Plotinus ENNEADS - THE THIRD ENNEAD, Part II, Complete

Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.

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» Contents of this Ennead

THE THIRD ENNEAD:   1) FATE,   2) ON PROVIDENCE,   3) ON PROVIDENCE II,   4) OUR TUTELARY SPIRIT,   5) ON LOVE,   6) THE IMPASSIVITY OF THE UNEMBODIED,   7) TIME AND ETERNITY,   8) NATURE CONTEMPLATION AND THE ONE,   9) DETACHED CONSIDERATIONS

II: 42 pages - You are on Page 40

(C) When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously, observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to have that intellection.

We know, and it is ourselves that we know; therefore we know the reality of a knowing nature: therefore, before that intellection in Act, there is another intellection, one at rest, so to speak.

Similarly, that self-intellection is an act upon a reality and upon a life; therefore, before the Life and Real-Being concerned in the intellection, there must be another Being and Life. In a word, intellection is vested in the activities themselves: since, then, the activities of self-intellection are intellective-forms, We, the Authentic We, are the Intelligibles and self-intellection conveys the Image of the Intellectual Sphere.

(D) The Primal is a potentiality of Movement and of Repose — and so is above and beyond both — its next subsequent has rest and movement about the Primal. Now this subsequent is the Intellectual-Principle — so characterized by having intellection of something not identical with itself whereas the Primal is without intellection. A knowing principle has duality [that entailed by being the knower of something) and, moreover, it knows itself as deficient since its virtue consists in this knowing and not in its own bare Being.

(E) In the case of everything which has developed from possibility to actuality the actual is that which remains self-identical for its entire duration — and this it is which makes perfection possible even in things of the corporeal order, as for instance in fire but the actual of this kind cannot be everlasting since [by the fact of their having once existed only in potentiality] Matter has its place in them. In anything, on the contrary, not composite [= never touched by Matter or potentiality] and possessing actuality, that actual existence is eternal . . . There is, however, the case, also in which a thing, itself existing in actuality, stands as potentiality to some other form of Being.

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