Plotinus ENNEADS - THE FIRST ENNEAD Complete

Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.

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» Contents of this Ennead

THE FIRST ENNEAD:   1) THE ANIMATE AND THE MAN,   2) ON VIRTUE,   3) ON DIALECTIC - THE UPWARD WAY,   4) ON TRUE HAPPINESS,   5) HAPPINESS AND EXTENSION OF TIME,   6) BEAUTY,   7) ON THE PRIMAL GOOD AND SECONDARY FORMS OF GOOD - “ON HAPPINESS”,   8) ON THE NATURE AND SOURCE OF EVIL,   9) “THE REASONED DISMISSAL”

106 pages - You are on Page 10

7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul’s presence.

This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body.

No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate.

But the “We”? How have We Sense-Perception?

By the fact that We are not separate from the Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler elements go to make up the entire many-sided nature of Man.

The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other [of that in the Soul] which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms.

And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We: before this there was only the “Ours”; but at this stage stands the WE [the authentic Human-Principle] loftily presiding over the Animate.

There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be described as the Animate or Living-Being — mingled in a lower phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from all that is kin to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this “We” that reasons, in that the use and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the Soul.

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