus necessarily an active Something or that it became a Something. It has never been able to annex for itself even a visible outline from all the forms under which it has sought to creep : it has always pursued something other than itself ; it was never more than a Potentiality towards its next : where all the circle of Being ends, there only is it manifest ; discerned underneath things produced after it, it is remoter (from Real-Being) even than they.

Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order of Being, it can be no actualisation of either : all that is allowed to it is to be a Potentiality, a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing incapable of a Shape of its own.

Its actuality is that of being a phantasm, the actuality of being a falsity ; and the false in actualisation is the veritably false, which again is Authentic Non-Existence.

So that Matter, as the Actualisation of Non-Being, is ail the more decidedly Non-Being, is Authentic Non-Existence.

Thus, since the very reality of its Nature is situated in Non-Being, it is in no degree the Actualisation of any definite Being.

If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an Actualisation, for then it would not be the stray from Authentic Being which it is, the thing having its Being in Non-Beingness : for, note, in the case of things whose Being is a falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away what Being they have, and if we introduce actualisation into things whose Being and Essence is Potentiality, we destroy the foundation of their nature since their Being is Potentiality.

If Matter is to be kept as the unchanging substratum, we must keep it as Matter : that means — does it not ? — that we must define it as a Potentiality and nothing more — or refute these considerations.

Ennead II, Treatise 6

i. Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct ; must we not envisage Being as the substance stripped of all else, while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others — Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference — so that these are the specific constituents of Reality ?

The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which Being, Movement, and so on are separate constituents.

Now Movement has Being (not essentially but) as an accident and therefore should have Reality as an accident ; or is it something serving to the completion of Reality ?

No : Movement is a Reality ; everything in the Supreme is a Reality.

Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally, in this sphere ?

In the Supreme there is Reality because all things are one ; ours is the sphere of images whose separation produces grades of difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are present undistinguishably ; there is no separation of head and hand : their distinct existence begins in the life here, whose content is image, not Authentic Existence.

And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic Realm to be explained in the same way ? Are they differing Realities centred in one Reality or gathered round Being — differences which constitute Realities distinct from each other within the common fact of Reality ?

This is sound enough ; but it does not apply to all the qualities of this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are differentiations of Realitysuch as the quality of two-footedness or four-footedness — but others are not such differentiations of Reality and, because they are not so, must be called qualities and nothing more.

On the other hand, one and the same thing may be sometimes a differentiation of Reality and sometimes not — a differentiation when it

is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some other thing, where it is not a constitutive element but an accidental. The distinction may be seen in the (constitutive) whiteness of a swan or of ceruse and the whiteness which in a man is an accidental.

Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-Form of the thing it is a constitutive element and not a quality ; where it is a superficial appearance it is a quality.

In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think of a qualification that is of the very substance of the thing, something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying that is nothing more (not constituting but simply) giving some particular character to the real thing ; in this second case the qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it ; the Reality has existed fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which — whether in soul or body — merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing.

But what if (the superficial appearance such as) the visible white ness in ceruse is constitutive ? In the swan the whiteness is not con stitutive since a swan need not be white : it is constitutive in ceruse, just as warmth is constitutive of the Reality, fire.

No doubt we may be told that the Reality in fire is (not warmth but) fieriness and in ceruse an analogous abstraction : yet the fact remains that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is constitutive and in the ceruse whiteness.

Thus the same entities (warmness, whiteness and fieriness) are represented at once as being not qualities but constituents of Reality and not constituents but qualities.

Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical thing — (warmth, whiteness or the like) changed its own nature according to whether it is present as a constituent or as an accidental.

The truth is that while the Reason-Principles producing these entities contain nothing but what is of the nature of Reality, yet only in the Intellectual Realm do the produced things possess real existence : here they are not real ; they are qualified.

And this is the starting-point of an error we constantly make : in our enquiries into things we let realities escape us and fasten on what is mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the obser vation 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 (not so much by being produced as) 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 perf ectionment 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 (not essentially but) 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 a Quality (and not therefore a Reality) ?

No, the Form is not a Quality : it is a Reason-Principle.

And the outcome of this Reason-Principle entering into the under lying 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 estab lished, 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 (by which human beings take the quality of being instructed, etc.).

Thus : Quality is a condition superadded to a Reality whose exist ence 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, so that there are two forms of Quality, the moveable and the fixed.

3- The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being is, clearly, to be classed

not as a quality but as an activity — the act of a power which can make white ; and similarly what we think of as qualities in the Intellectual Realm should be known as activities ; they are activities which to our minds take the appearance of quality from the fact that, differing in character among themselves, each of them is a particularity which, so to speak, distinguishes those Realities from each other.

What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from that here, if both are Acts ?

The difference is that these (" Quality-Activities ") in the Supreme do not indicate the very nature of the Reality (as do the corresponding Activities here) nor do they indicate variations of substance or of (essen tial) character ; they merely indicate what we think of as Quality but in the Intellectual Realm must still be Activity.

In other words this thing, considered in its aspect as possessing the characteristic property of Reality is by that alone recognised as no mere Quality. But when our reason separates what is distinctive in these (" Quality- Activities ") — not in the sense of abolishing them but rather as taking them to itself and making something new of them— this new something is Quality : reason has, so to speak, appropriated a portion of Reality, that portion manifest to it on the surface.

By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant of the specific nature of fire, may very well be no quality in fire but an Idea-Form belonging to it, one of its activities, while being merely a Quality in other things than fire : as it is manifested in any warm object, it is not a mode of Reality but merely a trace, a shadow, an image, something that has gone forth

from its own Reality — where it was an Act — and in the warm object is a quality.

All, then, that is accident and not Act ; all but what is Idea-form of the Reality ; all that merely confers pattern ; all this is Quality : quali ties are characteristics and modes other than those constituting the substratum of a thing.

But the Archetypes of all such qualities, the foundation in which they exist primarily, these are (not qualities but) Activities of the In tellectual Beings.

And ; one and the same thing cannot be both Quality and nonquality : the thing void of Real-Existence is Quality ; but the thing accompanying Reality is either Form or Activity : there is no longer self-identity when, from having its being in itself, anything comes to be in something else with a fall from its standing as Form and Activity.

