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THE NEO-PLATONISTS
A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM
BY ge Tes
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THOMAS WHITTAKER
SECOND EDITION WITH A SUPPLEMENT ON THE COMMENTARIES OF PROCLUS
CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1928
First Edition 1901 Second Edition (Enlarged) 1918 Reprinted 1928
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
Undergraduate
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Dunrinc the time that has elapsed since the publication of the first edition of this work, I have at intervals kept myself in contact with the subject; but it was not until lately that I saw clearly how the book might receive the completion which from the first had appeared desirable. The task that obviously re- mained was to give a more circumstantial account of the Athenian period of Neo-Platonism. I once thought of doing this in a second volume; but it became evident in the end that, for the aim I had in view, what was necessary and sufficient was a more adequate exposition of Proclus. I had never proposed to deal with all minutiae on a uniform scale. My purpose was, wile not neglecting to give some accoun* of the lesser as well as the greater thinkers, to set forth sub- stantially the doctrine of the school so as to bring out its real originality and its historical importance, Now, for this purpose, even Porphyry and Iamblichus, while they must always retain an honourable place in the history of philo- sophy, are of minor significance. The case is otherwise with Proclus, whose name has by general consent taken rank next to that of Plotinus as representing the last powerful expression of Hellenie thought before it ceased to have any effective originality.
Since the book was written, the publication of improved texts has put it in my power to do more justice to the thought of Proclus than would have been possible at first. I hope that, with the aid of these, I have been able to set before the reader an account of his principal commentaries bringing out their distinctive features and the new developments by which its finished form was given to the great system of philosophy initiated by Plotinus two centuries earlier.
Vi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
In the text and notes of the book as it appeared in 1901, I have made only slight alterations. The Appendix on the outlying subject of Gnosticism, however, I found must be re- written in view of recent research. The nature of the modifi- cation needed, I have indicated in the Appendix itself in its new form.
T. W.
February, 1918.
”
CONTENTS
PAGE INTRODUCTION Ost of op e ° - . ° e . ix CHAPTER I _ GRAECO-ROMAN CIVILISATION IN ITS POLITICAL DE- VELOPMENT. 5 5 . 5 0 . pean * 1 CHAPTER II THE STAGES OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY . = . ° 7
CHAPTER III RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS IN LATER ANTIQUITY . 17
CHAPTER IV PLOTINUS AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS . an cO
CHAPTER V
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM OF PLOTINUS. . . 40
1. PSYCHOLOGY f é A ; : . . wi 43
2. METAPHYSICS ° 0 . ° ° 5 ° e 53
8 COSMOLOGY AND THEODICY . 5 C ° e 70
4. AESTHETICS , . 0 0 ° ° : C 5 8&7
5. ETHICS) fe: teas & gee lier heey eee OF CHAPTER VI
THE MYSTICISM OF PLOTINUS . . . . >. 98, CHAPTER VII
THE DIFFUSION OF NEO-PLATONISM . . . . 107
1. PORPHYRY . ' ° 4 0 5 ° 5 6 107
2. IAMBLICHUS . 0 : 0 ° 0 = 0 om V2E
8, THE SCHOOL OF IAMBLICHUS . e . e - Il
Vili CONTENTS
CHAPTER VIII
THE POLEMIC AGAINST CHRISTIANITY , . : » °136
CHAPTER IX THE ATHENIAN SCHOOL ° ‘ , ° . . » 155 1, THE ACADEMY BECOMES NEO-PLATONIC . . 155 2 PROCLUS) ee as Dae are Gil ee tute vey es LO
3. THE END OF THE PLATONIC SUCCESSION .. - 180
CHAPTER X THE INFLUENCE OF NEO-PLATONISM . : . - 185
CHAPTER XI CONCLUSION . . : . . ° . : . - 205
APPENDIX
I. THE COMMUNISM OF PLATO |. ¥. .%)°. . 216 AG THE GNOSTICS 3,1 6a acing ae ees eae B18
III. IAMBLICHUS AND PROCLUS ON. MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE oie re vii) ton eg teat oti ey ayn Oo
SUPPLEMENT
THE COMMENTARIES OF PROCLUS. , a alot 220 ON THELFIRST ALCINIA DES inewwenenaenn ee ii fai 242 39 9» PARMENIDES . 5 4 “ 9 . . 248 ules SORT ALARUS keting eke! TN MIn eS aeeaC eroG. sf A HEPUBLIO ce Le Pee SERS DR
INDEX OF NAMES . . . Spa ai é : ° - 815
INTRODUCTION
Tart the history of ancient culture effectively ends with the second century of the Christian era is an impression not in- frequently derived from histories of litereture and éven of philosophy. The period that still remains of antiquity is ob- _ viously on its practical side a period of dissolution, in which every effort is required to maintain the fabric of the Roman State against its external enemies, And, spiritually, a new religious current is evidently beginning to gain the mastery; - so that, with the knowledge we have of what followed, we can already see in the third century the break-up of the older form of inner as well as of outer life. In the second century too ap-- peared the last writers who are usually thought of as classical. The end of the Stoical philosophy as a living system coincides with the death of Marcus Aurelius. And with Stoicism, it is often thought, philosophy ceased to have an independent life. - It definitely entered the service of polytheism, In its struggle with Christianity it appropriated Oriental superstitions. It lost its scientific character in devotion to the practice of magic. It became a mystical theology instead of a pursuit of reasoned truth. The structure of ancient culture, like the fabric of the Kmpire, was in process of decay at once in form and content. In its permeation by foreign elements, it already manifests a transition to the new type that was to supersede it. | An argument for this view might be found in a certain ““modernness” which has often been noted in the later classical literature, Since the ancient type was dissolved in the end to make way for the modern, we might attribute the early appearance of modern characteristics to the new growth ac- companying incipient dissolution. The general falling-off in literary quality during the late period we should ascribe to decay; the wider and more consciously critical outlook on life, - which we call modern, to the movement of the world into its
x INTRODUCTION
changed path. Thus there would be a perfectly continuous process from the old civilisation to the new. On the other hand, we may hold that the “‘modernness”’ of the late classical period does not indicate ithe beginning of the intermediate phase of culture, but is a direct approximation to the modern. type, due to the existence of « long intellectual tradition of a similar kind. If the latter view be taken, then we must regard the dissolution of the ancient world as proceeding, not by a penetration of new elements into the older form of culture so as to change the type, but indirectly through the conquest of the practical world by a new power; so that, while ancient culture was organically continuous as long as it lasted, it finally came to an end as an organism, The new way into which the world had passed was directed by a new religion, and this ap- propriated in its own manner the old form of culture, bringing it under the law of its peculiar type. Thus one form was substituted for another, but the first did not spontancously pass into the second. There was no absolute break in history; for the ancient system of education remained, though in a re- duced form, and passed by continuous transition into another; but the directing power was changed, The kind of “‘modern”’ character which the ancient culture assumed in the end was thus an anticipation of a much later period, not a genuine phase of transition, In confirmation of the latter view, it might be pointed out that the culture of the intermediate period, when it assumed at length its appropriate form, had decidedly less of the specifically modern character than even that of early antiquity with all its remoteness.
Be this as it may in pure literature, it is certain that the . latest phase of ancient philosophy had all the marks of an intrinsic development, All its characteristic positions can be traced to their origin in earlier Greek systems, Affinities can undoubtedly be found in it with Oriental thought, more par- ticula-ly with that of India; but with this no direct contact can be shown. In its distinctive modes of thought, it was wholly Hellenic, So far as it was ‘‘syneretistic,” it was as philosophy
INTRODUCTION xi of religion, not as pure philosophy. _On this side, it was an attempt to bring the various national cults of the Roman Empire into union under the hegemony of a philosophical _ conception, As philosophy, it was indeed “eclectic,” but the eclecticism was under the direction of an original effort of speculative thought, and was exercised entirely within the | Hellenic tradition, And, in distinction from pure literature, philosophy made its decisive advance after practical disso- _ lution had set in, It was not until the middle of the third century that the metaphysical genius of Plotinus brought to a common point the Platonising movement of.revival which was already going on before the Christian era, The system | founded by Plotinus, and known distinctively.as ‘‘ Neo-Plato- nism,” was that which alone gave unity to all that remained of Greek culture during the period of its survival as such, Neo-Platonism became, for three centuries, the one philosophy © of the Graeco-Roman world. It preserved the ancient type of thought from admixture with alien elements; and, though defeated in the struggle to give direction to the next great period of human history, it had a powerful influence on the antagonist system, which, growing up in an intellectual atmo- sphere pervaded by its modes of thought, incorporated much - of its distinctive teaching,
The persistence of philosophy as the last living force of the ancient world might have been predicted. Philosophie thought in antiquity was the vital centre of liberal education as it has never been for the modern world. There were of course those who disparaged it in contrast with empirical practice or with ° rhetorical ability, but, for all that, it had the direction of . practical thought so far as there was general direction at all, . The dissolution by which the ancient type was broken down did not begin at the centre but at the extremities. The free development of the civic life both of Greece and of Rome had been checked by the pressure of a mass of alien elements imperfectly assimilated. These first imposed a political prin- | ciple belonging to a different phase of culture, To the new . ©
xii INTRODUCTION
movement thus necessitated, the culture of the ancient world, whatever superficial changes it might undergo, did not in- wardly respond, Literature still looked to the past for its models. Philosophy least of all cared to adapt itself. It be- came instead the centre of resistance to the predominant movement,—to overweening despotism under the earlier _ Caesars, to the oncoming theocracy when the republican .
‘tradition was completely in the past. The latest philosophers of antiquity were pre-erninently
The kings of thought Who waged contention with their time’s decay.
And their resistance was not the result of pessimism, of a disposition to see nothing but evil in the actual movement of things. The Neo-Platonists in particular were the most convinced of optimists, at the very time when, as they well knew, the whole movement of the world was against them. They held it for their task to maintain as far as might be the type of life which they had themselves chosen as the best; knowing that there was an indefinite future, and that the alternating rhythms in which, with Heraclitus and the Stoics, they saw the cosmic harmony! and the expression of provi- dential reason, would not cease with one period. If they did not actually predict the revival of their thought after a thou- sand years, they would not have been in the least surprised to see it.
More than once has that thought been revived, and with _ various aims; nor is its interest even yet exhausted, The first revival the philosophers themselves would have cared for was that of the fifteenth century, when, along with their master Plato, they became the inspirers of revolt against the system of mediaeval theology that had established itself long after their defeat, Another movement quite in their spirit, but this time not an insurgent movement, was that of the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century, which went back to
? wraNlvrovos apyovln Kbopov Sxworep AUpns Kal rdtov.—Heraclitus.
-
INTRODUCTION xiii Neo-Platonism for the principles of its resistance to the ex- clusive dominance of the new “‘mechanical philosophy.” As the humanist academies of Italy had appealed against Schol- astic dogmatism to the latest representatives in antiquity of free philosophic inquiry, so the opponents in England of ““Hobbism” went for support to those who in their own day had intellectually refuted the materialism of the Stoics and Epicureans. Since then, many schools and thinkers have shown affinity with Neo-Platonic thought; and, apart from direct historic attachment or spontaneous return to similar metaphysical ideas, there has been a deeper continuous in- fluence of which something will have to be said.
From about the middle of the nineteenth century, the Neo- Piatonists, though somewhat neglected in comparison with the other schools of antiquity, have been made the subject of important historical work. To French philosophers who began as disciples of Cousin, a philosophy that could be described as - at once “eclectic” and “spiritualist”? naturally became an object of interest. The result of that interest was seen in the brilliant works of Vacherot and Jules Simon. For definite and positive information on the doctrines of the school, the portion of Zeller’s Philosophie der Griechen that deals with the period is of the highest value. In English, Mr Benn’s chapter on “The Spiritualism of Plotinus,” in his Greek Philosophers, brings out well the advance in subjective thought made by the latest on the earlier philosophies of Greece, Of special importance in relation to this point are the chapters on Piotinus and his successors in Sicbeck’s Geschichte der Psy- chologie. An extensive work. on the psychology of the school has appeared since in the last two volumes of M. Chaignet’s Psychologie des Grecs, Recent English contributions to the general exposition of the Neo-Platonist philosophy are Dr C. Bige’s volume in the ‘Chief Ancient Philosophies” Series (Christian Knowledge Society), and Dr F. W. Bussell’s stimulating book on The School of Plato, which, however, deals more with preliminaries than with the school itself,
xiv INTRODUCTION
In the later historical treatment of Neo-Platonism a marked tendency is visible to make less of the supposed “Oriental” character of the school and more of its real dependence on the preceding philosophies, of Greece. This may be seen in Zeller as compared with Vacherot, and in Mr Benn as compared with Zeller. Of the most recent writers, M. Chaignet and Dr Bigg, approaching the subject from different sides, conclude in almost the same terms that the system of Plotinus was through and through Hellenic. And, as M. Chaignet points out, Plotinus,
‘in all essentials, fixed the doctrine of the school. Whatever attractions the thought of the East as vaguely surmised may have had for its adherents, their actual contact with it was slight. When the school took up a relation to the practical world, it was as the champion of ‘‘ Hellenism” (‘EAAnuiopos) against the “‘barbarian audacity” of its foes, On the whole, however, it did not seek to interfere directly with practice, but recognised the impossibility of modifying the course which the world at large was taking, and devoted itself to the task of carrying forward thought and preserving culture. Hence a history of Neo-Platonism must be in the main a history of doctrines internally developed, not of polemic with extraneous systems of belief. At the same time the causes must be in- dicated of its failure, and of the failure of philosophy, to hold for the next age the intellectual direction of the world,—a failure not unqualified. To bring those causes into view, it will be necessary to give a brief sketch of the political, as well as of the philosophical and religious, movement to the time of Plotinus. For the ultimate causes of the triumph of another system were social more than they were intellectual, and go far back into the past. Of the preceding philosophical develop- ment, no detailed history can be attempted. As in the case of the political and religious history, all that can be done is to put the course of events in a light by which its general bearing may be made clear. In relation to the inner movement, the aim will be to show precisely at what point the way was open for an advance on previous philosophies,—an advance which,
INTRODUCTION XV it may be said by anticipation, Neo-Platonism did really suc- ceed in making secure even for the time when the fortunes of independent philosophy were at their lowest. Then, when the history of the school itself has been set forth in some detail, a sketch, again reduced to as brief compass as possible, must be given of the return of the modern world to the exact point: where the thought of the ancient world had ceased, and of the continued influence of the Neo-Platonic conceptions on modern thought. Lastly, an attempt will be made to state the law of the development; and, in relation to this, some- thing will be said of the possibilities that still remain open for _ _ the type of thought which has never been systematised with more perfection than in the school of Plotinus.
