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

241 See Cicero, de Nat. Deor. ii. 34.

242 See iv. 4.39, 40.

243 Plato, Phaedrus, p. 248; Cary, 59.60.

244 See iii. 1.8–10.

245 See iv. 4.39.

246 See iii. 4.3.

247 See iii. 1.10.

248 See iii. 1.5.

249 Rep. x. p. 616; Cary, 14; Enn. iii. 4.

250 See iv. 4.30, 40, 43, 44.

251 See i. 4.

252 See i. 2.5.

253 In i. 1; proof of the chronological order.

254 See ii. 9.12; iv. 3.9, 10; negatively.

255 See iii. 3.1, 2; see Seneca, de Provid. 5.

256 See ii. 3.17; iii. 8.

257 See iv. 4.9–12.

258 See ii. 4; Seneca, de Provid. 5.

259 See ii. 9.2; iii. 2, 3. Seneca, de Provid. 5.

260 Or generative reasons, a Stoic term, Seneca, Quest. Nat. iii. 29; see iii. 3.1, 2, 7.

261 Plotinos is here harking back to his very earliest writing, 1.6, where, before his monistic adventure with Porphyry, he had, under the Numenian influence of Amelius, constructed his system out of a combination of the doctrines of Plato (about the ideas), Aristotle (the distinctions of form and matter and of potentiality and actualization), and the Stoic (the "reasons," "seminal reasons," action and passions, and "hexis," or "habit," the inorganic informing principle). Of these, Numenius seems to have lacked the Aristotelian doctrines, although he left Plato's single triple-functioned soul for Aristotle's combination of souls of various degrees (fr. 53). Plotinos, therefore, seems to have distinguished in every object two elements, matter and form (ii. 4.1; ii. 5.2). Matter inheres potentially in all beings (ii. 5.3, 4) and therefore is non-being, ugliness, and evil (i. 6.6). Form is the actualization (K. Steinhart's Melemata Plotiniana, p. 31; ii. 5.2); that is, the essence and power (vi. 4.9), which are inseparable. Form alone possesses real existence, beauty and goodness. Form has four degrees: idea, reason, nature and habit; which degrees are the same as those of thought and life (Porphyry, Principles 12, 13, 14). The idea is distinguished into "idea" or intelligible Form, or "eidos," principle of human intellectual life.

Reason is 1, divine (theios logos, i. 6, 2; the reason that comes from the universal Soul, iv. 3.10), 2, human (principle of the rational life, see Ficinus on ii. 6.2); 3, the seminal or generative reason (principle of the life of sensation, which imparts to the body the sense-form, "morphé," 3.12-end; Bouillet, i. 365). Now reasons reside in the soul (ii. 4.12), and are simultaneously essences and powers (vi. 4.9), and as powers produce the nature, and as essences, the habits. Now nature ("physis") is the principle of the vegetative life, and habit, "hexis," Numenius, fr. 55, see ii. 4.16, is the principle of unity of inorganic things.

262 As thought Aristotle, Met. xii, 3.

263 See ii. 9.13.

264 See iv. 4.9–13.

265 See iii. 4.1.

266 This is Numenius' doctrine, fr. 16.

267 See iii. 3.5, 11.

268 Plotinos here makes in the world-Soul a distinction analogous to that obtaining in the human one (where there is a reasonable soul, and its image, the vegetative soul, see i. 1.8–12; iv. 4. 13, 14). Here he asserts that there are two souls; the superior soul (the principal power of the soul, which receives the forms from Intelligence (see iv. 4.9–12, 35), and the inferior soul (nature, or the generative power), which transmits them to matter, so as to fashion it by seminal reasons (see iii. 4.13, 14, 22, 27). Bouillet, no doubt remembering Plotinos's own earlier invectives against those who divided the world-soul (ii. 9.6), evidently directed against Amelius and the Numenian influence, which till then he had followed—tries to minimize it, claiming that this does not mean two different hypostases, but only two functions of one and the same hypostasis. But he acknowledges that this gave the foundation for Plotinos's successors' distinction between the supermundane and the mundane souls (hyperkosmios, and egkosmios). Plotinos was therefore returning to Numenius's two world-souls (fr. 16), which was a necessary logical consequence of his belief in two human souls (fr. 53), as he himself had taught in iii. 8.5. Plotinos objectifies this doubleness of the soul in the myth of the two Hercules, in the next book, i. 1.12.

269 See ii. 9.2.

270 The subject announced in the preceding book, ii. 3.16; another proof of the chronological order. This is a very obscure book, depending on iv. 3 and 4: and vi. 7; on the theory of the three divine hypostases, on his psychology, the soul's relation to, and separation from the body, and metempsychosis. His doctrines of "self" and of the emotions are strikingly modern.

271 See sect. 2.

272 See sect. 3.

273 See sect. 4.

274 See sect. 7, 11.

275 This most direct translation of "pathos," is defective in that it means rather an experience, a passive state, or modification of the soul. It is a Stoic term.

276 "Dianoia" is derived from "dia nou," and indicates that the discursive thought is exercised "by means of the intelligence," receiving its notions, and developing them by ratiocination, see v. 3.3. It is the actualization of discursive reason "to dianoêtikon," or of the reasonable soul ("psychê logikê"), which conceives, judges, and reasons (dianoei, krínei, logizetai).

277 "Noêsis" means intuitive thought, the actualization of intelligence.

278 See sect. 7.

279 See Porphyry, Faculties of the Soul, and Ficinus, commentary on this book.