Finally, anything which is never Form but always accidental to something else is Quality unmixed and nothing more.

Ennead II, Treatise 7

i. Some enquiry must be made into what is known as the complete transfusion of material substances.

Is it possible that fluid be blended with fluid in such a way that each penetrate the other through and through ? or — a difference of no import ance if any such penetration occurs — that one of them pass completely through the other ?

Those that admit only contact need not detain us. They are dealing with mixture, not with the coalescence which makes the total a thing of like parts, each minutest particle being composed of all the combined elements.

But there are those who, admitting coalescence, confine it to the qualities : to them the material substances of two bodies are in contact

merely, but in this contact of the matter they find footing for the qualities of each.

Their view is plausible because it rejects the notion of total admixture and because it recognises that the masses of the mixing bodies must be whittled away if there is to be mixture without any gap, if, that is to say, each substance must be divided within itself through and through for complete interpenetration with the other. Their theory is confirmed by the cases in which two mixed substances occupy a greater space than either singly, especially a space equal to the conjoined extent of each : for, as they point out, in an absolute interpenetration the infusion of the one into the other would leave the occupied space exactly what it was before and, where the space occupied is not increased by the juxta position, they explain that some expulsion of air has made room for the incoming substance. They ask further, how a minor quantity of one substance can be spread out so as to interpenetrate (speck by speck or drop by drop) a maj or quantity of another. In fact they have a multitude of arguments.

Those, on the other hand, that accept " complete transfusion," might object that it does not require the reduction of the mixed things to frag ments, a certain cleavage being sufficient : thus, for instance, sweat does not split up the body or even pierce holes in it. And if it is answered that this may well be a special decree of Nature to allow of the sweat exuding, there is the case of those manufactured articles, slender but without puncture, in which we can see a liquid 'wetting them through and through so that it runs down from the upper to the under surface. How can this fact be explained, since both the liquid and the solid are bodily substances ? Interpenetration without disintegration is difficult to conceive, and if there is such mutual disintegration the two must obviously destroy each other.

When they urge that often there is a mixing without augmentation their adversaries can counter at once with the exit of air.

When there is an increase in the space occupied, nothing refutes the explanation — however unsatisfying — that this is a necessary con sequence of two bodies bringing to a common stock their magnitude

equally with their other attributes : size is as permanent as any other property ; and, exactly as from the blending of qualities there results a new form of thing, the combination of the two, so we find a new mag nitude ; the blending gives us a magnitude representing each of the two. But at this point the others will answer, " If you mean that substance lies side by side with substance and mass with mass, each carrying its quantum of magnitude, you are at one with us : if there were complete transfusion, one substance sinking its original magnitude in the other, we would have no longer the case of two lines joined end to end by their terminal points and thus producing an increased extension ; we would have line superimposed upon line with, therefore, no increase."

But a lesser quantity permeates the entire extent of a larger ; the smallest is sunk in the greatest ; transfusion is exhibited unmistakeably. In certain cases it is possible to pretend that there is no total penetration but there are manifest examples leaving no room for the pretence. In what they say of the spreading out of masses they cannot be thought very plausible ; the extension would have to be considerable indeed in the case of a very small quantity (to be in true mixture with a very large mass) ; for they do not suggest any such extension by change as that of water into air.

2. This, however, raises a problem deserving investigation in itself : what has happened when a definite magnitude of water becomes air, and how do we explain the increase of volume ? But for the present we must be content with the matter thus far discussed out of all the varied controversy accumulated on either side.

It remains for us to make out on our own account the true explana tion of the phenomenon of mixing, without regard to the agreement or disagreement of that theory with any of the current opinions mentioned.

When water runs through wool or when papyrus-pulp gives up its moisture why is not the moist content expressed to the very last drop or even, without question of outflow, how can we possibly think that in a mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is contact

and that only the qualities are fused ? The pulp is not merely in touch with water outside it or even in its pores ; it is wet through and through so that every particle of its matter is drenched in that quality. Now if the matter is soaked all through with the quality, then the water is every where in the pulp.

" Not the water ; the quality of the water."

But then, where is the water ? and (if only a quality has entered) why is there a change of volume ? The pulp has been expanded by the addition : that is to say it has received magnitude from the incoming substance — but if it has received the magnitude, magnitude has been added ; and a magnitude added has not been absorbed ; therefore the combined matter must occupy two several places. And as the two mixing substances communicate quality and receive matter in mutual give and take so they may give and take magnitude. Indeed when a quality meets another quality it suffers some change ; it is mixed, and by that admixture it is no longer pure and therefore no longer itself but a blunter thing, whereas magnitude joining magnitude retains its full strength.

But let it be understood how we came to say that body passing through and through another body must produce disintegration, while we make qualities pervade their substances without producing disin tegration : the bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter, too, is bodiless : it may, then, be supposed that as Matter pervades everything so the bodiless qualities associated with it — as long as they are fewhave the power of penetration without disintegration. Anything solid would be stopped either in virtue of the fact that a solid has the precise quality which forbids it to penetrate or in that the mere coexistence of too many qualities in Matter (constitutes density and so) produces the same inhibition.

If, tnen, what we call a dense body is so by reason of the presence of many qualities, that plenitude of qualities will be the cause (of the inhibition) .

If on the other hand density is itself a quality like what they call corporeity, then the cause will be that particular quality.

This would mean that the qualities of two substances do not bring about the mixing by merely being qualities but by being apt to mixture ; nor does Matter refuse to enter into a mixing as Matter but as being associated with a quality repugnant to mixture ; and this all the more since it has no magnitude of its own but only does not reject magnitude.

3- We have thus covered our main ground, but since corporeity has been mentioned, we must consider its nature : is it the conjunction of all the qualities or is it an Idea, or Reason-Principle, whose presence in Matter constitutes a body ?

Now if body is the compound, the thing made up of all the required qualities plus Matter, then corporeity is nothing more than their con junction.

And if it is a Reason-Principle, one whose incoming constitutes the body, then clearly this Principle contains embraced within itself all the qualities. If this Reason-Principle is to be no mere principle of definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body : thus the body will be Matter associated with an indwelling Reason-Principle which will be in itself immaterial, pure Idea, even though irremoveably attached to the body. It is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man — treated elsewhere — which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual Principle.