“On pourrait dire, sans trop d’exagération, que |’histoire morale des premiers siécles de notre ére est dans l’histoire
du platonisme.”’ Matrer, Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme,
livre vim. ch. 28,
CHAPTER I
GRAECO-ROMAN CIVILISATION IN ITS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
Broapty, the political history of classical antiquity almost from the opening of the historic period may be described as a slow passage from the condition of self-governing common- wealths with a subordinate priesthood to the condition of a cheocratic despotism, This was a reduction of the West to the polity of the civilised East. In the old Oriental monarchies known to the classical world, the type was that of a conse- crated despot ruling with the support and under the direction of a priesthood socially supreme. Immemorial forms of it were to be seen in Egypt and in the Assyrio-Babylonian civilisation on which the conquering Persian monarchy was superimposed. In Persia had appeared the earliest type of a revealed as distin- guished from an organised natural religion.. And here were the beginrings of the systematic intolerance at first so puzzling to the Greeks!. Intolerance, however, did not till later and from a new starting-point assume a permanently aggressive form. With the Persians, conquest over alien nationalities led to some degree of toierance for their inherited religions.
The origin of the monarchies of Egypt and of Western Asia is a matter of conjecture. To the classical world they appeared as a finished type. The aricient European type of polity was
1 Herodotus, though ho knew and sympathised with the refusal of the Persian religion to ascribe visible'form to the divinity, saw in the persecution of the Egyptian cult by Carabyses and in the burning of Greek temples by order of Xerxes, nothing but acts of wanton impiety. They had come to be better understood in the time of Cicero, who definitely ascribes the latter to the motive of pious intolerance. Sce De Rep. iii. 9,14. After a reference to the animal deities of Egypt as illustrating the varicty of religious customs among civilised men, the exposition proceeds: “‘Dcinde Gracciac sicut apud nos, delubra, magnifica humanis consecrata simulacris, quae Persac nefaria puta- verunt, eamyue unam ob causam Xerxes inflammari Atheniensium fana iussisse dicitur, quod deos, quorum domus esset omnis hic mundus, inclusos parietibus contineri nefas esse ducerct.”
Ww. 1
2 GRAECO-ROMAN CIVILISATION [CH. '
new and independent. It did not spring out of the Oriental type. by way of variation. In investigating its accessible be- ginnings we probably get nearer to political origins than we can in the East. We have there before our eyes the plastic stage which cannot in the East be reconstructed. The Greek tragic poets quite clearly distinguished their own early con- stitutional monarchies with incompietely developed germs of aristocracy and democracy from Oriental despotism. While these monarchies lasted, they were probably not very sharply marked off, in the general consciousness, from other mon- archical institutions. The advance to formal republicanism revealed at once a new type of polity and the preparation for it at an earlier stage. That this was to be the conquering type might very well be imagined. Aeschylus puts into the mouth of the Persian elders a lamentation over the approaching downfall of kingship in Asia itself!. Yet this prophecy, as we know, is further from being realised now than it may have appeared then. And, though organised despotism on the great scale was thrown back into Asia by the Persian wars, the later history of Europe for a long period is the history of its return.
The republican type of culture was fixed for all time’, first in life and then in literature, by the brief pre-eminence of Athens. The Greek type of free State, however, from its re- striction to a city, and the absence of a representative system, with other causes, could not maintain itself against the inroads of the monarchical principle, which at that time had the power of conferring unity on a larger aggregate. The Macedonian monarchy, originally of the constitutional type, became, through its conquests at once over Greece and Asia, essentially an Oriental monarchy—afterwards a group of monarchies— distinguished only by its appropriation of the literary culture
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1g IN ITS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT ee
of Greece. Later, the republican institutions of Rome, which succeeded those of Greece as the type of political freedom, broke down, in spite of their greater flexibility and power of. incorporating subjects', through a combination of the causes- that affected Greece and Macedon separately. Perhaps the imperial monarchy was a necessity if the civilised world was to be kept together for some centuries longer, and not to break up into warring sections. Still, it was a lapse to a lower form . of polity. And the republican resistance can be historically justified, The death of Caesar showed his inheritors that the: hour for, formal monarchy was not yet come. The complete shaping of the Empire on the Oriental model was, in fact, postponed to the age of Diocletian and Constantine. Mean- while, the emperor not being formally monarch, and the re- public remaining in uame, the whole system of education con- tinued to be republican in basis. The most revered classics were those that had come down from the time of freedom, 'Declamations against tyrants were a common exercise in the schools, And the senatorial opposition, which still cherished the ethical ideal of the republic, came into power with the emperors of the second century. What it has become the fashion to call the “‘republican prejudices” of Tacitus and Suetonius were adopted by Marcus Aurelius, who, after citing with admiration the names of Cato and Brutus, along with those of later heroes of the Stoical protestation against Caesarean despotism, holds up before himself “the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity ad- ministered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed?.”’ Here the demand
1 That the Romans themselves were conscious of this, may be seen for example in a speech of the Emperor Claudius as recorded by Tacitus (Ann. xi. 24): “Quid aliud exitio Lacedaemoniis et Atheniensibus fuit, quamquam armis pollerent, nisi quod victos pro alienigenis arcebant? at conditor nostri Romulus tantum sapientia valuit, ut plerosque populos eodem, die hostes, ~ dein cives habuerit.”’
* j. 14 (Long’s Translation). With the above passage may be compared Julian’s appeal to Plato and Aristotle in support of his conviction that the
spirit of laws should be impersonal (Epistola ad Themistium, 261-2). The second imperial philosopher, in his satirical composition entitled Caesares, -
1—2
4 GRAECO-ROMAN CIVILISATION | [on.
for administrative unity might seem to be reconciled with the older ideal; but the Stoic emperor represented the departing and not the coming age.
There was a discrepancy between the imperial monarchy on the one hand, potentially absolute, though limited by the deference of the ruler for ancient forms, and on the other hand the ideal that had come down from the past. The ethics of antiquity had never incorporated absolutism. Now the new religion that was already aiming at the spiritual dominance of the Empire had no tradition that could separate it from the monarchical.system, Christian ethics from the first accepted absolutism as its political datum. The Christian apologists under the Antonines represent themselves as a kind of legiti- mists,—praying, in the time of Marcus Aurelius, that the right of succession of Commodus may be recognised and the blessing of hereditary kingship secured', Christianity therefore, once accepted, consecrated for the time an ideal in accordance with the actual movement of the world. In substituting the notion of a monarch divinely appointed for the apotheosis of the emperors, it gave a form less unendurable in civilised Europe to a servility which, in its pagan form, appearing as an Asiatic superstition, had been something of a scandal to the rulers who were in a manner compelled to countenance it. The _ result, unmodified by new factors, is seen in the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Empire of the East remained strong enough to throw off the barbarian attack for centuries. It preserved much of ancient Greek letters, In distinction from the native monerchies of Asia, it possessed a system of law that had received its bent during a period of freedom*. But, with these differences, it was a theocratic monarchy of the Oriental type. It was the last result, not of a purely internal
most frequently reaffinns the judgments of Suetonius and Tacitus, but not — without discrimination. Tiberius he sums up as a mixed character, and does _ not represent him as flung into Tartarus with Caligula and Nero.
1 See Renan, Marc-Auréle, where illustrations are given of this attitude on the part of the apologists.
2 “The period of Roman freedom was the period during which the stamp of a distinctive character was impressed on the Roman jurisprudence.” Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law, 10th ed., ch. ii. p. 40,
1} IN ITS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 5
development, but of reaction on the Graeco-Roman world from the political institutions and the religions of Asia.
The course of things in the West was different. Having been for a time reduced almost to chaos by the irruptions of the Germanic tribes, the disintegrated and then nominally revived Western Empire furnished the Church with the oppor- tunity of erecting an independent theocracy above the secular rule of princes. This type came nearest to realisation in the twelfthand thirteenthcenturies. It broke down partly through internal decay and partly through the upgrowth of a stronger secular life. With immense difficulty and with the appearance almost of accident?, a new kind of free State arose. The old Teutonic monarchies, like the old Greek monarchies, were not of the Asiatic type. They contained elements of political aristocracy and democracy which could develop under favour- ing circumstances, In most cases the development did not _ take place. With the cessation of feudal anarcliy, the royal power became too strong to be effectively checked. There was formed under it a social hierarchy of which the most privileged equally with the least privileged orders were excluded as such from all recognised political authority. Thus on the Conti- nent, during the early modern period, the prevailing type became Catholic Absolutism, or, as it has been called, “‘ Euro- pean monarchy,’’—a system which was imitated in the Con- tinental Protestant States. By the eighteenth century this had become, like the Byzantine Empire or the old Asiatic monarchies, a fixed type, a terminal despotism from which there could be no peaceful issue, It was destroyed—so far as it has since been destroyed—by the revolutionary influence of ideas from the past and from without, In England the germs of freedom, instead of being suppressed, were developed, and in the seventeenth century, after a period of conflict, the modern system of constitutional monarchy was established. To the political form of the modern free State, early English institutions by their preservation contributed most. Classical reminiscences, in England as clsewhere, enkindled the love of
1 Comte at least regarded Absolutism as the normal development, Consti- tutionalism as a local anomaly, in European history before 1789,
6° GRAECO-ROMAN CIVILISATION [cH. 1
freedom; but deliberate imitation was unnecessary where the germs from which the ancient republics themselves had sprung were still ready to take a new form, From England the in- fluence of revived political freedom diffused itself, especially in France, where it combined with the emulation of classical models and with generalisations from Roman law, to form the abstract system of “‘natural rights.”’ From this system, on the intellectual side, have sprung the American and the French: Republics,
In the general European development, the smaller con- stitutional States may be neglected, The reappearance of a kind of city-republic in mediaeval Italy is noteworthy, but had little practical influence. The Italian cities were never completely sovereign States like the Greek cities. Politically, it is as if these had accepted autonomy under the supremacy of the Great King. Spiritually, it is as if they had submitted to a form of the Zoroastrian religion from which dissent was penal, Nor did the great Italian poets and thinkers ever quite set up the ideal of the autonomous city as the Greeks had done. In its ideal, their city was rather a kind of municipality : with Dante, under the ‘‘ universal monarchy” of the restored Empire; with Petrarch and more distinctly with Machiavelli, under Italy as a national State, unified by any practicable means, Even in its diminished form, the old type of republic was exceedingly favourable to the reviving culture of Europe; but the prestige of the national States around was too strong for it to survive except as an interesting accident, |
The present type of free State is one to which no terminal form can be assigned. In England and in America, in France and in Italy, not to speak of the mixed forms existing else- where, it is still at the stage of growth, The yet living rival with which it stands confronted is the Russian continuation or reproduction of Christian theocracy in its Byzantine form},
1 This epilogue, sketching the political transition to modern Europe, seemed necessary for the sake of formal completeness, although the bearing of political history on the history of philosophy is much less direct in modern then in ancient times. Since 1901 (the date of the first edition), war and
revolution have changed the aspect of things indicated in the last aentence of the chapter.
