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

We would acknowledge the existence of a particular Providence, such as we mentioned above, if we thought that the world had had a beginning of existence, and had not existed since all eternity. By this particular Providence we mean a recognition, in the divinity, of a kind of prevision and reasoning (similar to the reasoning and prevision of the artist who, before carrying out a work, deliberates on each of the parts that compose it25). We would suppose that this prevision and reasoning were necessary to determine how the universe could have been made, and on what conditions it should have been the best possible. But as we hold that the world's existence had no beginning, and that it has existed since all time, we can, in harmony with reason and our own views, affirm that universal Providence consists in this that the universe is conformed to Intelligence, and that Intelligence is prior to the universe, not indeed in time—for the existence of the Intelligence did not temporarily precede that of the universe—but (in the order of things), because, by its nature, Intelligence precedes the world that proceeds from it, of which it is the cause, type26 and model, and cause of unchanged perpetual persistence.