Plotinus ENNEADS - THE FOURTH ENNEAD Complete

Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.

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» Contents of this Ennead

THE FOURTH ENNEAD:   1) ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL,   2) ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL II,   3) PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL,   4) PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL II,   5) PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL III - “ON SIGHT”,   6) PERCEPTION AND MEMORY,   7) THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL,   8) THE SOUL’S DESCENT INTO BODY,   9) ARE ALL SOULS ONE?

129 pages - You are on Page 46

Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the sensitive and representative soul; it draws upon the Reason-Principle immediately above itself; downward, it is in contact with an inferior of its own: on this analogy the uppermost member of the living being was taken by the ancients to be obviously its seat; they lodged it in the brain, or not exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which is the medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the brain. They saw that something must be definitely allocated to body — at the point most receptive of the act of reason — while something, utterly isolated from body must be in contact with that superior thing which is a form of soul [and not merely of the vegetative or other quasi-corporeal forms but] of that soul apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle.

Such a linking there must be, since in perception there is some element of judging, in representation something intuitional, and since impulse and appetite derive from representation and reason. The reasoning faculty, therefore, is present where these experiences occur, present not as in a place but in the fact that what is there draws upon it. As regards perception we have already explained in what sense it is local.

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to birth and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these functions. Blood — subtle, light, swift, pure — is the vehicle most apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its well-spring, the place where such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature.

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