CHAPTER II ‘THE STAGES OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY
A the time of the Persian wars the civilisation of the East was in complexity, specialism, organised industry—whatever relative importance we may attach to those features of pro- gress—in all probability ahead of the civilisation of Greece. The conscious assumption of self-government by the Greek cities had, however, been closely followed by the beginnings of what we may call speculative science, which was a distinc- tive product of the Greck intellect. For this, the starting-point was furnished by the empirical observations of Egyptians and Chaldacans, made with a view to real or fancied utility— measurement of land or prediction of future events: The earliest Greek philosophers, natives of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, and thus on the borders of the fixed and the grow- ing civilisations, took up a few generalised results of the long and laborious but unspeculative accumulation of facts and methods by the leisured priesthoods! of Egypt and Babylonia, and forthwith entered upon the new paths of cosmical theorising without regard to authoritative tradition, and of deductive thinking about numbers and figures without regard to immediate utility, As early as Pythagoras, still in the sixth century B.c., speculative scicnce had begun to show signs of its later division into philosophy properly so-called, and posi- tive science; the first special sciences to become detached, after mathematics, being those to which mathematical treat- ment seemed applicable. All this took place before the con- tinuous movement of reflective thinking on human knowledge,
> ‘Tuis way of putting the matter seems to reconcile the accounts of the invention of geometry in Egypt given by Herodotus and Aristotle, which Prof, Burnet (Early Greek Philosophy, 1st ed., Introduction, p. 19) finds dis- crepant. Herodotus assigns che motive, viz, “the necessity of measuring the Jands afresh after the inundations’’; Aristotle the condition that made it possible, viz. “‘the leisure enjoyed by the priestly caste,”
8 THE STAGES [cH. which marks a new departure in philosophy, not its first origin, began at Athens.
The emotion in which alissestss ana science had their common source was exactly the same in ancient Greece and in renascent Europe. Plato and Aristotle, like Descartes and Hobbes, define it as “wonder,”” The earliest thinkers did not define it at all. Their outlook has still something very im- personal. With them, there is little inquiry about happiness or the means of attaining it. When the speculative life has been lived by several generations of thinkers, and a self-con-. scious theory of it is at length set forth, as at the opening of - Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the happiness involved in it is re- garded as something that necessarily goes with mere thinking and understanding. ,
This is the subjective form of early Greek philosophy. In objective content, it is marked by complete detachment from religion. No traditional authority is acknowledged. Myths are taken merely as offering points of contact, quite as fre- quently for attack as for interpretation in the sense of the individual thinker. The handling of them in either case is perfectly free. Results of the thought and observation of onc thinker are summed up by him, not to be straightway ac- cepted by the next, but to be examined anew. The aim 1s insight, not edification,
The general result is a conception of the cosmos in principle not unlike that of modern science; in detail necessarily crude, though still scientific in spirit, and often anticipating the latest phases of thought in remarkable ways, Even the repre- sentations of the earth as a disc floating on water, and of the stars as orifices in circular tubes containing fire, are less re- mote in spirit from modern objective science than the astro- nomy of later antiquity and of the instructed Middle Ages. _This was far mure accurate in its conception of shapes and magnitudes and apparent motions, but it was teleological in a way that purely scientific astronomy cannot be. The earliest Ionian thinkers, like modern men of science, imposed no teleo- logical conceptions on their «stronomical theories,
At the same time, early Greek philosophy was not merely
w] OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY | 9
objective, as modern science has become. Jt was properly
_ philosophical in virtue of its ““hylozoism.” Life and mind, or their elements, were attributed to the world or its parts. Later, a more objective “naturalism” appears, as in the system of Democritus, Here the philosophical character is still retained-by the addition of an explicit theory of know- ledge to the scientific explanation of the cosmos, “Primary” and “‘secondary” qualities of matter are distinguished, and these last are treated as in a sense unreal. Thus the definite formulation of materialism is accompanied by the beginnings of subjective idealism. But with the earliest thinkers of all, there is neither an explicit theory of knowledge nor an ex- clusion of life and mind from the elements of things.
The atomism of Democritus and his predecessors was the result of long thinking and perhaps of much controversy. The “Ionians,” down to Heraclitus, regarded the cosmos as continuously existing, but as ruled by change in all its parts if not also as a whole. The Eleatics, who came later, affirmed that unchanging Being alone exists: this is permanent and always identical; ‘‘not-being” absolutely does not exist, and change is illusory, The Being of Parmenides, it is now held?, was primarily the extended cosmos regarded as a closed sphere coincident with all that is. Yet, though the conception was in its basis physical and not metaphysical, the metaphysical abstraction made by Plato was doubtless implicit in it, And Parmenides himself evidently did not conceive reality as purely objective and mindless. If he had intended to convey that meaning, he would have been in violent contradiction with his predecessor Xenophanes, and this would hardly have escaped notice, The defect of Eleaticism was that apparent change received no satisfactory explanation, though an attempt was made to explain it in what Parmenides called a “‘deceptive”’ iscourse as dealing with illusory opinion and no longer with demonstrative truth. Atomism mediated be- tween this view and that of the Ionians by asserting a plurality of real beings, each having the characters of the Eleatic
1 See Tannery, Pour l’Histoire de la Science Helléne, and Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy
10 3 THE STAGES [ox.
“being.”’ “‘Not-being” for the atomists was empty space; change in the appearances of things was explained by mixture and separation of unchanging elements, The mechanical con- ception of the purely quantitative atom, which modern science afterwards took up, was completed by Democritus. Anaxa- goras, though fundamentally a mechanicist, did not deprive his atoms of quality. And Empedocles, along with ideas of mixture and separation—explained by the attractive and re- pulsive agents, at once forces and media, to which he gave the mythological names of Love and Strife—retained some- thing of the old hylozoism, Over against the material elements of things, Anaxagoras set Mind as the agent by which they are sifted from their primitive chaos. This was the starting- point for a new development, less purely disinterested than the first because more coloured by cthical and _ religious motives, but requiring even greater philosophic originality for its accomplishment.
The new departure of philosophy, though adopting the Anaxagorean Mind as its starting-point, had its real source in the ethical and political reflection which began effectively with the Sophists and Socrates. To give this reflective atti- tude consistency, to set up the principles suggested by it against ail exclusive explanations of reality from the material ground of things, and yet to do this without in the end letting go the notion of objective science, was the work of Plato. Aristotle continued Plato’s work, while carrying forward science independently and giving it relatively a more impor- tant position. One great characteristic result of the earlier thinking—the assertion that materially nothing is created and nothing destroyed—was assumed as an axiom both by Plato and by Aristotle whenever they had to deal with physics. They did not take up from the earlier thinkers those specific ideas that afterwards turned out the most fruitful scientific-- ally—though Plato had a kind of atomic theory—but they affirmed physical law in its most general principle. This they subordinated to their metaphysics by the conception of a universal teleology. The teleological conception of nature there 1s good historical ground for attributing also to Socrates.
11) OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY ll
The special importance which Plato’s Timaeus acquired for. his successors is due to its being the most definite attempt made by the philosopher himself to bring his distinctive thought into relation with objective science, Thus, in view of knowledge as it was in antiquity, the later Platonists were quite right in the stress they Jaid on this dialogue.
For the period following upon the death of Aristotle, during which Stoicism and Epicureanism were the predominant schools, the most important part of’Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought was the ethical part. Both schools were, on the theoretical side, a return to naturalism as opposed to the | Platonic and Aristotelian idealism. Both alike held that all | reality is body; though the Stoics regarded it as continuous _ and the Epicureans as discrete. The soul, for the Stoies as for the Epicureans, was a particular kind of matter. The most fruitful conception in relation to the science of the future was preserved by Epicurus when he took up the Democritean idea of the atom, defined as possessing figured extension, resistance and weight; all “secondary” qualities being regarded as re- _ sulting from the changes of order and the interactions of the atoms, And, on the whole, the Epicureans appealed more to genuine curiosity about physics for itself!, though ostensibly cultivating it only as a means towards ridding human life of the fear of meddlesome gods, If the determinism of the Stoics was more rigorous, it did not prevent their undertaking the defence of some popular superstitions which the Epicureans have the credit of opposing. On the other hand, Stoicism did more for ethics. While both schools, in strict definition, were “‘eudaemonist,” the Stoics brought out far more clearly the social reference of morality. Their line of thought here, as the Academics and Peripatetics were fond of pointing out, could be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. So also could the © teleology which they combined with their naturalism. But all the systems of the time were more or less eclectic.
The social form under which the Stoics conceived of morality was the reference, no longer to a particular State,
Af arene ag -
1 Mr Benn, in his Greek Philosophers, points out the resemblance of Lucretius in type of mind to the early physical thinkers of Greece.
2 : THE STAGES fox.
but to a kind of universal State. Since the social reference in Greek morality had been originally to the “city,”’ the name was retained, but it was extended to the whole world, and the ideal morality was said to be that of a citizen of the world. This ‘‘cosmopolitanism”’ is prepared in Plato and Aristotle. Socrates (as may be seen in the Memorabilia of Xenophon) had already conceived the idea of a natural law or justice which is the same for all States. And in Aristotle that con- ception of “natural law” which, transmitted by Stoicism, had so much influence on the Roman jurisprudence, is definitely formulated!, The humanitarian side of Stoicism—which is not quite the same thing as its conception of universal justice —is plainly visible in Cicero?.
Although Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was by race half a Phoenician, it cannot be said that the East contributed any- thing definable to the content of his ethics. Its sources were evidently Greek. Down to the end of the ancient world, philosophy was continued by men of various races, but always
_by those who had taken the impress of Greek or of Graeco- Roman civilisation.
The same general account is true of the Neo-Platonists. They too were men who had inherited or adopted the Hellenic tradition, On the ethical. side they continue Stoicism; al- though in assigning a higher place to the theoretic virtues
1 See the quotation and references given by Zeller, ii. 2, p. 646, n. 1. (Ariutotle, Eng. Trans., ii. 175, n. 3.)
2 See, in De Finibus, ne exposition of Cato, deducing pare the Stoic principles the existence of a “communis humani generis societas”’ (iii. 19, 62). -“Bonitas” is expressly distinguished from “justitia” (c. 20, 66); cf. De Off. iii. 6, 28, In the fifth book of the De Finibus, Piso goes back for the origin of the whole doctrine to the Platonists and Peripatetics, The following sentence . (c. 23, 65) sums up the theory: ‘In omni autem honesto, de quo loquimur, nihil est tam illustre nec quod latius pateat quam coniunctio inter homines hominum et quasi quacdam societas et communicatio utilitatum et ipsa caritas generis humani, quae nata a primo satu, quod a procreatoribus nati diliguntur et tota domus coniugio et stirpe coniungitur, serpit sénsim foras, cognationibus primum, tum affinitatibus, deinde amicitiis, post vicinitatibus, tum civibus et iis, qui publice socii atque amici sunt, deinde totius complexu gentis humanae; quae animi affectio suum cuique tribuens atque hanc, quam dico, societatemconiunctionis humanae munifice et aequetuens iustitia dicitur, cui sunt adiunctae pictas, bonitas, liberalitas, henignitas, comitas, quaeque
‘sunt generis eiusdem.”’
We OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 13
they return to an earlier view. Their genuine originality is in psychology and metaphysics. Having gone to the centre of Plato’s idealistic thought, they demonstrated, by a new - application of its principles, the untenableness of the Stoic materialism; and, after the long intervening period, they succeeded in defining more rigorously than Plato had done, in psychology the idea of consciousness, in metaphysics the © idea of immaterial and subjective existence. Scientifically, they incorporated elements of every doctrine with the ex- ception of Epicureanism; going back with studious interest to the pre-Socratics, many fragments of whom the latest Neo- Platonist commentators rescued just as they were on the point of being lost. On the subjective side, they carried thought to the highest point reached in antiquity. And neither in Plotinus, the great original thinker of the school, nor in his successors, was this the result of mystical fancies or of Oriental influences. These, when they appeared, were superinduced. No idealistic philosophers have ever applied closer reasoning or subtler analysis to the relations between the inner and the outer world. If the school to some extent “Orientalised,” in this it followed Plato; and it diverged far less from Hellenic ideals than Plato himself.
A certain affinity of Plato with the East has often been noticed. This led him to the most remarkable previsions of the later movement of the world. The system of caste in the Republic is usually said to be an anticipation of the mediaeval order of society, Now in the introduction to the Timaeus and in the Critias, the social order of Egypt is identified in its determining principles with that of the ideal State, and both with the constitution of pre-historic Athens, also regarded as ideal, Hence it becomes evident that, for his specialisation and grading of social functions, Plato got the hint from the Egyptian caste of occupations!, Thus his ideal society is in contact, on one side with the pre-Hellenic East, on the other side with the Orientalised Europe of the Middle Ages. By its communism it touches modern schemes of reform?.
1 Cf, Arist, Pol. 1v. (vii.) 10, 1829 b 23: 6 8¢ xwprouds 6 ward. yévos red modirikod whiBous & Alyowrov, 2 See Appendix L
14 Oe “THE STAGES : fon.
Mr Benn has remarked that the stages of degeneration from the ideal aristocracy to 4 tyranny, set forth in the Republic, are the same as the actual stages of degeneration of the Roman State. To this it may be added that in the Laws Plato lays down the exact conditions that concurred for the establishment of Christianity. The problem is to get a new system of legislation received in the projected colony. For this he finds that, though citizens from the same State are better in so far as they are likely to be more orderly, yet they vill be too attached to their own laws. There is therefore an advantage in beginning with a mixture of colonists from several States. The character of such colonists will make the task in any case difficult, but the most favourable condition is that the ideas of a great legislator should be taken up by a young and vigorous tyrant, Generalise a little, putting for a single legislator the succession of those who formulated ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline, and for a single tyrant the consummated autocracy of the later Roman Empire, and the conditions are historically given. For there was, in the cosmopolitan Empire, exactly that mixture of different in- herited customs which Plato desiderates. Add, what is con- tinually insisted on in the Laws, that towards getting par- ticular precepts enforced it would conduce much if they could be regarded as proceeding from a god, and it will be seen that here also the precise condition of success was laid down.
