Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 4 In Chronological Order,...

There are many other unclassifiable Numenian traces in Plotinos. Two of them, however, are comparatively important. First, is a reaffirmation of the ancient Greek connection between generation, fertility of birth of souls and wetness,730 which is later reaffirmed by Porphyry in his "Cave of the Nymphs." Plotinos, however, later denies this.731 Then we come to a genuine innovation of Numenius's; his theory of divine or intelligible giving. Plato had, of course, in his genial, casual way, sketched out a whole organic system of divine creation and administration of this world. The conceptions he needed he had cheerfully borrowed from earlier Greek philosophy without any rigid systematization, so that he never noticed that the hinge on which all was supposed to turn was merely the makeshift of an assumption. This capital error was noticed by Numenius, who sought to supply it by a psychological observation, namely, that knowledge may be imparted without diminution. Plotinos, with his winning way of dispensing with quotation-marks, appropriated this,732 as also the idea that life streams out upon the world in the glance of the divinity, and as quickly leaves it, when the Divinity turns away His glance.733

Other less important points of contact are: the Egyptian ship of souls;734 the Philonic distinction between "the" God as supreme, and "god" as subordinate;735 the hoary equivocation on "kosmos;"736 and the illustration of the divine Logos as the pilot of the world.737