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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 80
18. To pass to the consideration of beauty:
If by beauty we mean the primary Beauty, the same or similar arguments will apply here as to goodness: and if the beauty in the Ideal-Form is, as it were, an effulgence [from that primary Beauty], we may observe that it is not identical in all participants and that an effulgence is necessarily a posterior.
If we mean the beauty which identifies itself with Substance, this has been covered in our treatment of Substance.
If, again, we mean beauty in relation to ourselves as spectators in whom it produces a certain experience, this Act [of production] is Motion — and none the less Motion by being directed towards Absolute Beauty.
Knowledge again, is Motion originating in the self; it is the observation of Being — an Act, not a State: hence it too falls under Motion, or perhaps more suitably under Stability, or even under both; if under both, knowledge must be thought of as a complex, and if a complex, is posterior.
Intelligence, since it connotes intelligent Being and comprises the total of existence, cannot be one of the genera: the true Intelligence [or Intellect] is Being taken with all its concomitants [with the other four genera]; it is actually the sum of all the Existents: Being on the contrary, stripped of its concomitants, may be counted as a genus and held to an element in Intelligence.
Justice and self-control [sophrosyne], and virtue in general — these are all various Acts of Intelligence: they are consequently not primary genera; they are posterior to a genus, that is to say, they are species.
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