Ennead II, Treatise 8

i. Seen from a distance, objects appear reduced and close together, however far apart they be: within easy range, their sizes and the distances that separate them are observed correctly.

Distant objects show in this reduction because they must be drawn

together for vision and the light must be concentrated to suit the size of the pupil ; besides, as we are placed further and further away from the material mass under observation, it is more and more the bare form that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude as of all other quality.

Or it may be that we appreciate the magnitude of an object by observing the salience and recession of its several parts, so that to perceive its true size we must have it close at hand.

Or again, it may be that magnitude is known incidentally (as a deduction) from the observation of colour. With an object at hand we know how much space is covered by the colour ; at a distance, only that something is coloured, for the parts, quantitatively distinct among themselves, do not give us the precise knowledge of that quantity, the colours themselves reaching us only in a blurred impression.

What wonder, then, if size be like sound — reduced when the form reaches us but faintly — for in sound the hearing is concerned only about the form ; magnitude is not discerned except incidentally.

Well, in hearing magnitude is known incidentally ; but how ? Touch conveys a direct impression of a visible object ; what gives us the same direct impression of an object of hearing ?

The magnitude of a sound is known not by actual quantity but by degree of impact, by intensity — and this in no indirect knowledge ; the ear appreciates a certain degree of force, exactly as the palate perceives by no indirect knowledge, a certain degree of sweetness. But the true magnitude of a sound is its extension ; this the hearing may define to itself incidentally by deduction from the degree of intensity but not to the point of precision. The intensity is merely the definite effect at a particular spot ; the magnitude is a matter of totality, the sum of space occupied.

Still (it will be objected) the colours seen from a distance are faint ; but they are not small as the masses are.

True ; but there is the common fact of diminution. There is colour with its diminution, faintness ; there is magnitude with its diminution, smallness ; and magnitude follows colour diminishing stage by stage with it.

But, the phenomenon is more easily explained by the example of things of wide variety. Take mountains dotted with houses, woods and other land-marks ; the observation of each detail gives us the means of calculating, by the single objects noted, the total extent covered : but, where no such detail of form reaches us, our vision, which deals with detail, has not the means towards the knowledge of the whole by measurement of any one clearly discerned magnitude. This applies even to objects of vision close at hand : where there is variety and the eye sweeps over all at one glance so that the forms are not all caught, the total appears the less in proportion to the detail which has escaped the eye ; observe each single point and then you can estimate the volume precisely. Again, magnitudes of one colour and unbroken form trick the sense of quantity : the vision can no longer estimate by the particular ; it slips away, not finding the stand-by of the difference between part and part.

It was the detail that prevented a near object deceiving our sense of magnitude : in the case of the distant object, because the eye does not pass stage by stage through the stretch of intervening space so as to note its forms, therefore it cannot report the magnitude of that space.

2. The explanation by lesser angle of vision has been elsewhere dis missed ; one point, however, we may urge here.

Those attributing the reduced appearance to the lesser angle occupied allow by their very theory that the unoccupied portion of the eye still sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of vision, if only air-space.

Now consider some very large object of vision, that mountain for example. No part of the eye is unoccupied ; the mountain adequately fills it so that it can take in nothing beyond, for the mountain as seen either corresponds exactly to the eye-space or stretches away out of range to right and to left. How does the explanation by lesser angle of vision hold good in this case, where the object still appears smaller, far, than it is and yet occupies the eye entire ? ;

Or look up to the sky and no hesitation can remain. Of course we cannot take in the entire hemisphere at one glance ; the eye directed to it could not cover so vast an expanse. But suppose the possibility : the entire eye, then, embraces the hemisphere entire ; but the expanse of the heavens is far greater than it appears ; how can its appearing far less than it is be explained by a lessening of the angle of vision ?

Ennead II, Treatise 9

I. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal — for the secondary can never be simplex — that it contains nothing : that it is an integral Unity.

Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we know as The One. Just as the goodness of The Good is essential and not the outgrowth of some prior substance so the Unity of The One is its essential.

Therefore : —

When we speak of The One and when we speak of The Good we must recognise an Identical Nature ; we must affirm that they are the same — not, it is true, as venturing any predication with regard to that (un knowable) Hypostasis but simply as indicating it to ourselves in the best terms we find.

Even in calling it The First we mean no more than to express that it is the most absolutely simplex : it is the Self-Sufficing only in the sense that it is not of that compound nature which would make it dependent upon any constituent ; it is " the Self-Contained " because everything contained in something alien must also exist by that alien.

Deriving then, from nothing alien, entering into nothing alien, in no way a made-up thing, there can be nothing above it.

We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles ; this— the One and the Good— is our First, next to it follows the Intellectual Principle, the Primal Thinker, and upon this follows Soul. Such is the order in nature. The Intellectual Realm allows no more than these and no fewer.

Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold the identity of either Intellectual-Principle and Soul or of Intellectual-Principle and The First ; but we have abundantly shown that these are distinct.

It remains for us to consider whether there are more than these Three.

Now what other (Divine) Kinds could there be ? No Principles of the universe could be found at once simpler and more transcendent than this whose existence we have affirmed and described.

They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the Principle in Act by a Principle in Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of im material beings whose existence is in Act — even in lower forms no such division can be made — and we cannot conceive a duality in the Intellec tual-Principle, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual Principle as con trasted with its movement or utterance ? What would the quiescence of the one phase be as against the energy of the other ?

No : the Intellectual-Principle is continuously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement— towards it or within it— we are in the realm of the Soul's operation : such act is a Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle to stand between the

two.

Nor are we warranted in affirming a plurality of Intellectual Prin ciples on the ground that there is one that knows and thinks and another knowing that it knows and thinks. For whatever distinction be possible in the Divine between its Intellectual Act and its Consciousness of that Act, still all must be one projection 'not unaware of its own operation : it would be absurd to imagine any such unconsciousness in the Authentic Intelligence ; the knowing principle must be one and the selfsame with that which knows of the knowing.

The contrary supposition would give us two beings, one that merely '( knows, and another — a separate being — that knows of the act of knowing.

If we are answered that the distinction is merely a process of our thought, then, at once, the theory of a plurality in the Divine Hypostasis is abandoned : further, the question is opened whether our thought can entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as not to know that it knows — a limitation which would be charged as imbecility even in ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force are always master of our emotions and mental processes.