The philosopher even anticipated some of the actual legis- lation of.the Church, In the tenth book of the Laws, he pro- poses a system of religious persecution. Three classes of the impious are to be cast out,—those who deny the existence of
_all gods, those who say that the gods take no. heed of human affairs, and those who say that they can be bought off with prayers and gifts; or, as we may put it compendiously,— Atheists, Epicureans and Catholics. As, however, the last class would have been got rid of with least compunction, the anticipation here was by no means exact. And probably none of these glimpses, extraordinary as they were, into the strange transformation that was to come in a thousand years, had any influence in bringing it to pass,
11] ' OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 15
The Neo-Platonists would have carried out an ethical re- form of polytheism in the spirit of the Repylic and the Laws; but they did not propose to set up persecution as.a sanction. On the contrary, they were the champions of the old intellec- tual liberty of Hellenism against the new theocracy. One of the most Orientalising sayings to be found in the later Platonists, namely, that the “‘ barbarians”’ have an advantage over the Greeks in the stability of their institutions and doctrines as contrasted with the Greek innovating spirit’, occurs both in the Timaeus and in the Laws?. And Piato’s attack, in the Republic, on the myths of Greek religion, was continued by the Christians, not by his Neo-Piatonic succes- sors; who sought to defend by allegorical interpretations whatever they could not accept literally; or at least, in re- pudiating the fables, did not advocate the expulsion of the poets.
It is to be remembered further that in the philosophical tradition of antiquity even more than in its general culture, the republican ideal was always upheld. Aristotle as well as ° Plato, it is true, was less favourable than the statesmen, orators and historians of the great Athenian period to personal spontaneity uncontrolled by the authority of the State. But of course what the philosophers desired was the supremacy of reason, not of arbitrary will. Licence in the city seemed to them condemnable on this ground emong others, that under the show of liberty it paved the way for a tyrant. And the later schools, in which philosophy had fixed a sort of official
1 Quoted by Ritter and Preller (Historia Philosophiae Graecae, 7th ed, 547 b) from the De Mysterits formerly attributed to Iamblichus (vii. 5, ed. Parthey, p. 259): weraBadrAdueva det dd Thy xatvoroulay Kal wapavoulay row “EdAjvwy oddev waverat...BdpBapo 82 pbviuor trois Oeow bvres al rois \dyaus BeBalws rots avrots éuuévovar.
* Allowance being made for the point of view, the two aspects of Plato are
_appreciated with perfect exactitude by Joseph de Maistre in his vituperation of the Greek spirit. (Du Pape, livre iv. ch. 7.) Plato’s “positive and eternal’ dogmas,” says the brilliant reactionary, “portent si clairement le cachet oriental que, pour le méconnaitre, il faut n’avoir jamais entrevu |’Asie..,.0 y avait en lui un sophiste et un théologien, ou, si l’on veut, an Greco et un Chaidéen. On n’entend pas ce philosophe si on ne le lit pas avec cette idée toujours présente & l’esprit.”
16 THE STAGES: OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY [OH 11
attitude, were always understood to be hostile to despotism’, The Stoies in particular hacl this reputation, which they justified under the early Empire. That the Neo-Platonists, although by their time philoscphy had almost ceased to have a political branch, were still of the ancient tradition, is proved by the republican spirit of Julian, who had received from them his self-chosen training*, In the chiefs of the school also, slight indications to the same effect may be discerned. This attitude of the philosophers had its importance in pre- serving the memory of the higher ideal notwithstanding the inevitable descent due to circumstance. And even in the carly Middle Ages, deriving their knowledge of antiquity as they did mainly from a few late compilations, such discussions as there are on the origin of society and of government seem
raceable to reminiscences from the philosophic schools; the idea of a social contract in particular COTE probably from the Epicureans.
2 Cf. Sueton. Nero, 52: ‘Liberalis disciplinas omnis fere puer attigit. Sed & philosophia eum mater avertit, monens imperaturo contrariam esse.”’
2 Julian’s refusal to be addressed by the title deamérns customary in the East, did not concitiate the ‘‘average sensual man”’ of Antioch. See Miso. pogon, 343 O—344 A: deomdrns elvac ob Pas ode avéxy ToiTo dxovwy, ddAXd Kal dyavaxreis,...dovhevey 8 muds dvayndfers dpxovo. nal vouos, xalro. woow
xpeirroyv ty dvopdterdat pdv ce Seaomdrny, Epyw 5¢ dav nuds elvat édevOépous:... adels S¢ thy oxnviy xal rods ulwous Kal rods doxnoras drokwAKKas Huwy Thy woke.
CHAPTER III
RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS IN LATER ANTIQUITY
-Tuoven philosophy at its beginning among the Ionians had broken with traditional authority as completely as it has ever done since, religion and free speculation did not cease to inter- act. In some points, however, their developments were inde- pendent. Religious developments independent of philosophy were the establishment and the increased attention paid to the ‘‘mysteries,” and the importation of new worships from Egypt and Asia Minor, It was also due rather to a new
development of religion than to philosophy, that more definite.
and vivid beliefs came to be popularly held about the immor- tality of the soul and about future rewards and punishments; though philosophers of religious mind sought to impress these doctrines along with the general conception of a providential government of the universe. In the Homeric poems, the.soul goes away to the underworld as soon us the corpse is burnt, and can never afterwards reappear in the world of living men. Yet much later, in the dramatists, the ghost is invoked as still having active powers in this world. Here there 1s perhaps a survival of a stage of belief more primitive than the Homeric, rather than a development?; but in the notion of definite places of reward and punishment there was clearly some growth of belief. Perhaps the mythical treatment of immor- tality by which Plato follows up his arguments for it on speculative grounds, is more a reaction of older religion on philosophy than an application of philosophy to religion, To the exact truth of the representations given, the philosopher never commits himself, but merely contends that something of the kind is probably truce, as against the imaginations in Homer of a world of lifeless shades contrasted in their un- reality with the vigour and bloom of life on earth, This side 1 Rohde (Psyche, i.) finds evidences of such survival in Hesiod.
Ww. 4
18 RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS [CH.
of Plato’s teaching had for a long time not much influence. It became influential in proportion as religion revived. With Aristotle and the naturalistic schools, personal immortality almost went out of sight. The Epicureans denied the immor- tality of the human soul altogether, and with the Stoics sur- vival of consciousness after death, if admitted at all, was only till the end of a cyele or “great year.”” The religious belief, and especially the belief in Tartarus, became, however, in the end vigorous enough to furnish one point of contact for a new religion that could make it still more definite and terrible. And one side of the new religion was prepared for by the notion, more or less seriously encouraged, that those who partook of the mysteries had somehow a privileged position among the dead!, This of course was discountenanced by the most religious philosophers; though they came to hold that it showed a certain want of piety towards ancestral beliefs to make light of initiation into the native mysteries.
Ancient religion and philosophy had not always been on such amicable terms as are implied in this last approximation, Especially at the beginning, when philosophy was a new thing, what may be called a sporadic intolerance was mani- fested towards it. Indeed, had this not been so, it would be necessary to allow that human nature has since then changed fandamentally. Without such germs of intolerance, its later developments would have been inconecivable, What can be truly said is that the institutions of antiquity were altogether unfavourable to the organisation of it. The death of Socrates had political more perhaps than religious motives, It has even been maintained that serious intolerance first appeared in the Socratic school itself?.. Plato, it is clear, would have been
quite willing that an ethieal reform of religion should be -
carried out by force. After the first collision, however, re- ligion on the one side remained unorganised, and philosophy on the other side practically free.
’ Cf, Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usayes upon the Christian Church, Lecture X.
2 This is the thesis of a very suggestive litte book by M. G. Sorel, entitled Le Procés de Socrate (1889).
111] IN LATER ANTIQUITY 19
How far was popular polytheism taken seriously? That it was not taken seriously by the philosophers is quite evident. Perhaps the Epicureans reacted on it less than any other . school; for they conceived of their ethical ideal as realised by the many gods named in mythology, and they had no other divinities, Their quarrel was not with polytheism as such, but with the belief in gods who interrupted their divine tran- quillity to interfere in the affairs of mortals, The belief of the philosophie schools generally was some form of theism, or, as in the case of the Stoics, pantheism, by which the gods of mythology, if recognised at all, were subordinated to a supreme intelligence or allegorised into natural forces, The later philosophers made use of more elaborate accommoda- tions. Aristotle had rejected polytheism in so many words. Plato had dismissed it with irony. Their successors needed those explicit theories of a rationalising kind which Plato ° thought rather idle. For the educated world, both in earlier and. later antiquity, Cudworth’s position is probably in the main true, that a sort of monotheism was held over and above all ideas of gods and daemons,
Thus (the controversy between Christian assailants and pagan defenders of the national religions was not really a con- troversy between monotheism and polytheism. The cham- pions of the old gods contended only for the general reason- ableness of the belief that different parts of the earth have been distributed to different powers, divine though sub- ordinate!, And in principle the Christians could have no objection to this, They themselves often held with regard to angels what the pagans attributed to gods; or even allowed the real agency of the pagan gods, but called them “‘daemons,” holding them to be evil beings.) The later paganism also allowed the existence of evil daemons, and had a place for angels among supernatural powers, Perhaps there is here a trace of influence from the Eastern gnosis; though Proclus insisted © that the name is not peculiar to “the barbarian theosophy,”’ but was applied of old to genuinely Hellenic divinities?,
1 Cf. Keim, Celsus’ Wahres Wort, p. 67.
* See Comm. in Remp., ed. Kroll, ii, 255: ov tevixdv 7d dvoua Kal BapBdpov
2—2
20 RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS [cH.
It is often represented as a paradox that the Christian idea of a suffering God should have triumphed over what is sup- posed to have been the universal prejudice of paganism that to suffer is incompatible with divinity. There is no real paradox. Ideas of suffering gods were everywhere, and the worship of them became the most popular. The case is really this. The philosophers held that absolutely divine beings— who are not the gods of fable—are “impassible.”” Inoratorical apologies for the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, this philo- sophie view of the divinity had to be met, On the other hand, the Christians made most of their converts among those who were not philosophers. By their mode of appeal, they got the advantage at once of a rigorous monotheism such as philo- sophy was tending to diffuse, and of the idea that expiations could be performed by incarnate and suffering deities, such as were believed in over all the pagan world. Exactly with this kind of popular paganism philosophy had had its quarrel. Of Xenophanes, the earliest explicitly monotheistic philo- sopher, it is related that, being asked by the people of Elea whether they should sacrifice to Leucothea and lament for her, he replied: “If you think her a god, do not lament; if human, do not sacrifiee'.”” The same view was taken by later philosophers. It was against this, and not against the popular imaginations, that such sayings as the well-known one of Tertullian were directed ?,
Coineiding, with the rise of Christianity there was, as has lately come to be recognised, a revival, not a decline, of ancient religion. The semblance of decline is due to the effect produced on modern readers by the literature of the later Roman Republic and earlier Empire, which proceeded for the most part from the seeptical minority, This impression
Geosogias porns, a\Aa Kal WidXdrwr ev Kparthw tov'Epufy wal thy “Ipw Gedy ayyéXous cival dno. : 1 Arist.Rhet. ii. 23, 1400 b5. (R. P.8l a.) Revodduns ’EXedrats épwriow ef Oiwor tH Nevxobéa kal OpnvGaw 7 uw}, cvveBowdevev, ef wev Gedy UodauUBavovsr, py Opnvew, ei 5 avOowmor, wy Over. ; * Tert. De Carne Christi, c. 5: “Natus est Dei Filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est: et mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus eredibile est, quia ineptum est: et sepultus, resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile.”
WIE|e 4 IN LATER ANTIQUITY ‘91
has been corrected by the evidence of archaeology. So far as there was a real decline in the worship of the old gods, it meant only a desertion of indigenous cults for more exciting ones from the East. First there appeared the cult of the Oriental Bacchus, then of Cybele and of Isis. And all these present curious analogies with Christianity. It is an interest- ing circumstance that from the Bacchae of Euripides,—which is essentially a picture of the uncontrollable frenzy aroused by devotion to a lately born son of Zeus, persecuted and after- wards triumphant, coming from the East,—many lines were transferred to the Christus Patiens!. The neglect of the altars of the gods spoken of by Lucian may be explained by this transfer of devotion. In the dialogue @cdév ’Ex«Anata, the Hellenic gods are called together with a view to the expulsion of intruding barbarian divinities, such as those that wear Persian or Assyrian garments, and above all “the brutish gods of Nile,” who, as Zeus himself is obliged to admit, are a scandal to Olympus. Momus insinuates that the purge will not turn out easy, since few of the gods, even among the Hellenic ones themselves, if they come to be closely examined, will be able to prove the purity of their race. Such an attempt at conservative reform as is here satirised by Lucian no doubt represented what was still the attitude of classical culture in _the second century; as may be seen by the invective of Juvenal against the Egyptian religion. Later, the syncretism that took in deities of every nationality came to be adopted by the defenders of classicism. It is this kind of religious syncretism, rather than pure classicism, that revives at the Renaissance, The apology not only for the Greek gods but for-those of Egypt, as in truth all diverse representations of the same divinity, is undertaken in one of Bruno’s dialogues, What makes this the more remarkable is that Bruno probably got the hint for his Spaccio della Bestia Trionfar.te precisely from the dialogue of Lucian just referred to. The nearest approach in the Hellenic world to the idea of a
1 See the notes in Paley’s edition of Euripides. The Christus Patiens was — formerly attributed to Gregory Nazianzen, but is now held to be of much later date
22 _ RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS . [on.
personal religious revelation was made by the philosophic sect of the Pythagoreans, The early history of the sect is mainly.
the account of an attempt at ethico-political regulation of .
cities in the south of Italy by oligarchies imbued with the philosophical and religious ideas of Pythagoras. These oli- garchies made themselves intensely unpopular, and the Pytha- gorean associations were violently suppressed. Afterwards remains of the societies combined to form a school specially devoted to geometry and astronomy, and in astronomy re- markable for suggestions of heliocentric ideas. Till we come to the Neo-Pythagoreans of about the first century B.c., the history of the school is obscure. Its religious side is observable in this, that those who claim to be of the Pythagorean succes- sion appeal more than other philosophers to the. recorded sayings of the founder, and try to formulate a minute dis- cipline of daily hfe in accordance with his precepts. The writings, mostly pseudonymous, attributed by them to early Pythagoreans? are in composition extremely eclectic, borrow- ing freely from the Stoics as well as from Plato and Aristotle. Coincidences were explained by the assumption that other philosophers had borrowed from Pythagoras. The approach of the Neo-Pythagorean school to the idea of a revelation is illustrated by the circumstance that Apollonius of Tyana, to whom in the first century A.D. miracles and a religious mission were attributed, was a Pythagorean, The lives of Pythagoras himself, by Porphyry and Iamblichus, are full of the marvels related in older documents from which both alike drew. According to Zeller, the peculiar doctrines and the ascetic discipline of the Essenes are to be ascribed to Neo-Pytha- gorean rather than to Indian or Persian influences. Their
asceticlsm—an essentially non-Judaic character—has in any —
case to be explained from a foreign source; and its origin from this particular Hellenic source is on the whole the most prob- able, because of the number of detailed coincidences both in method of life and in doctrine.
