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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 118
The essential existence of generated things seems to lie in their existing from the time of their generation to the ultimate of time after which they cease to be: but such an existence is compact of futurity, and the annulment of that futurity means the stopping of the life and therefore of the essential existence.
Such a stoppage would be true, also, of the [generated] All in so far as it is a thing of process and change: for this reason it keeps hastening towards its future, dreading to rest, seeking to draw Being to itself by a perpetual variety of production and action and by its circling in a sort of ambition after Essential Existence.
And here we have, incidentally, lighted upon the cause of the Circuit of the All; it is a movement which seeks perpetuity by way of futurity.
The Primals, on the contrary, in their state of blessedness have no such aspiration towards anything to come: they are the whole, now; what life may be thought of as their due, they possess entire; they, therefore, seek nothing, since there is nothing future to them, nothing external to them in which any futurity could find lodgement.
Thus the perfect and all-comprehensive essence of the Authentic Existent does not consist merely in the completeness inherent in its members; its essence includes, further, its established immunity from all lack with the exclusion, also, of all that is without Being — for not only must all things be contained in the All and Whole, but it can contain nothing that is, or was ever, non-existent — and this State and Nature of the Authentic Existent is Eternity: in our very word, Eternity means Ever-Being.
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/plotinus/enneads-3.asp?pg=118
