Plotinus
PLOTINUS  Macroknow Library
   

   
The Enneads.

". . . [T]he distribution of evil to the opposite classes of men: the good go bare while the wicked are rich: all that human need demands, the least deserving have in abundance; it is they that rule . . ."1a OLD TESTAMENT

"No one can ever escape the suffering entailed by ill deeds done: the divine law is ineluctable, carrying bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom."1b

"We cannot . . . refer all that exists to Reason-Principle inherent in the seed of things (spermatic Reasons); the universe is to be traced further back, to the more primal forces, to the principles by which that seed itself takes shape. . ."1c LEIBNIZ

". . . [T]he Primals (the first 'Categories') are seen to be: Intellectual-Principle; Existence: Difference; Identity; we must include also Motion and Rest: Motion provides for the intellectual act, Rest preserves identity as Difference gives at once a Knower and a Known, for, failing this, all is one, and silent."1d 352

"The Platonic Parmenides is more exact; the distinction is made between the Primal One, a strictly pure Unity, and a secondary One which is a One-Many and a third which is a One-and-Many; thus he too in accordance with our thesis of the Three Kinds."1e PIERCE

". . . In the assertion 'I am this particular thing', either the 'particular thing' is distinct from the assertor -- and there is a false statement -- or it is included within it, and, at once, multiplicity is asserted: otherwise the assertion is 'I am what I am', or 'I am I'."1f DESCARTES

"Consciousness . . . is a conperception, an act exercised upon a manifold: and even intellection . . . implies that the agent turns back upon itself, upon a manifold, then. If that agent says no more than 'I am a being', it speaks (by the implied dualism) as a discoverer of the extern; and rightly so, for being is a manifold . . ."1g HEGEL

"But Soul is not in the universe, on the contrary the universe is in the Soul; bodily substance is not a place to the Soul; Soul is contained in Intellectual-Principle and is the container of body. The Intellectual-Principle in turn is contained in something else; but that prior principle has nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in nothing, and, therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where but in the First?"1h

"As in Soul (principle of Life) so in Divine Mind (principle of Idea) there is this infinitude of recurring generative powers . . ."1i KANT

" . . . [I]ntellect, to act at all, must inevitably comport difference with identity; otherwise it could not distinguish itself from its object by standing apart from it, nor could it ever be aware of the realm of things whose existence demands otherness, nor could there be so much as a duality."1j HEGEL


  
   

* Italics in the original.

1 Plotinus (AD 204-270). The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Abridged with an Introduction and Notes by John Dillon. London, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1991. (First published by the Medici Society, 1917-1930.).
THE THIRD ENNEAD
a SECOND. Providence: First Treatise, at 143.
THE FOURTH ENNEAD

b THIRD. Problems of the Soul (I), at 277.
c FOURTH, Problems of the Soul (II), at 326.

THE FIFTH ENNEAD

d FIRST. The Three Initial Hypostases, at 352.
e Ibid., at 357.
f THIRD. The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent, at 376.
g Ibid., at 380.
h FIFTH. That the Intellectual Beings are not Outside the Intellectual-Principle: and on The Nature of the Good, at 401.
i SEVENTH. Is there an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?, at 409.

THE SIXTH ENNEAD

j SEVENTH. How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms came into Being; and on the Good, at 507.

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