Closely connected with the idea of the cosmical harmony, so strongly accentuated in the Pythagorean school, is the
1 Zeller, ii. 2, pp. 100-3, gives a long list of them.
111] IN LATER ANTIQUITY 5 23
adoration of the stars thought of. as animated beings, which. became in quite a special manner the philosophic religion. This may have been first suggested by the star-worship associated with the empirical observations of the Chaldaeans, |. from which the Greek rational astronomy arose. There is not ~~ much trace of this form of religion in Greek polytheism at its first mythological stage. The genuine gods of Greece were essentially anthropomorphic, In a passage of Aristophanes? it is even said that the sun and moon are distinctively the gods of the barbarians, The earliest philosophers did not treat the heavenly bodies as in any special way divine, but regarded them as composed of the same kinds of matter as the other and lower bodies of the universe. When popular religion thought it an impiety on the part of Anaxagoras to explain the nature and action of the sun without introducing divine agency, the divine agency required was no doubt of an anthro- . pomorphic kind,—that of a charioteer for example. By Plato and Aristotle the divinity of the stars themselves was affirmed; and it afterwards became an article of faith with what we may call pagan philosophical orthodoxy. It was for the philosophers a mode of expressing the teleological relation — between the supreme Deity and the animated universe. The heavenly bodies, according to the theory, were placed in spheres to give origin by their motions to the ideas of time and number, and to bring about the succession of day and night and the changes of the seasons for the good of men and other animals, That they might do this, they were endowed with ruling intelligences superior to man’s and more lasting. For the animating principle of the stars, unimpeded by any process of growth or decay, can energise continuously at its height, whereas human souls, being temporarily united to portions of unstable matter, lapse through such union from
1 Quoted in Blakesley’s Herodotus, vol. ii. p. 210, n. TP. 7 yap certvn yw wavotpyos nALos, buiv éwriBoudevovTe mrodvy Hdn xpdvov, Trois BapBdpow. mpodidorov rv ‘EXXdba. EP. iva ri 6¢ rotro dparov; TP. orn vh Ala Nuets pev Uuiv Ovouev, ToUTaLW de ol BdpBapor Ovovar. : Paz, 406-11.
24 RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS [cH.
the condition of untroubled intellectual activity. This theory, founded by Plato in the 7'imaeus, was an assertion of teleo- logical optimism against the notion that the stars are products of chancc-ageregation. As such, it was defended by Plotinus against the pessimism of the Christian Gnosties, who—going | eyond the Epicureans, as he says—regarded the present - world as the work of an imperfect or of an evil creator. And in the latest period of the Neo-Platonic school at Athens, a high place was given, among the devotional usages adopted
rom the older national religions, to those that had reference to the heavenly bodies,
A current form taken by this modification of star-worship was astrology. Its wide dissemination in Italy is known from the c:icts expelling the so-called “‘mathematici” or *“‘Chal- daci,”’ as well as from the patronage they nevertheless ob- tained at the courts of emperors. Along with magic or “theurgy,” it came to be practised by some though not by all the members of the Neo-Platonie school, Plotinus him- self, as a true successor of Plato, minimised where he could not entirely deny the possibility of astrological predictions and of magical influences, and discouraged the resort to them even if supposed real. In his school, from first to last, there were always two sections: on the one hand those who, in their attachment to the old religion and aversion from the new, . inquired curiously into all that was still preserved in local traditions about human intercourse with gods or dacmons: and on the other hand those who devoted themselves entirely to the cultivation of philosophy in a scientifie spirit, or, if of more religious mind, aimed at mystical union with the highest God as the end of virtue and knowledge. This union, accord- ing to the general position of the school, was in no case attainable by magical practices, which at best brought the soul into relation with subordinate divine powers, According to those even who attached most importance to “theurgy,” it was to be regarded as a means of preparation for the soul itself in its progress, not as having any influence on the divinity, One here and there, it was allowed, might attain to the religious consummation of philosophy without external
Im} . IN LATER ANTIQUITY 25
aids, but for the majority they were necessary. As “magical” powers, when real, were held to be due to a strictly “natural” sympathy of each part of the universe with all the rest, and as this was not denied, on scientific grounds, by the opponents of magic, the theoretical difference between the two parties was less than might be supposed, It did not prevent philo- sophers of opposite views on this point from being on friendly terms with each other, The real chasm was between the philosophers who, however they might aspire after what they had heard of Eastern wisdom, had at heart the continuance of the Hellenic tradition, and those believers in a new revela- tion who, even if giving to their doctrines a highly speculative form, like the Gnostics?, yet took up a revolutionary attitude towards the whuie of ancient culture.
1 See Appendix IT.
CHAPTER IV PLOTINUS AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS
A NAME once customarily but incorrectly applied to the Neo- Platonist school was ‘“‘the Schoo! of Alexandria.” The his- torians who used the name were aware that it was not strictly correct, and now it seems to be again passing out of use. That the Neo-Platonic teachers were not in any close association yith the scientific specialists and Jiterary critics of the Alex- andrian Museum was elaborately demonstrated by Matter in a work which is really a History of the School—or rather Schools—of Alexandria, and not, like those of Vacherot and Jules Simon bearing the same general title, of Neo-Platonism. - In his third volume (1848) Matter devotes a special section to the Neo-Platonic philosophy, “falsely called Alexandrian,” and there he treats it as representing a mode of thought secretly antipathetie to the scientific spirit of the Museum, This, however, is an exaggeration, Of the obscure antipathy which he thinks existed, he does not bring any tangible evidence; and, in fact, when Neo-Platonism had become the ' philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world, it was received at Alexandria as elsewhere, What is to be avoided is merely the ascription of a peculiar local association that did not exist, To the Jewish Platonism of Philo and to the Christian Pla- tonism of Clement and Origen the name of “ Alexandrian”’ may be correctly applied; for it was at Alexandria that both types of thought were elaborated. To the Hellenic Platonism of Pletinus and his school it has no proper application, Plo- tinus indeed reccived his philosophical training at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas; but it was not till long after, at Rome, that he began to put forth a system of his own, After his death, knowledge of his system, through Porphyry and Iamblichus, diffused itself over all parts of the Roman Empire where there was any care for philosophy. Handed on by the successors of Jamblichus, the. doctrine of Plotinus at last
CH.1V] PLOTINUS AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS 27
gained the assent of the occupants of Plato’s chair in the Academy. The one brilliant period of Neo-Platonism at Alexandria was when it was expounded there by Hypatia. Its last great names are not those of Alexandrian teachers, but those of the “Platonic successors” at Athens, among whom by far the most distinguished was Proclus.
The school remained always in reality the school of Plotinus. From the direction impressed by him it derived its unity. A history of Neo-Platonism must therefore set out from the activity of Plotinus as teacher and thinker, Of this activity an account sufficient in the main points ts given by his dis- ciple Porphyry, who edited his writings and wrote his ie},
Through the reticence of Plotinus himself, the date and place of his birth are not exactly recoverable, This reticence Porphyry connects with an ascetic repugnance to the body. It was only by stealth that a portrait of the master could be taken; his objection, when asked to sit to a painter, being the genuinely Platonic one that a picture was but an “image of an image.”” Why perpetuate this when the body itself is a mere image of reality? Hence also the philosopher did not wish to preserve the details of his outward history. Yet in his aesthetic criticism he is far from taking a merely depreciating view of the fine arts, His purpose seems to have been to prevent a cult of him from arising among his disciples, He would not tell his birthday, Jest there should be a special celebration of it, as there had come to be of the birthdays of other philosophers?; although he himself used to keep the traditional birthday-feasts of Socrates and Plato’,
According to Eunapius‘, he was born at Lyco (or Lycopolis) in’ Egypt. From Porphyry’s Life the year of his birth is inferred to be 204 or 205, In his twenty-eighth year, being
1 Porphyry’s Life is prefixed to the edition of Plotinus by R. Volkmann (Teubner, 1883, 4), from which the citations in the present volume are made.
* Cicero treats the direction of Epicurus that his birthday should be celebrated after his death as a weakness in a philosopher. De Fin. ii. 31, 102; “Haec non erant eius, qui innumerabilfs mundos infinitasque regiones, quarum nulla esset ora, nulla extremitas, mente peragravisset.” In the last two words there is an evident allusion to Lucr. i. 74.
® Porph. Vita Plotini, 2.
* Vitae Philosophorum ac Sophistarum (Plotinus).
OO
238 PLOTINUS | (cH.
dissatisfied with the other Alexandrian teachers of philosophy
whom he frequented, he was taken by a friend to Ammonius, v Vhen he had heard him, he said to his companion: “This is the man of whom [I was in search” (rovrov éfjrovy). With Ammonius he remained eleven years, At the end of that time, he became eager to learn something definite of the philosophy that wes cultivated among the Persians and Indians. Ac- cordingly, in his thirty-ninth year he joined the expedition which Gordian was preparing against Persia (242). The Em- peror was killed in Mesopotamia, and, the expedition having failed, Plotinus with difficulty escaped to Antioch. At the age of forty, he went to Rome (244); where, for ten whole years, though giving philosophical instruction, he wrote nothing. He began to write in the first year of the reign of Gallienus (254), In 263, when Plotinus was about fifty-nine, Porphyry, then thirty years of age, first came into relation with him. Plotinus had by that time written twenty-one “books,”’ on such topics as had presented themselves in lectures and dis- cussions. These Porphyry found issued to a few, Under the stimulus of new discussions, and urged by himself and an earlier pupil, Amelius Gentilianus, who had come to him in his third year at Rome, Plotinus now, in the six years that Porphyry was with him, wrote twenty-four more books. The procedure was as before; the books taking their starting-point from the questions that occurred!, While Porphyry was in Sicily, whither he had retired about 268, Plotinus sent him in ali nine more books, In 270, during this absence, Plotinus died in Campania. After his death, Amelius consulted the Delphic oracle on his lot, and received a response placing him among the happy daemons, which Porphyry transcribes in full?,
Among the hearers of Plotinus, as Porphyry relates, were not a few senators. Of these was Rogatianus, who carried philosophic detachment so far as to give up all his possessions, dismiss all his slaves, and resign his senatorial rank. Having before suffered severely from the gout, he now, under the
1 VY. Plot. 5: éx mpooxalpwv mpoBr\nudrww Tas brodécers NaBbvra. |My Jellate, BPP
1v] AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS 29
abstemious rule of life he adopted, completely recovered!. To Plotinus were entrusted many wards of both sexes, to the interests of whose property he carefully attended. During the twenty-six years of his residence at Rome, he acted as umpire in a great number of disputes, which he was able to settle without ever exciting enmity. Porphyry gives some examples of his insight into character, and takes this occasion to explain the reason of his own retirement into Sicily, Plotinus had detected him meditating suicide; and, perceiving that the cause was only a “disease of melancholy,” persuaded him to go away for a time?, One or two marvellous stories are told in order to illustrate the power Plotinus had of resisting malignant influences, and the divine protection he was under°. He was especially honoured by the Emperor Gallienus‘ and his wife Salonina, and was almost permitted to carry out a project of restoring a ruined city in Campania,—said to have been once a “city of philosophers®,’’—which he was to govern according to the Platonic Laws, giving it the name of “ Plato- nopolis®,”” The fortunes of the scheme are curiously recalled by those of Berkeley’s projected university in the Bermudas.
At the time of this project, Plotinus must have been already engaged in the composition of his philosophical books. As Porphyry relates, no external demands on his attention, with whatever good will and practical success he might respond to them, could break the continuity of his meditations, which he had always the power to resume exactly at the point where he had le‘t off. Of the characteristics of his lecturing, his disciple gives a sympathetic picture’. He did not care for personal controversy; as was shown by his commissioning his pupils to reply to attacks on his positions, Porphyry mentions
YV. Plots 7: 2 Tbrd. 11. 3 Jbid. 10.
$ Gallien':> tolerated Christianity. He was a man of considerable accom- plishments, tiiough the historians do not speak highly of him as a ruler.
