Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 1 In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods

Thus the absolutely divisible (essence) does not exist alone; there is another one located immediately beneath it, and derived from it. On one hand, this inferior (essence) part...

3. What then is unity? What is its nature? It is not surprising that it is so difficult to say so, when it is difficult to explain of what even essence or form consist. But, nev...

9. But how shall we train this interior vision? At the moment of its (first) awakening, it cannot contemplate beauties too dazzling. Your soul must then first be accustomed to c...

2. It is to this (universal) Soul especially that may be applied these words of Plato:[317] "The general Soul cares for all that is inanimate." The other (individual) souls are...

7. The same reflections may be made about pain, and one's feeling of it. When a man's finger is said to give him pain, this, no doubt, is a recognition that the seat of the pain...

But how is an actualization begotten from that self-limited (intelligible)? We shall have to draw a distinction between an actualization of being, and an actualization out of th...

The principle which informs matter will give it form as something foreign to its nature; it will also introduce magnitude and all the real properties. Otherwise, it would be ens...

1. Plato says, "The intelligence sees the ideas comprised within the existing animal." He adds, "The demiurge conceived that this produced animal was to comprise beings similar...

6. Each being derives his character from his nature. One being is a horse because he is born from a mare, while another is human, because born from a human mother; and more: he...

Now when we consider the nature of some being, it should be studied in its rarest condition, since extraneous additions hinder it from being rightly judged. The soul must be the...

As the One does not contain any difference, He is always present; and we are ever present to Him as soon as we contain no more difference. It is not He who is aspiring to us, or...

3. Consider now the human soul which[167] undergoes numberless ills while in the body, eking out a miserable existence, a prey to griefs, desires, fears, sufferings of all kinds...

4. The dignity of Intelligence may be appreciated in still another way. After having admired the magnitude and beauty of the sense-world, the eternal regularity of its movement,...

Is form a quality? No: form is a reason. Now what is constituted by (material) substance, and reason? (In the warm body) it is neither what burns, nor what is visible; it is qua...

6. Thus Intelligence actually constitutes all beings; it contains them all, but not locally; it contains them as it possesses itself; it is identical with them. All entities are...

5. The limit of purification decides to which (of the three hypostases of) divinity the soul may hope to assimilate and identify herself; therefore we shall have to consider tha...

The latter, who also was a member of the senate, had so detached himself from the affairs of life, that he had abandoned all his possessions, dismissed all his attendants, and r...

12. How does it happen that we possess principles that are so elevated, almost in spite of ourselves, and for the most part without busying ourselves about them? For there are e...

It is only with mixed feelings that such a work can be published. Overshadowing all is the supreme duty to the English-speaking world, and secondarily to the rest of humanity to...

(The Stoics), like almost everybody, insist that visual beauty consists in the proportion of the parts relatively to each other and to the whole, joined to the grace of colors....

"There were, O Marcellus Orontius[17] many philosophers in our time, and especially in the first years of our childhood--for it is useless to complain of their rarity at the pre...