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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 11
7. It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing-Principle alleged to interweave everything with everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon — a Principle which, acting through seminal Reason-Forms — Logoi Spermatikoi — elaborates all that exists and happens.
The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the Universe the source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without or — supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards personal act — within ourselves.
But it is the theory of the most rigid and universal Necessity: all the causative forces enter into the system, and so every several phenomenon rises necessarily; where nothing escapes Destiny, nothing has power to check or to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it were, from one general cause leave us no resource but to go where they drive. All our ideas will be determined by a chain of previous causes; our doings will be determined by those ideas; personal action becomes a mere word. That we are the agents does not save our freedom when our action is prescribed by those causes; we have precisely what belongs to everything that lives, to infants guided by blind impulses, to lunatics; all these act; why, even fire acts; there is act in everything that follows the plan of its being, servilely.
No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate: unable to halt at such a determinant principle, we seek for other explanations of our action.
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/plotinus/enneads-3.asp?pg=11