5 This apparently means, as has been conjectured (R. P. 508 f.), that it had
formerly been ruled by a Pythagorean society.
6 V. Plot. 12..
7 V, Plot. 13: qv & ev rp A€yew 7 Cvdeckis Too vod dype TOO wpoowmov avrov 7d pis émAdumovTos: épdopucos pev dPOjvar, Kadriwy dé TéTE- wddiaTa dpwuevos* Kal Aemrds tis ldpws Ewéder kai n wpgdrns dtéAapure Kal Td mpoonves Mpds TAS EpwTHoeEs €delxvuTo Kal TO eOTovov.
30 | PLOTINUS. «| [cu. a. case in which he himself was set to answer an unedifying discourse of the rhetor Diophanes!. The books of Plotinus, as we have seen, were not composed on any general plan. Porphyry relates that, through a weakness of the eyes, he never read over again what he had once written. His gram- matical knowledge of Greek remained imperfect, and the revision as well as editing of his writings was committed to Porphyry, from whom proceeds the arrangement of the six ““Enneads,”—the name the fifty-four books received from their ordering in groups of nine. While he worked in this irregular way, the character of his thought was extremely systematic. He evidently possessed his doctrine as a whole from the time when he began to write. Yet in detail, even to the very last books, in wnich Porphyry thought he observed a decline of power, he has always something effectively new to add.
In addition to the grouping according to subjects, which he adopted for his arrangement of the Enneads as we have them, Porphyry has put on record an alternative ordering which may be taken as at least approximately chronologica). The chronological order is certain as regards the succession of the main groups. Of these there are three, or, more exactly, four; the third group being divided into two sub-groups, At the beginning of the second main group also the order of four books is certain, For the rest, Porphyry does not definitely state that the books are all in chronological order; but, as his gencral arrangement in this enumeration is chronological, we may take it that he carried it through in detail as far as he could; and, as a matter of fact, links of association can often be detected in passing consecutively from one book to an- other, For reading, I have found this order on the whole more convenient than the actual grouping of the Enneads.
When the books are read in this chronological order, the psychological starting-point of the system becomes particu- larly obvious, the main positions about the soul coming early in the series, In the exposition that is to follow?, these will be set forth first. After Psychology will come Metaphysics,
1 VY. Plot. 15. 2 See ch, v.
Iv] AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS Kee 1 |
then in succession Cosmology (with Theodicy), Aesthetics and Kthics!, A separate chapter will be devoted to the Mysticism of Plotinus*. For this order of exposition support might be. found in what Plotinus himself says, where he points out that from the doctrine of the soul, as from a centre, we can equally ascend and descend§,
Before beginning the exposition, an attempt must be made to ascertain the points of contact furnished to Plotinus by those nearest him in time, His general relation to his pre- decessors is on the whole clear, but not the details. Of the teachings of his Alexandrian master, nothing trustworthy is recorded. Ammonius left nothing written, and the short accounts preserved of his doctrine come from writers too late to have had any real means of knowing.’ What those writers do is to ascribe to him the reasoned positions of Plotinus, or even the special aims of still later thinkers contemporary with themselves, Porphyry, in a passage quoted by Eusebius, mentions that Ammonius had been brought up as a Christian, but, as soon as he came in contact with philosophy, returned to the religion publicly professed. He is spoken of as a native of Alexandria; and the name “Saccas” is explained by his having been originally a porter (Laxxds being equivalent to caxxopopos). Hierocles calls him “‘the divinely taught” (@eo- diéaxtos), Besides Plotinus he had as pupils Longinus the famous critic’, Origen the Christian, and another Origen. With this Origen and a fellow-student named Herennius, Plotinus is said to have entered into a compact that none of them should divulge the doctrine of Ammonius, The com- pact was first broken by Herennius, then by Origen; lastly Plotinus thought himself at liberty to expound the master’s doctrine orally, Not for ten more years did he begin to write’. Evidently this, even if accepted, does little towards explaining
' Roughly, this corresponds to the order:—Enn. tv, y. VI. U1. WL. 1
2 See ch. vi. 3 Enn, tv. 3, l.
‘ The Iept “Yous, formerly attributed to Longinus, is now generally ascribed to some unknown writer of the first century. See the edition by Prof. W. Rhys Roberts (1899), who, however, points out that in its spirit it is such a work as might very well have proceeded from the historical Longinus.
5 Porph. V. Plot. 3.
32 PLOTINUS (cn.
the source of the written doctrine of Plotinus,—in which there is no reference to Ammonius,—and Zeller throws doubt on the whole story}, regarding it as suspiciously like what is related about a similar compact among the early Pythagoreans, It is to be observed that Porphyry does not say that he had it directly from Plotinus.
What is elear is this, that from Ammonius Plotinus must have received some impulse which was of great inxportance for his intellectual development. In the class-room o1.Plotinus, we learn from Porphyry?, the later Platonic and Aristotelian commentators were read; but everywhere an original turn was given to the discussions, into which Plotinus carried the spirit of Ammonius. This probably indicates with sufficient clearness the real state of the case, Ammonius was one of those teachers who have the power of stirring up independent thought along a certain line; but he was not himself the forma- . tive mind of the movement. The gcneral line of thought was already marked out. Neither Ammonius nor Plotinus had to ereate an audience, A large section of the philosophical world had for long been dissatisfied with the Stoie, no less than with the Epicurean, dogmatism, The opposition was partly seep- tical, partly Neo-Pythagorean and Platonic, The sceptical opposition was represented first by the New Academy, as we see in Cicero; afterwards by the revived Pyrrhonism of Aene- sidemus and Sextus. In Ciecro we sce also, set against both FEpicureanism and Stoicism as a more positive kind of opposi- tion, a sort of eclectic combination of Platonic and Peripatetic positions, A later stage of this movement ts represented by Plutareh; when Platonisni, though not yet assuming syste- matic form, is already more metaphysical or “theological,” and less predominantly cthieal, than the celeeticism of Cicero’s time. On its positive side the movement gained strength in proportion as the secptical attack weakened the prevailing dogmatic schools, ‘These at the same time ccased to give . Internal satisfaction, as we perecive in the melancholy tone of Marcus Aurelius. By the end of the sceond ecntury, the new positive current was by far the strongest; but no thinker
1 iii, 2, p. 452. # V. Plot. 14.
Iv] AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS | 33
of decisive originality had appeared, at least on the line of Greek thought. In Plotinus was now to appear the greatest individual thinker between Aristotle and Descartes. Under the attraction of his systematising intellect, all that remained of aspiration after an independent philosophy was rallied to a common centre. Essentially, the explanation of the change is to be found in his individual power. Yet he had his pre- cursors as well as his teachers. There were two thinkers at least who, however little they may have influenced him, anticipated some of his positions.
The first was Philo of Alexandria, who was born about 80 B.c., and died later than a.p. 40. The second was Numenius of Apamea, who is said to have flourished between 160 and 180 a.p. Philo was pretty certainly unknown to Plotinus. Numenius was read in his class-room; but his disciple Amelius wrote a treatise, dedicated to Porphyry, in which, replying to an accusation of plagiarism, he pointed out the differences be- tween their master’s teaching and that of Numenius. Amelius, it may be remarked, had acquired a great reputation by his thorough knowledge of the writings of Numenius, Porphyry cites also the testimony of Longinus. The judgment of the eminent critic was for the unquestionable originality of Plo- tinus among the philosophers of his own and the preceding age', In what that originality consisted, Plotinus, who spoke of him as “a philologist but by no means a philosopher,” might not have allowed his competence to decide, He him- self confessed that he did not understand some treatises of Plotinus that were sent to him. What he ascribes to him in the passage quoted by Porphyry is simply a more accurate mode of interpreting the Pythagorean and Platonic principles _ than had been attempted by others who took the same general direction, This, however, only renders his judgment the more
1 Longinus ap. Porph. V. Plot. 20: of 6¢...7pdrw Oewpias idiw xpnodmevoe Wrwrivds efor kal Vevridiavds’Auédros,...0088 yap ovd? éyyts Ts 7a Nounvior wat Kpovlov xal Modeparov kal Opagv\ou Trois IIAwrlvou mepl ray avrwy avyypaumagiw eis axplBevav’ 6 dé "Auédos Kar’ Txvn pev Tovrov Badifew mpoarpovmevos Kai Ta TONAG mev TOV alrav doyuaruw éxbuevos, TH dé eLepyacia TONDs wy...wy Kal wovwy nMEts akcov eivac voulCouev éemioxomeccOar Ta CvyypauuaTa.
W. 3
34 PLOTINUS [cu.
decisive as to the impression Plotinus made in spite of the difficulties of his style.
To make clear what doctrines of Plotinus were anticipated, the principles of his metaphysics must be stated in brief pre- liminary outline. Of the causes above the visible world, he placed highest of all the One beyond thought and being. To the One, in the Neo-Platonic philosophy, the name of God is applicable in a peculiar manner. Everything after it that is called divine is regarded as derivative. Next in order, as the effect of the Cause and Principle, comes the divine Mind, identical with the “intelligible world”? which is its object. Last in the order of supramundane causes comes the Soul of the whole, produced by Mind. Thence the descent is to the world of particular souls and changing things. The series composed of the primal One, the divine Mind, and the Soul of the whole, is sometimes called the “‘ Neo-Platonie Trinity?.”’ Now Numenius put forth the idea of a Trinity which in one point resembles that of Plotinus,
According to Proclus, Numenius distinguished “‘three Gods.” The first he called the Father, the second the Maker?, while the third was the World, or that which is made*. The point of resemblance here to Plotinus is the distinction of “the first God” from the Platonic Demiurgus, signified by “the Maker.’”’ With Numenius, however, the first God is Being and Mind; not, as with Plotinus, a principle beyond these, Zeller remarks that, since a similar distinction. of the highest God from the Creator of the world appears before Numenius in the Christian Gnostics, among whom the Valentinians adopted
1 It is of course inexact to speak of a first, second and third “Person” in — the Trinity of Plotinus, Even the generalised term “hypostasis”’ is moro strictly applicable inChristian than in Neo-Platonic theology, as Vacherot points out. See Histoire Critique de l’ Ecole d’ Alexandrie, t. ii. p. 425 n.
2 Cf. Timaeus, 28 ¢.
3 Comm. in Tim. p. 93 4; ed. Diehl, i. 303-4. (R. P. 506 a; Zeller, iii. 2, p. 220, n. 6.) mwarépa wey Kade tov mpGrov, monrny dé tov devrepov, melnua dé tov tplrov’ 6 yap Kéay0s xar’ alrdv 6 Tpiros dari Geds. A protest follows against this ‘‘hypostasising,”’ as we should call it, of the Father and the Maker, To divide apart the one Cause, following the names, says Proclus, is as if, because Plato calls the Whole both “heaven” and “world,” we were to speak of tho Heaven and the World as two different things.
1v] AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS 35
the name ‘‘Demiurgus”’ from Plato, it was probably from them that Numenius got the hint for his theory; and that in addition Philo’s theory of the Logos doubtless influenced him’. To this accordingly we must turn as possibly the original starting-point for the Neo-Platonic doctrine.
With Philo, the Logos is the principle that mediates. be- | tween the supreme God and the world formed out of matter. Essentially the conception, in so far as it means a rational order of production running through nature, is of Greek origin, being taken directly from the Stoics, who got at least the suggestion of it from Heraclitus?, Philo regards the Logos as containing the Ideas in accordance with which the visible world was formed. By this Platonising turn, it becomes in . the end a different conception from the divine ‘* Reason” of the Stoics, embodied as that is in the material element of fire, On the other hand, by placing the Platonic Ideas in the divine Mind, Philo interprets Plato in a sense which many scholars, both in antiquity and in modern times, have refused to allow. Here Plotinus coincides with Philo. Among those who dissented from this view was Longinus. Porphyry, who,. before he came to Rome, had been the pupil of Longinus at Athens, was not without difficulty brought over, by con- troversy with Amelius, to the view of Plotinus, “that in- telligibles do not exist outside intellect*.”” Thus by Plotinus as by Philo the cause and principle of things is distinguished from the reason or intellect which is its proximate effect; and, in the interpretation of Plato, the divine mind is regarded as containing the ideas, whereas in the Timaeus they are figured as existing outside the mind of the Demiurgus. On the other hand, Plotinus differs both from Philo and from the Gnostics in consistently treating as mythical the representation of a maker setting out from a certain moment of time to shape things according to a pattern out of pre-existent matter. And, in spite of his agreement with Philo up to a certain point,
1 iii, 2, p. 219, n. 3.
2 Sce, for the detailed genealogy of the conception, Principal Drummond’s Philo Judaeus, vol. i. * V. Plot. 18. The position which he had adopted from Longinus was ér:
éLw tov vou Udéarnke Ta vonrd.