No : The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself ; the object of the thought is nothing external : Thinker and Thought are one ; there fore in its thinking and knowing it possesses itself, observes itself and sees itself not as something unconscious but as knowing : in this Primal Knowing it must include, as one and the same Act, the knowledge of the knowing ; and even the logical distinction mentioned above cannot be made in the case of the Divine ; the very eternity of its self-thinking precludes any such separation between that intellective act and the consciousness of the act.

The absurdity becomes still more blatant if we introduce yet a ' further distinction — after that which affirms the knowledge of the know ing, a third distinction affirming the knowing of the knowledge of the knowing : yet there is no reason against carrying on the division for ever and ever.

To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate : the Soul then would possess not the Reason-Principle but an image of it : the Soul could not know the Intellectual-Principle ; it could have no intellection.

2. Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals : we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects.

We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is con cerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one nature in graded powers ; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent ; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty — the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part — thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its con templation of the things above it.

For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it com municates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.

3- Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it

to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive body within range.

Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope : given powers that have no limitation and are never cut off from the Authentic Existences, how imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them ?

It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another : without this communication, The Good would not be Good, nor the Intellectual- Principle an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul itself be what it is : the law is, " some life after the Primal Life, a second where

there is a first ; all linked in one unbroken chain ; all eternal ; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary."

In other words, things commonly described as generated have never known a beginning : all has been and will be. Nor can anything dis appear unless where a later form is possible : without such a future there can be no dissolution.

If we are told that there is always Matter as a possible term, we ask why then should not Matter itself come to nothingness. If we are told it may, then we ask why it should ever have been generated. If the answer comes that it had its necessary place as the ultimate of the series, we return that the necessity still holds.

With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the Divine Beings are not everywhere but in some bounded place, walled off, so to speak ; if that is not possible, Matter itself must receive the Divine light (and so cannot be annihilated).

4- To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place ? If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing : if at some one moment, why not before that ?

We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consist only in its forgetting the Divine : but if it forgot, how could it create ? Whence does it create but from the things it knew in the Divine ? If it creates from the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in some dim inter mediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline : any inclination would be towards its Prior, in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire could it have than to retrace the way ?

What could it have been planning to gain by world-creating ? Glory ? That would be absurd — a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our earth.

Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power — how explain the making of this universe ?

And when will it destroy the work ? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for ? If it has not yet repented, then it will never repent : it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it with the passing of time.

Can it be waiting for certain souls still here ? Long since would these have ceased returning for such re-birth, having known in former life the evils of this sphere ; long since would they have foreborne to come.

Nor may we grant that this world is of unhappy origin because there are many jarring things in it. Such a judgement would rate it too high, treating it as the same with the Intelligible Realm and not merely its reflection.

And yet — what reflection of that world could be conceived more beautiful than this of ours ? What fire could be a nobler reflection of the fire there than the fire we know here ? Or what other earth than this could have been modelled after that earth ? And what globe more minutely perfect than this, or more admirably ordered in its course could have been conceived in the image of the self-centred circling of the World of Intelligibles ? And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere, if it is to be more splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be.

5- Still more unreasonably : —

There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder, to change ; they deny that it is any wiser than we, the late born, hindered by so many cheats on the way towards truth.

Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine ; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though

these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls — yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is to die.

Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul which they piece together from the elements.

How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the elements ? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold or an intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.

Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four elements together when (by the hypothesis) it is a later thing and rises from them ? And this element-soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest — what can we think ?

Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation and this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth is the Reason-Form (the Logos) of our world. Why should they desire to live in the archetype of a world abhorrent to them ?

Then again, what is the origin of that pattern world ? It would appear, from the theory, that the Maker had already declined towards the things of this sphere before that pattern came into being.

Now let us suppose the Maker craving to construct such an Inter mediate World — though what motive could He have ? — in addition to the Intellectual world which He eternally possesses. If He made the mid-world first, what end was it to serve ?

To be a dwelling-place for Souls ?

How then did they ever fall from it ? It exists in vain.

If He made it later than this world — abstracting the formal-idea of this world and leaving the Matter out — the Souls that have come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced enough to keep them from entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls exhibit the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is there distinctive in the teaching ?

6. And, what are we to think of the new forms of being they introduce — their " Exiles " and " Impressions " and " Repentings " ?

If all comes to states of the Soul — " Repentance " when it has under gone a change of purpose ; " Impressions " when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but their simulacra — there is nothing here but a jargon invented to make a case for their school : all this terminology is piled up only to conceal their debt to the ancient Greek philosophy which taught, clearly and without bombast, the ascent from the cave and the gradual advance of souls to a truer and truer vision.

For, in sum, a part of their doctrine comes from Plato ; all the novelties through which they seek to establish a philosophy of their own have been picked up outside of the truth.

From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body ; as for the plurality they assert in the Intellectual Realm — the Authentic Existent, the Intellectual-Prin ciple, the Second Creator and the Soul — all this is taken over from the Timaeus, where we read :—

" As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved should be contained in this All."

Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself all that has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe — though often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Prin ciple — and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato.

They are in fact quite outside of the truth in their identification of the Creator.

In every way they misrepresent Plato's theory as to the method of creation as in many other respects they dishonour his teaching : they, we are to understand, have penetrated the Intellectual Nature, while Plato and all those other illustrious teachers have failed.

They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences ; but in reality this multi plication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind : their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis — which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature — and to recognise Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system — an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul's need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt : wher.e they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks : where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly ; they must point their minds towards the truth and not hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past.

As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity : it is easy also to identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties — how for example, where they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruc tion, how they cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial beings.

7- That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever

as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul.

But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city.

We must recognise how different is the governance exercised by the All-Soul ; the relation is not the same : it is not in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We (the human Soul) lies under fetter ; and this in a second limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it grasps.

But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound : it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering ; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset (as the Body), necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle (as the Soul), and does not com municate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life : thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still ; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world ; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned.

The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single, separate forms of life : there, the established rule commanding to per manence is sovereign ; here things are like deserters kept to their own place and duty by a double bond ; there is no outlet from the All, and therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to

bounds : all remains where from the beginning the Soul's nature appointed.

