Plotinus ENNEADS - THE SIXTH ENNEAD Complete

Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.

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THE SIXTH ENNEAD:   1) ON THE KINDS OF BEING,   2) ON THE KINDS OF BEING ΙΙ,   3) ON THE KINDS OF BEING ΙΙΙ,   4) ON THE INTEGRAL OMNIPRESENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENT,   5) ON THE INTEGRAL OMNIPRESENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENT ΙΙ,   6) ON NUMBERS,   7) HOW THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE IDEAL-FORMS CAME INTO BEING: AND UPON THE GOOD,   8) ON FREE-WILL AND THE WILL OF THE ONE,   9) ON THE GOOD, OR THE ONE

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7. But Matter, it may be contended, is the source of existence to the Sensible things implanted in it. From what source, then, we retort, does Matter itself derive existence and being?

That Matter is not a Primary we have established elsewhere. If it be urged that other things can have no subsistence without being implanted in Matter, we admit the claim for Sensible things. But though Matter be prior to these, it is not thereby precluded from being posterior to many things-posterior, in fact, to all the beings of the Intellectual sphere. Its existence is but a pale reflection, and less complete than that of the things implanted in it. These are Reason-Principles and more directly derived from Being: Matter has of itself no Reason-Principle whatever; it is but a shadow of a Principle, a vain attempt to achieve a Principle.

But, our critic may pursue, Matter gives existence to the things implanted in it, just as Socrates gives existence to the whiteness implanted in himself? We reply that the higher being gives existence to the lower, the lower to the higher never.

But once concede that Form is higher in the scale of Being than Matter, and Matter can no longer be regarded as a common ground of both, nor Substance as a genus embracing Matter, Form and the Couplement. True, these will have many common properties, to which we have already referred, but their being [or existence] will nonetheless be different. When a higher being comes into contact with a lower, the lower, though first in the natural order, is yet posterior in the scale of Reality: consequently, if Being does not belong in equal degrees to Matter, to Form and to the Couplement, Substance can no longer be common to all three in the sense of being their genus: to their posteriors it will bear a still different relation, serving them as a common base by being bound up with all alike. Substance, thus, resembles life, dim here, clearer there, or portraits of which one is an outline, another more minutely worked. By measuring Being by its dim manifestation and neglecting a fuller revelation elsewhere, we may come to regard this dim existence as a common ground.

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