3—2
36 PLOTINUS [cH.
there is nothing to show that their views were historically connected. Against the attempt to connect Plotinus, or even Numenius, with Philo, a strong argument is urged by Dr Bigg. Neither Plotinus nor Numenius, as he points out, ever uses Noyes as a technical term for the “second hypostasis!.” Yet, if they had derived their theory from Philo, this is evidently whet they would have done; for the Philonian Aoyos, on the philosophical side, was not alien from Greek thought, but was a genuine product of it. In truth, to adapt the conception to their own systems by means of a change of name, would have been more difficult than to arrive at their actual terminology directly by combining Stoical and Aristotelian positions with their Platonism. This kind of combination is what we find in the eclectic thinkers, of whom Numenius was one. Plotinus made use of the same elements; the presence of which in his system Porphyry has expressly noted*, And, so far as the relation of the Neo-Platonic Trinity to Plato is concerned, the exact derivation of the three “‘hypostases”’ is pointed out in a fragment of Pcrphyry’s Jost History of Philosophy’. The highest God, we there learn, is the Idea of the Good in the Republic; the second and third hypostases are the Demiurgus and the Soul of the World in the Timaeus. To explain the triadic form of such speculations, no theory of individual
1 See Neoplatonism, pp. 123, 242, etc. Dr Bigg’s actual assertions are too sweeping. It is not quite correct to say, as he does in the second of the pass- ages referred to, that Plotinus expressly refuses to apply to his principle of Intelligence the title Logos, which in his system means, as with the Stoics, “little more than physical force.’’ There are indeed passages where he refuses to apply the title in some special reference; but elsewhere—as in Enn, v. 1, 6 —he says that Soul is the Adyos of Mind, and Mind the Adyos of the One, While the term with him has many applications, and among them the Stoical application to the “seminal reasons” (or formulae) of natural things, it may most frequently be rendered by “rational law.”
This indeed might well be adopted as the usual rendering of the term from Heraclitus onward whenever it seems to approximate to an ontological sense. - Psychologically of course it often means simply ‘‘reason,” though this is never its exact sense in Heraclitus, with whom the transition of the idea is from “word” or “discourse” to “law” or “measure,”
2 V, Plot. 14: éupéuexrar 8 ev rots ovyypdumact cal ra Truckd AavOdvovra Sbyuara cal ra Wepirarnrixd’ xaramemixvwrat dé cal 7 pera TH Puowkd Tov ’ApcarotéXous mpayuarela.
5 Fragm. 16 in Nauck’s Opuscula Selecta,
Iv] AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS 37
borrowing on any side is necessary, All the thinkers of the period, whether Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, had grown up in an atmosphere of Neo-Pythagorean speculation about num- bers, for which the triad was of peculiar significance’, Thus on the whole it seems that Numenius and Plotinus drew independently from sources common to them with Philo, but cannot well have been influenced by him.
Plotinus, as we have seen, had some knowledge of Numenius ; but, where a special point of contact has been sought, the difference is as obvious as the resemblance. The great differ- ence, however, is not in any detail of the triadic theory. It is that Plotinus was able to bring all the elements of his system under the direction of an organising thought. That thought © was a definitely conceived immaterialist monism which, so far as we know, neither Philo nor Numenius had done anything substantially to anticipate. He succeeded in clearly develop- ing out of Plato the conception of incorporeal essence, which his precursors had rather tended by their eclecticism to con- fuse. That the conception was in Plato, the Neo-Platonists not only admitted but strongly maintained, Yet Plato’s meta- phorical expressions had misled even Aristotle, who seriously thought that he found presupposed in them a spatial extension of the soul?, And if Aristotle had got rid of semi-materialistic *“animism”’ even in expression, this had not prevented his successors from running into a new materialism of their own. Much as the Platonising schools had all along protested against the tendency to make the soul a kind of body or an outcome of body, they had not hitherto overcome it by clear definitions and distinctions. This is one thing that Plotinus and his successors achieved in their effort after an idealist metaphysie, :
It was on this side especially that the thought of the school influeneed the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. On the
1 Jules Simon, in his Histoire de l’ Ecole d' Alexandrie, dwells on this point as an argument against the view, either that Neo-Platonism borrowed its Trinity from Christianity or Christianity from Neo-Platonism.
® Proclus wrote a book to show that Plato's view of the soul is not open
to the objections raised by Aristotle. See Comm. in Tim. 226 D; ed. Diehl, ii. 279.
2
38 PLOTINUS | (ox.
specifie dogmas of Christian theology, Neo-Platonism prob- ably exercised little influence. From Platonising Judaism or Christianity, it received none at all, At most an isolated ex- pression occurs showing that the antipathy to alien religions was not so unqualified as to prevent appreciation, for example, of the Platonism in the Fourth Gospel. Numenius, it is in- teresting to note, was one of the few earlier writers who attach themselves to the Hellenic tradition and yet show traces of sympathetic contact with Hebraic religion. He is said to have called Plato ‘“‘a Moses writing Attic?.” On the other side Philo, though by faith a Jew, was as a philosopher essentially Greek both in thought and in terminology. What divided him from the Hellenic thinkers was simply his acceptance of formal limitations on thought prescribed by a positive religion. In concluding the present chapter, a word may be said on the literary style of Plotinus, and on the temper of himself and his school in relation to life. His writing is admittedly diffi- cult; yet it is not wanting in beautiful passages that leave an impression even of facility. He is in general, as Porphyry says, concentrated, “abounding more in thoughts than in words.” The clearness of his systematic thought has been recognised by expositors in spite of obseurities in detail; and the obscurities - often disappear with close study. On the thought when it. comes in contact with life is impressed the character of ethical purity and inwardness which always continued to mark the school. At the same time, there is a return to the Hellenic love of beauty and knowledge for themselves, Stoical elements are incorporated, but the exaggerated “‘tension” of Stoicism has disappeared. While the Neo-Platonists are more con- sistently ascetic than the Stoics, there is nothing harsh or repulsive in their asceticism. The ascetic life was for them not a mode of self-torture, but the means to a happiness which on the whole they succeeded in attaining, Perhaps the explanation is that they had restored the idea of theoretic
1 Suid. and Clem. Strom. (R. P. 7b, 504.) rl ydp dort TlAdtwv 7 Mwuofs arrixlfwy; (M. Théodore Reinach, in T'extes d’auteurs greca et romaine relatifs au Judaisme, p. 175, n, 2, disputes the genuineness of this often-quoted fragment).
Iv} _ AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS 3¢
virtue, against the too narrowly practical tone of the pre- ceding schools, Hence abstinence from the ordinary objects of pursuit left no blank. It was not felt as a deprivation, but as a source of power to think and feel. And in thinking they knew that indirectly they were acting. For theory, with them, is the remoter source of all practice, which bears to it the relation of the outward effect to che inward cause,
CHAPTER V THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM OF PLOTINUS
As idealists and their opponents alike recognise, one great stumbling-block of an idealist philosophy is language. This was seen by Plato, by Plotinus, and by Berkeley, just as from the other side it is seen by the materialist and the dualist. Language was formed primarily to indicate the things of sense, and these have not the characters which idealism, whether ancient or modern, ascribes to reality. Ancient idealism re- fuses to call external things real in the full sense, because they are in flux. The reality is the fixed mental concept or its un- changing intelligible object. Modern idealism regards things as merely “phenomenal,” because they appear to a conscious- ness, and beyond this appearance have no definable reality. Whether reality itself is fixed or changing, may by the modern idealist be left undetermined; but at any rate the groups of perceptions that make up the “objects”’ of daily experience and even of science are not, in his view, objects existing in themselves apart from mind, and known truly as such. Only by some relation to mind can reality be constituted. The way in which language opposes itself to ancient idealism is by its implication that existence really changes. To modern idealism it opposes itself by its tendency to treat external things as absolute objects with a real existence apart from that of all thinking subjects,
The two forms of developed idealism here regarded as typically ancient and modern are the earliest and the latest-— that of Plato on the one side, that of post-Cartesian, and still more of post-Kantian, thinkers on the other. The idealism of Plotinus contains elements that bring it into relation with both. English readers know how Berkeley insists that, if we are to grasp his doctrine, we must attend to the meanings he desires to conyey, and must not dwell on the mere form of
CH. V] THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM OF PLOTINUS, 41
expression, Let us see how Plato and Plotinus deal with the same difficulty.
Plato’s treatment of it may be most readily studied in the © Cratylus. Language, Socrates undertakes to show, has a cer- tain natural conformity to things named. To those who named them, external things mostly presented themselves as in flux. Accordingly, words are full of devices by the makers of lan- guage for expressing gliding and flowing movements. With a little ingenuity and an occasional evasion, those who hold that the true nature of everything is to flow and not to be in any manner fixed, might exhibit the early legislators over human speech as in exact agreement with their philosophical opinions, Yet after all there are some words, though fewer, that appear at first sight to express stability. So that the primitive legislators were not, on the face of things, perfectly consistent. On the whole, however, words suggesting flux predominate. Similarly the early myth-makers, in their deri- vation of all things from Ocean and Tethys, seem to have noticed especially the fact of change in the world, The Heracliteans, therefore, have the advantage in the appeal to language and mythology. Still, their Eleatic opponents may . be right philosophically. The makers of language and myth may have framed words and imagined the origin of things in accordance with what is apparent but not real. Real existence in itself may be stable. If this is so, then, to express philo- sophie thought accurately, it will be necessary to reform language, In the meantime, the proper method in all our inquiries and reasonings must be, to attend to things rather than words,
_ According to the Platonic doctrine, the ‘‘ place of ideas”’ is the soul'. In virtue of its peculiar relations to those stable and permanent existences known by intellect, the individual soul is itself permanent, It gives unity, motion and life to the fluent aggregate of material particles forming its temporary body. It disappears from one body and reappears in another, existing apart in the intervals between its mortal lives. Thus by Plato the opposition of soul and body is brought, as a
1 Arist. De An. iii. 4. 4290 27. (R. P. 251 c.)
42 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [CH.
subordinate relation, under the more general opposition of the stable ideas—the existence of which is not purely and simply in the soul, but is also in some way transcendent—and the flux of material existence. For Plotinus, this subordinate opposi- tion has become the starting-point. He does not dismiss the earlier antithesis; but the main problem with him is not to find permanence somewhere as against absolute flux. He allows in the things of sense also a kind of permanence. His aim is first of all to prove that the soul has a real existence of its own, distinguished from body and corporeal modes of being. For in the meantime body as such—and no longer, as with the Heracliteans, a process of the whole—had been set up by the dominant schools as the absolute reality. By the Epicurcans and Stoics, everything that can be spoken of at all was re- garded as body, or a quality or relation of body, or else as having no being other than “nominal.” The main point of attack for scepticism had been the position common to the naturalistic schools, that external things can be known by direct apprehension as they really are. Neither the Aca- demical nor the Pyrrhonist scepticism, however, had taken the place of the ruling dogmatic system, which was that of the Stoics. Thus the doctrine that Plotinus had to meet was still essentially materialism, made by the sceptical attack less sure of itself, but not dethroned.
The method he adopts is to insist precisely on the para- dexical character of the soul’s existence as contrasted with that of corporeal things. How specious is the view of his opponents he allows, Body can be seen and touched. It re- sists pressure and is spread out in space. Soul is invisible and intangible, and by its very definition unextended. Thus lan- guage has to be strugeled with in the attempt to describe it; and in the end can only be made to express the nature of soul by constraining it to purposes for which most men never think of employing it. What is conclusive, however, as against the materialistic view, is that the soul cannot be described at all except by phrases which would be nonsensical if applied to body or its qualities, or to determinations of particular
bodies. Once the conception of soul has been fixed as that
v] | OF PLOTINUS 43
of an incorporeal reality, body_is seen to admit of a kind of explanation in terms of soul—from which it derives its “form” —whereas the essential nature of soul admitted of no expla-
nation in terms of bod Ene —~Above soul and beneath body, as we shall see, Plotinus has
other principles, derived from earlier metaphysics, by which he is able to construct a complete philosophy, and not merely what would be called in modern phrase a “rational psy- chology.” His psychology, however, is the centre. Within the soul, he finds all the metaphysical principles in some way represented, In it are included the principles of unity, of pure intellect, of moving and vitalising power, and, in some sense, of matter itself, Further, by what may be called his ‘“‘em- pirical psychology,” he prepared the starting-point for the distinctively modern “‘theory of knowledge.”’ This he did, as Prof. Siebeck has shown!, by the new precision he gave to the - conception of consciousness. On this side he reaches forward
to Descartes, as on the other side he looks back to Plato and Aristotle.
1. Psychology.
It is absurd, or rather impossible, says Plotinus at the open- ing of one of his earliest expositions*, that life should be the product of an aggregation of bodies, or that things without understanding should generate mind. If, as some say, the - soul is a permeating air with a certain habitude (rvedpa rrws éyov)—and it cannot be air simply, for there are innumer- able airs without life—then the habitude (ws Exov or cyéors) is either a mere name, and there is really nothing but the “breath,” or it is a kind of being (ray évtwy Tr). In the latter case, it is a rational principle and of another nature than body (Aoxos av ein Tis Kal ov capa Kat duors Etépa). If the soul were matter, it could produce only the effects of the particular kind of matter that it is—giving things its own quality, hot or cold, and so forth—not all the opposite effects actually produced in the organism, The soul is not susceptible of quantitative increase or diminution, or of division. Thus it
1 Geschichte der Psychologie, i. 2. 2 Enn., rv. 7.
a4 ; THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [on.
has not the characters of a thing possessing quantity (drocov dpa n wuxy), The unity in perception would be impossible if that which perceives consisted of parts spatially separated. It is impossible that the mental perception, for example, of & pain in the finger, should be transmitted from the “‘ animal spirit” (vruyexdv mvedpua) of the finger to the ruling part (ro nNYyexovouv) in the organism. For, in that case, there must either be accumulated an infinity of perceptions, or each intermediate part in succession must feel the pain only in itself, and not in the parts previously affected; and so also the ruling part when it becomes affected in its turn. That there can be no such physical transmission as is supposed of a mental perception, results from the very nature of material mass, which consists of parts each standing by itself: one part can have no knowledge of what is suffered by another part. Consequently we must assume a percipient which is everywhere identical with itself. Such a percipient must be another kind of being than body. That which thinks can still less be body than that which perceives. For even if it is not allowed that thought is the laying hold on intelligibles without the use of any bodily organ, yet there are certainly involved in it apprehensions of things without magnitude (apeyéOwv avrirnweis). Such are abstract conceptions, as for
example those of the beautiful and the just. How then can that which is a magnitude think that which is not? Must we suppose it to think the indivisible with that in itself which is divisible? If it can think it at all, it must rather be with some indivisible part of itself, That which thinks, then, cannot be body. For the supposed thinking body has no function as an extended whole (and to be such is its nature as body), since it cannot as a whole come in contact with an object that is ineorporeal.