The natural movement within the plan will be injurious to anything whose natural tendency it opposes : one group will sweep bravely onward with the great total to which it is adapted ; the others, not able to comply with the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral is moving to its concerted plan ; midway in the march, a tortoise is intercepted ; unable to get away from the choral line it is trampled under foot ; but if it could only range itself within the greater movement it too would suffer nothing.

8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. The question, also, implies a begin ning in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act of a changeful Being who turns from this to that.

Those that so think must be instructed — if they would but bear with correction — in the nature of the Supernals, and brought to desist from that blasphemy of majestic powers which comes so easily to them, where all should be reverent scruple.

Even in the administration of the Universe there is no ground for such attack, for it affords manifest proof of the greatness of the Intellectual Kind.

This All that has emerged into life is no amorphous structure — like those lesser forms within it which are born night and day out of the lavishness of its vitality — the Universe is a life organised, effective, complex, all-comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom. How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear image, beautifully formed, of the Intellectual Divinities ? No doubt it is copy, not original ; but that is its very nature ; it cannot be at once symbol and reality. But to say that it is an inadequate copy is false ; nothing has been left out which a beautiful representation within the physical order could include.

Such a reproduction there must necessarily be — though not by deliberation and contrivance — for the Intellectual could not be the last

of things, but must have a double Act, one within itself and one out going ; there must, then, be something later than the Divine ; for only the thing with which all power ends fails to pass downwards something of itself. In the Supreme there flourishes a marvellous vigour and there fore it produces.

Since there is no Universe nobler than this, is it not clear what this must be ? A representation carrying down the features of the Intellectual Realm is necessary ; there is no other Kosmos than this ; therefore this is such a representation.

This earth of ours is full of varied life-forms and of immortal beings ; to the very heavens it is crowded. And the stars, those of the upper and the under spheres, moving in their ordered path, fellow travellers with the universe, how can they be less than gods ? Surely they must be morally good : what could prevent them ? All that occasions vice here below is unknown there — no evil of body, perturbed and perturbing.

Knowledge, too ; in their unbroken peace, what hinders them from the intellectual grasp of the God-Head and the Intellectual Gods ? What can be imagined to give us a wisdom higher than belongs to the Supernals ? Could anyone, not fallen to utter folly, bear with such an idea ?

Admitting that human Souls have descended under constraint of the All-Soul, are we to think the constrained the nobler ? Among Souls, what commands must be higher than what obeys. And if the coming was unconstrained, why find fault with a world you have chosen and can quit if you dislike it ?

And further, if the order of this Universe is such that we are able, within it, to practise wisdom and to live our earthly course by the Supernal, does not that prove it a dependency of the Divine ?

9- Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities of that order are made

ground of complaint. But this is to ignore that the Sage demands no equality in such matters : he cannot think that to own many things is to be richer or that the powerful have the better of the simple ; he leaves

all such preoccupations to another kind of man. He has learned that life on earth has two distinct forms, the way of the Sage and the way of the mass, the Sage intent upon the sublimest, upon the realm above, while those of the more strictly human type fall, again, under two classes, the one reminiscent of virtue and therefore not without touch with good, the other mere populace, serving to provide necessaries to the better sort.

But what of murder ? What of the feebleness that brings men under slavery to the passions ?

Is it any wonder that there should be failing and error, not hi the highest, the intellectual, Principle but in Souls that are like undeveloped children ? And is not life justified even so if it is a training ground with its victors and its vanquished ?

You are wronged ; need that trouble an immortal ? You are put to death ; you have attained your desire. And from the moment your citizenship of the world becomes irksome you are not bound to it.

Our adversaries do not deny that even here there is a system of law and penalty : and surely we cannot in justice blame a dominion which awards to every one his due, where virtue has its honour, and vice comes to its fitting shame, in which there are not merely representations of the gods, but the gods themselves, watchers from above, and — as we read — easily rebutting human reproaches, since they lead all things in order from a beginning to an end, allotting to each human being, as life follows life, a fortune shaped to all that has preceded — the destiny which, to those that do not penetrate it, becomes the matter of boorish insolence upon things divine.

A man's one task is to strive towards making himself perfectthough not in the idea — really fatal to perfection — that to be perfect is possible to himself alone.

We must recognise that other men have attained the heights of goodness ; we must admit the goodness of the celestial spirits, and above all of the gods — those whose presence is here but their contempla tion in the Supreme, and loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the most blessed Soul. Rising still higher, we hymn the divinities of the Intellectual Sphere, and, above all these, the mighty King of that dominion, whose majesty is made patent in the very multitude of the gods.

It is not by crushing the divine unto a unity but by displaying its exuberance — as the Supreme himself has displayed it — that we show knowledge of the might of God, who, abidingly what He is, yet creates that multitude, all dependent on Him, existing by Him and from Him.

This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks to Him — the Universe as a whole and every God within it — and tells of Him to men, all alike revealing the plan and will of the Supreme.

These, in the nature of things, cannot be what He is, but that does not justify you in contempt of them, in pushing yourself forward as not inferior to them.

The more perfect the man, the more compliant he is, even towards his fellows; we must temper our importance, not thrusting insolently beyond what our nature warrants ; we must allow other beings, also, their place in the presence of the Godhead ; we may not set ourselves alone next aiter the First in a dream-flight which deprives us of our power of attaining identity with the Godhead in the measure possible to the human Soul, that is to say, to the point of likeness to which the Intel lectual-Principle leads us ; to exalt ourselves above the Intellectual-Principle is to fall from it.

Yet imbeciles are found to accept such teaching at the mere sound of the words " You yourself are to be nobler than all else, nobler than men, nobler than even gods." Human audacity is very great : a man once modest, restrained and simple hears, " You, yourself, are the child of God ; those men whom you used to venerate, those beings whose worship they inherit from antiquity, none of these are His children ; you without lifting hand are nobler than the very heavens " ; others take up the cry : the issue will be much as if in a crowd all equally ignorant of figures, one man were told that he stands a thousand cubic feet ; he will naturally accept his thousand cubits even though the others present are said to measure only five cubits ; he will merely tell himself that the thousand indicates a considerable figure.

