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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
Plotinus Resources OnLine and in Print
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» Contents of this Ennead
128 pages - You are on Page 101
“Receptacle” and “nurse”; then it “retains its identity; it is not subject to modification. Similarly if it is” [as again we read] “the ground on which individual things appear and disappear,” and so, too, if it is a “place, a base.” Where Plato describes and identifies it as “a ground to the ideas” he is not attributing any state to it; he is probing after its distinctive manner of being.
And what is that?
This which we think of as a Nature-Kind cannot be included among Existents but must utterly rebel from the Essence of Real Beings and be therefore wholly something other than they — for they are Reason-Principles and possess Authentic Existence — it must inevitably, by virtue of that difference, retain its integrity to the point of being permanently closed against them and, more, of rejecting close participation in any image of them.
Only on these terms can it be completely different: once it took any Idea to hearth and home, it would become a new thing, for it would cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the receptacle of absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a ceaseless coming into it and going out from it, itself must be unmoved and immune in all the come and go. The entrant Idea will enter as an image, the untrue entering the untruth.
But, at least, in a true entry?
No: How could there be a true entry into that which, by being falsity, is banned from ever touching truth?
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/plotinus/enneads-3.asp?pg=101
