Ennead V.9 [5]: On Intellect, the Forms and Being · 1

THE NINTH TRACTATE

The Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas and the Authentic Existence

1.

All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense more than to the Intellectual.

Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them elect to abide by that order and, their life throughout, make its concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter of sense are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if they live along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the other. And those of them that pretend to reasoning have adopted this as their philosophy; they are like the heavier birds which have incorporated much from the earth and are so weighted down that they cannot fly high for all the wings Nature has given them.

​Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their soul urges them from the pleasant to the nobler, but they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair of any surer ground, they fall back in virtue's name, upon those actions and options of the lower from which they sought to escape.

But there is a third order—those godlike men who, in their mightier power, in the keenness of their sight, have clear vision of the splendour above and rise to it from among the cloud and fog of earth and hold firmly to that other world, looking beyond all here, delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways of his own country.

2.

What is this other place and how is it accessible?

It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in things whose beauty is of the soul—such things as virtue, knowledge, institutions, law and custom—and thence, rising still a step, reach to the source of this loveliness of the Soul, thence to whatever be above that again, until the uttermost is reached, The First, the Principle whose beauty is self-springing: this attained, there is an end to the pain inassuageable before.

But how is the ascent to be begun? Whence comes the power? In what thought is this love to find its guide?

The guiding thought is this:—that the beauty perceived on material things is borrowed.

The pattern giving beauty to the corporeal rests upon it as Idea to its Matter and the substrate may change and from being pleasant become distasteful, a sign, in all reason, that the beauty comes by participation.

Now, what is this that gives grace to the corporeal?

Two causes in their degree; the participation in beauty and the power of Soul, the maker, which has imprinted that form.

We ask then is soul, of itself, a thing of beauty: we find it is not ​since differences are manifest, one Soul wise and lovely, another foolish and ugly: soul-beauty is constituted by wisdom.

The question thus becomes, What principle is the giver of wisdom to the soul: and the only answer is "The Intellectual-Principle," the veritably intellectual, wise without intermission and therefore beautiful of itself.

But does even this suffice for our First?

No; we must look still inward beyond the Intellectual, which, from our point of approach, stands before the Supreme Beginning, in whose forecourt, as it were, it announces in its own being the entire content of the Good, that prior of all, locked in unity, of which this is the expression already touched by multiplicity.

3.

We will have to examine this Nature, the Intellectual, which our reasoning identifies as the authentically existent and the veritable ssential: but first we must take another path and make certain that such a principle does necessarily exist.

Perhaps it is ridiculous to set out enquiring whether an Intellectual-Principle has place in the total of being: but there may be some to hesitate even as to this and certainly there will be the question whether it is as we describe it, whether it is a separate existence, whether it actually is the real beings, whether it is the seat of the Ideas; to this we now address ourselves.

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realised out of these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements. Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle—since ​the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless—you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else—the Intellectual-Principle in it—representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape.

Applying the same method to the total of things, here too we discover the Intellectual-Principle and this we set down as veritably the maker and creator of the All. The underly has adopted, we see, certain shapes by which it becomes fire, water, air, earth; and these shapes have been imposed upon it by something else. This other is Soul which, hovering over the Four (the elements), imparts the pattern of the Kosmos, the Ideas for which it has itself received from the Intellectual-Principle as the soul or mind of the craftsman draws upon his craft for the plan of his work.

The Intellectual-Principle is in one phase the Form of the soul, its shape; in another phase it is the giver of the shape—the sculptor, possessing inherently what is given—imparting to soul nearly the authentic reality while what body receives is but image and imitation.

4.

But, soul reached, why need we look higher; why not make this The First?

A main reason is that the Intellectual-Principle is at once something other and something more powerful than Soul and that the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. For it is certainly not true, as people imagine, that the soul, brought to perfection, produces Intellect. How could that potentiality come to actuality unless there be, first, an effective principle to induce the actualisation which, left to chance, might never occur?

The Firsts must be supposed to exist in actuality, looking to nothing else, self-complete. Anything incomplete must be sequent upon these, and take its completion from the principles engendering it which, like fathers, labour in the improvement of an offspring born imperfect: the ​produced is as Matter to the producing principle and is worked over by it into a shapely perfection.

And if, further, soul is passible while something impassible there must be or by the mere passage of time all wears away, here too we are led to something above soul.