Another point :— (you hold that) God has care for you ; how then can He be indifferent to the entire Universe in which you exist ?

We may be told that He is too much occupied to look upon the Universe, and that it would not be right for Him to do so ; yet when He looks down and upon these people, is He not looking outside Himself and upon the Universe in which they exist ? If He cannot look outside Himself so as to survey the Kosmos, then neither does He look upon them.

But they have no need of Him ?

The Universe has need of Him, and He knows its ordering and its indwellers and how far they belong to it and how far to the Supreme, and which of the men upon it are friends of God, mildly acquiescing with the Kosmic dispensation when in the total course of things some pain must be brought to them — for we are to look not to the single will of any man but to the universe entire, regarding every one according to worth but not stopping for such things where all that may is hastening onward.

Not one only kind of being is bent upon this quest, which brings bliss to whatsoever achieves, and earns for the others a future destiny in accord with their power. No man, therefore, may flatter himself that he alone is competent ; a pretension is not a possession ; many boast though fully conscious of their lack and many imagine themselves to possess what was never theirs and even to be alone in possessing what they alone of men never had.

10. Under detailed investigation, many other tenets of this school — indeed we might say all — could be corrected with an abundance of proof. But I am withheld by regard for some of our own friends who fell in with this doctrine before joining our circle and, strangely, still cling to it.

The school, no doubt, is free-spoken enough — whether in the set

purpose of giving its opinions a plausible colour of verity or in honest belief

—but we are addressing here our own acquaintances, not those people

with whom we could make no way. We have spoken in the hope of

preventing our friends from being perturbed by a party which brings,

not proof — how could it ? — but arbitrary, tyrannical assertion ; another style of address would be applicable to such as have the audacity to flout the noble and true doctrines of the august teachers of antiquity.

That method we will not apply ; anyone that has fully grasped the preceding discussion will know how to meet every point in the system.

Only one other tenet of theirs will be mentioned before passing the matter ; it is one which surpasses all the rest in sheer folly, if that is the word.

They first maintain that the Soul and a certain " Wisdom " (Sophia) declined and entered this lower sphere — though they leave us in doubt of whether the movement originated in Soul or in this Sophia of theirs, or whether the two are the same to them — then they tell us that the other Souls came down in the descent and that these members of Sophia took to themselves bodies, human bodies, for example.

Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which was the occasion of descent to the others is declared not to have descended. " It knew no decline," but merely illuminated the darkness in such a way that an image of it was formed upon the Matter. Then, they shape an image of that image somewhere below — through the medium of Matter or of Materiality or whatever else of many names they choose to give it in their frequent change of terms, invented to darken their doctrine — and so they bring into being what they call the Creator or Demiurge, then this lower is severed from his Mother (Sophia) and becomes the author of the Kosmos down to the latest of the succession of images constituting it.

Such is the blasphemy of one of their writers.

Now, in the first place, if the Soul has not actually come down but has illuminated the darkness, how can it truly be said to have declined ? The outflow from it of something in the nature of light does not justify the assertion of its decline ; for that, it must make an actual movement towards the object lying in the lower realm and illuminate it by contact.

If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its own place and illuminates the lower without directing any act towards that end, why should it

alone be the illuminant ? Why should not the Kosmos draw light also from the yet greater powers contained in the total of existence ?

Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a Universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it, why do not that illumination and the creating of the world take place simultaneously ? Why must the Soul wait till the representations of the plan be made actual ?

Then again this Plan — the " Far Country " of their terminologybrought into being, as they hold, by the greater powers, could not have been the occasion of decline to the creators.

Further, how explain that under this illumination the Matter of the Kosmos produces images of the order of Soul instead of mere bodilynature ? An image of Soul could not demand darkness or Matter, but wherever formed it would exhibit the character of the producing element and remain in close union with it.

Next, is this image a real-being, or, as they say, an Intellection ?

If it is a reality, in what way does it differ from its original ? By being a distinct form of the Soul ? But then, since the original is the reasoning Soul, this secondary form must be the vegetative and genera tive Soul ; and then, what becomes of the theory that it is produced for glory's sake, what becomes of the creation in arrogance and selfassertion ? The theory puts an end also to creation by representation and, still more decidedly, to any thinking in the act ; and what need is left for a creator creating by way of Matter and Image ?

If it is an Intellection, then we ask first What justifies the name ? and next, How does anything come into being unless the Soul give this Intellection creative power and how, after all, can creative power reside in a created thing ? Are we to be told that it is a question (not so much of creation as) of a first Image followed by a second ?

But this is quite arbitrary.

And why is fire the first creation ?

12. And how 'does this image set to its task immediately after it comes into being ?

By memory of what it has seen ?

But it was utterly non-existent, it could have no vision, either it or the Mother they bestow upon it.

Another difficulty : These people (tell us that they) come upon earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable Souls ; yet, by great stress and strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and when they do attain Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight recollection of the Sphere they once knew : on the other hand, this Image, a new-comer into being, is able, they tell us — as also is its Mother — to form at least some dim representation of the celestial world. It is an Image, stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the Supreme and adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements serve the purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire before anything else ? What made it judge fire a better first than some other object ?

Again, if it created the fire of the Universe by thinking of fire, why did it not make the Universe at a stroke by thinking of the Universe ? It must have conceived the product complete from the first ; the con stituent elements would be embraced in that general conception.

The creation must have been in all respects more according to the way of Nature than to that of the arts— for the arts are of later origin than Nature and the Universe, and even at the present stage the partial things brought into being by the natural Kinds do not follow any such order— first fire, then the several other elements, then the various blends of these— on the contrary the living organism entire is encompassed and rounded off within the uterine germ. Why should not the material of the Universe be similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type in which earth, fire and the rest would be included ? We can only suppose that these people themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul, would have produced the world by such a process, but that the Creator had not wit

And yet to conceive the vast span of the Heavens— to be great in that degree— to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the circling path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this earth of ours— and all in

such a way that reason can be given for the plan — this could never be the work of an Image ; it tells of that Power (the All-Soul) next to the very Highest Beings.

Against their will, they themselves admit this : their " outshining upon the darkness," if the doctrine is sifted, makes it impossible to deny the true origins of the Kosmos.

Why should this down-shining take place unless such a process belonged to a universal law ?

Either the process is in the order of Nature or against that order. If it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place from eternity ; if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of natural right exists in the Supreme also ; evil antedates this world ; the cause of evil is not the world ; on the contrary the Supreme is the evil to us ; instead of the Soul's harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed by the Soul.

In fine, the theory amounts to making the world one of the Primals, and with it the Matter from which it emerges.

The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and illuminated the already existent Darkness. Now whence came that Darkness ?

If they tell us that the Soul created the Darkness by its Decline, then, obviously, there was nowhere for the Soul to decline to ; the cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the very nature of the Soul. The theory, therefore, refers the entire process to pre-existing compul sions : the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings.

Those, then, that censure the constitution of the Kosmos do not understand what they are doing or where this audacity leads them. They do not understand that there is a successive order of Primals, Secondaries, Tertiaries and so on continuously to the Ultimates ; that nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First ; that we can but accept, meekly, the constitution of the total, and make our best way towards the Primals, withdrawing from the tragic spectacle, as they see it, of the Kosmic spheres — which in reality are all suave graciousness.

And what, after all, is there so terrible in these Spheres with which it is sought to frighten people unaccustomed to thinking, never trained in an instructive and coherent gnosis ?

Even the fact that their material frame is of fire does not make them dreadful ; their Movements are in keeping with the All and with the Earth : but what we must consider in them is the Soul, that on which these people base their own title to honour.

And, yet, again, their material frames are pre-eminent in vastness and beauty, as they co-operate in act and in influence with the entire order of Nature, and can never cease to exist as long as the Primals stand ; they enter into the completion of the All of which they are major parts.

If men rank highly among other living Beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is not to play the tyrant but to serve towards beauty and order. The action attributed to them must be understood as a foretelling of coming events, while the causing of all the variety is due, in part to diverse destinies — for there cannot be one lot for the entire body of men — in part to the birth moment, in part to wide divergencies of place, in part to states of the Souls.

Once more, we have no right to ask that ail men shall be good, or to rush into censure because such universal virtue is not possible : this would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the Supreme and treating evil as a nearly negligeable failure in wisdom — as good lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous fading out : it would be like calling the Nature-Principle evil because it is not Sense-Perception and the thing of sense evil for not being a Reason- Principle. If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to admit evil in the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its Superior.

In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the in violability of the Supreme.

. In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the

Supernal Beings — not merely the Soul but even the Transcendents— they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations in the idea that these Powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from any of us who is in some degree trained to use the appropriate forms in the appropriate way — certain melodies, certain sounds, specially directed breathings, sibilant cries, and all else to which is ascribed magic potency upon the Supreme. Perhaps they would repudiate any such intention : still they must explain how these things act upon the unembodied : they do not see that the power they attribute to their own words is so much taken away from the majesty of the divine.

They tell us they can free themselves of diseases.

If they meant, by temperate living and an appropriate regime, they would be right and in accordance with all sound knowledge. But they assert diseases to be Spirit-Beings and boast of being able to expel them by formula : this pretension may enhance their importance with the crowd, gaping upon the powers of magicians ; but they can never per suade the intelligent that disease arises otherwise than from such causes as overstrain, excess, deficiency, putrid decay, in a word some variation whether from within or from without.

The nature of illness is indicated by its very cure. A motion, a medi cine, the letting of blood, and the disease shifts down and away ; some times scantiness of nourishment restores the system : presumably the Spiritual power gets hungry or is debilitated by the purge. Either this Spirit makes a hasty exit or it remains within. If it stays, how does the disease disappear, with the cause still present ? If it quits the place, what has driven it out ? Has anything happened to it ? Are we to sup pose it throve on the disease ? In that case the disease existed as some thing distinct from the Spirit-Power. Then again, if it steps in where no cause of sickness exists, why should there be anything else but illness ? If there must be such a cause, the Spirit is unnecessary : that cause is sufficient to produce that fever. As for the notion, that just when the cause presents itself, the watchful Spirit leaps to incorporate itself with it, this is simply amusing.

But the manner and motive of their teaching have been sufficiently

exhibited ; and this was the main purpose of the discussion here upon their Spirit-Powers. I leave it to yourselves to read the books and examine the rest of the doctrine : you will note all through how our form of philosophy inculcates simplicity of character and honest thinking in addition to all other good qualities, how it cultivates reverence and not arrogant self-assertion, how its boldness is balanced by reason, by careful proof, by cautious progression, by the utmost circumspection — and you will compare those other systems to one proceeding by this method. You will find that the tenets of their school have been huddled together under a very different plan : they do not deserve any further examination here.

There is, however, one matter which we must on no account overlook —the effect of these teachings upon the hearers led by them into despising the world and all that is in it.

There are two theories as to the attainment of the End of life. The one proposes pleasure, bodily pleasure, as the term ; the other pro nounces for good and virtue, the desire of which comes from God and moves, by ways to be studied elsewhere, towards God.

Epicurus denies a Providence and recommends pleasure and its enjoyment, all that is left to us : but the doctrine under discussion is still more wanton ; it carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence ; it scorns every law known to us ; immemorial virtue and all restraint it makes into a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth ; it cuts at the root of all orderly living, and of the righteousness which, innate in the moral sense, is made perfect by thought and by self-discipline : all that would give us a noble human being is gone. What is left for them— except where the pupil by his own character betters the teaching — comes to pleasure, self-seeking, the grudge of any share with one's fellows, the pursuit of advantage.

Their error is that they know nothing good here : all they care for is something else to which they will at some future time apply themselves : yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must be the startingpoint of the pursuit : arrived here from out of the divine nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly correction. The under standing of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning the delight of the body, and those that have no part in well-doing can make no step towards the Supernal.

This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of virtue : any discussion of such matters is missing utterly : we are not told what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears ; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients ; we do not learn what constitutes it or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For to say ' Look to God " is not helpful without some instruction as to what this looking imports : it might very well be said that one can " look " and still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave of impulse, repeating the word God but held in the grip of every passion and making no effort to master any. Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked with thought, occupying a Soul makes God manifest : God on the lips without a good conduct of life, is a word.

16. On the other hand, to despise this Sphere, and the Gods within it or anything else that is lovely, is not the way to goodness.

Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods ; and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other respects not wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the very fact.

Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes an inconsistency ; " Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of the beloved ; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father ; but in the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours ; for how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in it to stand apart ?

But of this matter we have treated elsewhere : here we urge that

where there is contempt for the Kin of the Supreme the knowledge of the Supreme itself is merely verbal.

What sort of piety can make Providence stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit whatsoever to it ?

And what consistency is there in this school when they proceed to assert that Providence cares for them, though for them alone ?

And is this Providence over them to be understood of their existence in that other world only or of their lives here as well ? If in the other world, how came they to this ? If in this world, why are they not already raised from it ?

Again, how can they deny that the Lord of Providence is here ? How else can He know either that they are here, or that in their sojourn here they have not forgotten Him and fallen away ? And if He is aware of the goodness of some, He must know of the wickedness of others, to distinguish good from bad. That means that He is present to all, is, by whatever mode, within this Universe. The Universe, therefore, must be participant in Him.

If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves, and you can have nothing to tell about Him or about the powers that come after Him.

But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world beyond — making any concession to your liking — it remains none the less certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not deserted and will not be : a Providence watching entires is even more likely than one over fragments only ; and similarly, Participation is more perfect in the case of the All-Soul — as is shown, further, by the very existence of things and the wisdom manifest in their existence. Of those that advance these wild pretensions, who is so well ordered, so wise, as the Universe ? The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place ; to make it, except as a help towards truth, would be impiety.

The very question can be entertained by no intelligent being but only by one so blind, so utterly devoid of perception and thought, so far from any vision of the Intellectual Universe as not even to see this world of our own.

For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony in sensible sounds ? What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences and principles of order observed in visible things ? Consider, even, the case of pictures : those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way ; they are deeply stirred by recog nising in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth — the very experi ence out of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense — this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display — no one could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither fathomed this world nor had any vision of that other.

Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to their reading of Plato who inveighs against body as a grave hindrance to Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be characteristically the inferior.

Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the Universe and study all that still remains.

They will think of the Intellectual Sphere which includes within itself the Ideal-Form realised in the Kosmos. They will think of the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce incorporeal magnitude and lead the Intelligible out towards spatial extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its magnitude, as adequate a representation as possible of the principle void of parts which is its model — the greatness of power there being translated here into greatness of bulk. Then whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere (the All-Soul) as already in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds it through and

through, beginning and middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer governance : either approach will lead to a true appreciation of the Soul that conducts this Universe.

Now let them set body within it — not in the sense that Soul suffers any change but that, since " In the Gods there can be no grudging," it gives to its inferior all that any partial thing has strength to receive — and at once their conception of the Kosmos must be revised ; they cannot deny that the Soul of the Kosmos has exercised such a weight of power as to have brought the corporeal-principle, in itself unlovely, to partake of good and beauty to the utmost of its receptivity — and to a pitch which stirs Souls, beings of the divine order.

These people may no doubt say that they themselves feel no such stirring, and that they see no difference between beautiful and ugly forms of body ; but, at that, they can make no distinction between the ugly and the beautiful in conduct ; sciences can have no beauty ; there can be none in thought ; and none, therefore, in God. This world descends from the Firsts : if this world has no beauty, neither has its Source ; springing thence, this world, too, must have its beautiful things. And while they proclaim their contempt for earthly beauty, they would do well to ignore that of youths and women so as not to be overcome by incontinence.

In fine, we must consider that their self-satisfaction could not turn upon a contempt for anything indisputably base ; theirs is the perverse pride of despising what was once admired.

We must always keep in mind that the beauty in a partial thing cannot be identical with that in a whole ; nor can any several objects be as stately as the total.

And we must recognise, that even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials — forms whose beauty must fill us with veneration for their creator and con vince us of their origin in the divine, forms which show how ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme since they cannot hold us but we must, though in all admiration, leave these for those. Further, wherever there

is interior beauty, we may be sure that inner and outer correspond; where the interior is vile, all is brought low by that flaw in the dominants.

Nothing base within can be beautiful without — at least not with an authentic beauty, for there are examples of a good exterior not sprung from a beauty dominant within ; people passing as handsome but essentially base have that, a spurious and superficial beauty : if anyone tells me he has seen people really fine-looking but interiorly vile, I can only deny it ; we have here simply a false notion of personal beauty ; unless, indeed, the inner vileness were an accident in a nature essentially fine ; in this Sphere there are many obstacles to selfrealisation.

In any case the All is beautiful, and there can be no obstacle to its inner goodness : where the nature of a thing does not comport perfection from the beginning, there may be a failure in complete expression ; there may even be a fall to vileness, but the All never knew a childlike immaturity ; it never experienced a progress bringing novelty into it ; it never had bodily growth : there was nowhere from whence it could take such increment ; it was always the All-Container.

And even for its Soul no one could imagine any such a path of pro cess : or, if this were conceded, certainly it could not be towards evil.

18. But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the Soul down in it.

In other words : two people inhabit the one stately house ; one of them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less maintains his residence in it ; the other makes no complaint, asserts the entire competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it, having no further need of a house : the malcontent imagines himself to be the wiser and to be the readier to leave because he has learned to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and timber and that the place falls far short of a true home ; he

does not see that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with necessity — assuming that his conduct, his grumbling, does not cover a secret admiration for the beauty of those same " stones." As long as we have bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of labourless creation.

Or would this school reject the word Sister ? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers ; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos ? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile ; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock ; there is nothing that can affect it : but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength.

Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies : when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend ; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the Principle of their Being.

This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to them selves, but they are not any the nearer to vision by the claim — or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for ever to the ordering of the Heavens, can never stand outside the material universe, they them selves have their freedom in their death. This is a failure to grasp the very notion of " standing outside," a failure to appreciate the mode in which the All-Soul cares for the unensouled.

No : it is possible to go free of love for the body ; to be clean-living, to disregard death ; to know the Highest and aim at that other world ;

not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others who are able for it and faithful to it ; and not to err with those that deny vital motion to the stars because to our sense they stand still — the error which in another form leads this school to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature, only because they do not see the Star-Soul in outer manifestation.