The soul in relation to the ‘eee according to Plotinus’s own mode of statement, is ‘all in all and all in every part!.” Thus it is in a sense divisible because it is in all the parts of a divisible body. Properly it is indivisible because it is all in the whole and all in each part of it, Its unity is unlike that
+ Enn. rv, 2, lL.
v] OF PLOTINUS 45
of a body, which is one by spatial continuity, having different parts each of which is in a different place; and unlike that of a quality of body such as colour, which can be wholly in many. discontinuous bodies, In the case of a quality, that which is the same in all portions of body that possess it in common is an affection (7ra@nuc), and not an essence (ovaia). Itsidentity is formal, and not numerical, as is the case with the soul!.
In this general argumentation, it will be observed, Plotinus starts from the supposition that the body has a reality other than phenomenal. Allowing this, he is able to demonstrate against his opponents that a reality of a different kind from that of body must also be assumed. In his metaphysics he goes further, and reduces corporeal things in effect to pheno- mena; but in his psychology he continues to take a view nearer that of ‘‘common-sense.”’ Thus he is confronted with the difficulties that have since become familiar about the ““connexion of body and mind,” and the possibility of their interaction. He lays bare in a single saying the root of all such difficulties, How if, in talking of a “mixture” of a corporeal with an incorporeal nature, we should be trying to realise an impossibility, as if one should say that linear mag- nitude is mixed with whiteness?? The solution for psychology is found in the theory that the soul itself remains ‘“unmixed”’ in spite of its union with body; but that it causes the pro- duction of a ‘‘common” or ‘‘dual”’ or ‘“‘composite” nature, which is the subject in perception, By the aid of this inter- mediary, the unity of the soul is reconciled—though not with- out perplexities in detail—with localisation of the organie functions that subserve its activity,
The different parts of the animated body participate in the
1 Cf. Enn, vi. 4, 1. The peculiar relation of the soul, in itself indivisible, to the body, in itself divisible, and so communicating a kind of divisibility to the soul, Plotinus finds indicated by tke “divine enigma” of the “mixture” in the Timaeus, Enn. iv. 2,2; rodro dpa éorl 7d Oelws yueyuévov ‘ris duepiorov Kal del xara Ta abra exovtons [ovclas] xal ris mepl Ta chara yeyvouerns MeproTns tplrov ¢& audotv guvexepacato ovalas eldos.’
3 Enn. 1. 1, 4: ¢nrnréov dé wai tov rpdwov ris wltews, pepmore ov Swards 7, womep Av ef ris Néyou went Oar NevKy ypaupnv, prow 4AAnv addy. This book,
though coming first in Porphyry’s arrangement according to subjects, is given as the last but one.in the chronological order.
46 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM (cH.
soul’s powers in different ways'!. According as each organ of sense is fitted for one special function, a particular power of perception may be said to be there; the power of sight in the eyes, of hearing in the ears, of smell in the nostrils, of taste in the tongue, of touch everywhere. Since the primary organs of touch are the nerves, which have also the power of animal motion, and since the nerves take thcir origin from the brain, in the brain may be placed the starting-point of the actual exercise of all powers of perception and movement. Above | perception is reason, This power has not properly a physical | organ at all, and so is not really in the head; but it was! assigned to the head by the older writers because it com- municates directly with the psychical functions of which the’ rain is the central organ. For these last, as Plotinus remarks, | - have a certain community with reason. In perception there is. 2 kind of judgment; and on reason together with the imagina- | tion derived from perception, impulse follows.
In making the brain central among the organs that are in special relation with mind, Plotinus of course adopts the Platonic as against the Aristotelian position, which made the heart central. At the same time, he incorporates what had since been discovered about the special functions of the ner- vous system, which were unknown to Aristotle as to Plato. The vegctative power of the soul he places in relation with the liver, because here is the origin of the veins and the blood in the veins, by means of which that power causes the nourish- ment of the body. Hence, as with Plato, appetite is assigned to this region, Spirited emotion, in accordance with the Platonic psychology, has its seat in the breast, where is the spring of lighter and purer blood.
Both:pereeptions and memories are ‘‘energics”’ or activities, not mere passive impressions received and stored up in the soul?, Take first the case of the most distinct perception. In sight, when we wish to perccive anything clearly, we direct our vision in a straight line to the object, This outwardly directed activity would not be necessary if the object simply Ieft its impression on the soul, Were this the whole proccss,
1 Enn, rv. 3, 23. | 2 Enn. ty. 6.
v] OF PLOTINUS 47
we should see not the outward objects of vision, but images and shadows of them; so that what we see would be other than the things themselves (@oTe dAXa pév elvas avta Ta MpaywarTa, Ara é Ta nyiv opwyeva). In hearing as in sight, perceptions are energies, not impressions nor yet passive states (47 rvzros, unde metoess). The impression is an articu- lated stroke in the air, on which it is as if letters were written by that which makes the sound. The power of the soul as it were reads those impressions, In the case of taste and smell, the passive affections (77a@n) are one thing; the perceptions and judgments of them are another. Memory of things is pro- duced by exercise of the soul, either generally or in relation to a special class of them. Children remember better because they have fewer things to attend to. Mere multitude of impressions retained, if memory were simply an affair of retaining impressions, would not cause them to be less re- membered, Nor should we need to consider in order to re- mind ourselves; nor forget things and afterwards recall them to mind. The persistence of passive impressions in the soul, if real, would be a mark rather of weakness than of strength, for that which is most fixedly impressed is so by giving way (TO yap évruTwtatToyv Tw eixewv €ott TovovToy). But where there is really weakness, as in the old, both raemory and per- ecption are worse,
The activity of perception, though itself mental, has direct physical conditions, That of memory has not, Memory itself belongs wholly to the soul, though it may take its start from what goes on in the composite being, What the soul directly preserves the memory of, is its own movements, not those of body. Pressure and reaction of bodics can furnish no explana-
tion of a storing-up of mental “impressions” (tv7ov), which are not magnitudes, That the body, through being in flux, is really a hindrance to memory, is illustrated by the fact that often additions to the store cause forgetfulness, whereas memory emerges when there is abstraction and purification?, Something from the past that was retained but Is latent may
1 Enn. iv, 3, 26: wpoorsOeudvwy trivdv djOn, év 5 adapéce Kal xaddpce AvakvmrTcs WOAAAKLS |] LYN.
48 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [on. .
be recalled when other memories or the impressions of the moment are removed, Yet, though it is not the composite being but the soul itself that possesses memory, memories come to it not only from its spontaneous activity, but from its activity incited by that which takes place in consequence of its association with the body, There are memories of what has been done and suffered by the dual nature, though the memories themselves, as distinguished from that which in- cites them, are purely mental. Thus indirectly the physical organism has a bearing on memory as well as on perception. It follows, however, from the general view, that memory as well as reason belongs to the “separable” portion of the soul, Whether those who have attained to the perfection of virtue will, in the life of complete separation from the body, retain indefinitely their memories of the past, is another question. ‘The discussion of it belongs rather to the ethics than to the pure psychology of Plotinus.
To specific questions about sense-perception, Plotinus de- votes two short books, both of which are concerned primarily vith vision. Discussing the transmission of light?, he finds that, like all perception, seeing must take place through some kind of body. The affection of the medium, however, need not be identical with that of the sense-organ. A reed, for example, through which is transmitted the shock of a torpedo, is not affected like the hand that receives the shock. The air, he concludes, is no instrument in vision, If it were, we should be able to see without looking at the distant obicct; just as we are warmed by the heated air we are in contact with. In the ease of heat too, Plotinus adds, we are warmed at the same ~ time with the air, rather than by means of it, Solid bodies receive more of the heat than does the air intervening between them and the heated object. In pursuance of this argument, he remarks that even the transmission of sound is not wholly dependent on a stroke in an aerial medium. Tones vary ac- cording to the differences of the bodies from which the sound starts, and not simply according to the shock, Furthermore, sounds are transmitted within our bodies without the inter-
oS IMA IS BY Qh 2 Enn. iv. 5..
v] pang OF PLOTINUS | et ag
mediation of air; as when bones are bent or sawn!. The shock itself, whether in air or not, when it arrives at perception is the sound. Light Plotinus defines as an incorporeal energy of the luminous body directed outwards. Being-an “energy,”’ and not a mere quality (rozorns), it is capable of overleaping an interval without becoming inherent in that which occupies the interval; as, in fact, it leaves no impression on the air passed through. It can exist in the interspace without a per- cipicnt, though a percipient, if present, would be affected by it.
For positive explanation here, Plotinus falls back on the idca, borrowed from the Stoies, of a ‘sympathy ” binding to- gether remote but Jike parts of the universe. The other book mentionced?, which discusses the question why things scen at a distanee appear small, is interesting from its points of contact with Berkeley, To solve the problem, Plotinus sets out in quest of something more directly psychological than the “visual angle,” Is not one reason for differences of estimate, he asks, because our view of magnitude is in an ‘‘accidental” relation to colour, which is what we primarily behold‘? To perecive how large any magnitude really is, we must be near it, so as to be able to go over its parts in succession. At a distance, the parts of the object do net permit accurate dis- cernment of their relative colouring, since the colours arrive faint (@wvdpa), Faintness in colours corresponds to smallness in magnitude; both have in common “the less” (70 7TTov). Thus the magnitude, following the colour, is diminished pro- portionally (ava XNoyor). The nature of the affection, however, becomes plainer in things of varied colours, Confusion of colours, Whether in near or distant objects, causes apparent diminution of size, beeause the parts do not offer differences by which they ean be accurately distinguished and so measured §, Magnitudes also of the same kind and of like colours are
' Enn, tv, 5, 5: ovx €v dépt, GANG suyKxpoticavros Kai mdijtavTos AANO Gdov* olov Kal dorav Kdpyers mpds ddAnAa TaparpiPondvuw aépos wi dvyTos peratt Kal Wpioes.
2 Enn. i. 8. > Cf. Theory of Vision, § 79.
4 Enn, 18, 1: 87+ kara ouuBeBnxds opara: To péyeOos TOD XpwuaTos rpwrus Oewpovudvor.
5 Cf, Theory of Vision, § 56.
Ww. 4
BODY THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM fou,
deceptive because the sight slips away; having, for precisely
the same reason as.in the ease of confused colours, no hold on the parts, Again, distant objects look near at hand because there is loss of visible detail in the intervening scenery. Close as all this comes to Berkeley, at least in psychological method, the incidental remark comes still closer, that that to which we primarily refer visible magnitude appears to be touch. This occurs in a question about the “magnitude” of sound, to which reference is made by way of illustrating the analogy of great and small in different sense-perceptions?.
Feeling, in the sense of pleasure and pain, according to Plotinus, belongs primarily to the animated body, in the parts of which it is localised, The perception of it, but eal the feeling itself, belongs to the soul. Sometimes, however, in speaking of the fecling of pleasure or pain, we include along with it the accompanying perception. Corporal desires too have their origin from the common nature of the animated body. That this is their source is shown by the differences, in respect of desires, between different times of life, and between persons in health and disease. In his account of desire and aversion, Plotinus notes the coincidence between mental and bodily movements’, The difference between the affection of the animated body on the one side and the soul’s clear per- ception of it on the other, applics both to appetitive and to irascible emotion’. Of these the second is not derived from the first, but both spring from a common root. That its origin cannot be entirely independent is shown by the fact that those whoare less eager after bodily pleasures are less prone to anger and irrational passions. To explain the impulse (op7)) to repel actively the cause of injury, we must suppos.: perception added to the mere resentment (ayavax«tnors), which, as a passion, is primarily a boiling-up of the blood. The “trace of soul” on
1 Enn. us. 8, Lb: rive yap mpdrws 7d év ry Quvy péyedos, Womep Soxet TH ady 7d Opwpevor ;
= Enn. rv. 4, 18-21.
3 Enn. tv. 4, 20: x ris dduuns eylvero n yvwors, Kal dmayew éx TOU roovvTos 7d mébos 7 Wuxi Bovropérny éroler rhv Pvyiy, kal Tod mpwrov waddvTos diddaKovros TovTo devyorrés ws Kai avrov é€v TH GuaTOAN.
* Enn. Iv. 4, 28.
v] OF PLOTINUS |
which this kind of emotion depends (ro éxmecov eis Oupov Uyvos) has its seat in the heart.
_Error too arises from the common nature, by which right reason becomes weak, as the wisest counsellor in an assembly may be overborne by the general clamour', The rational powey, with Plotinus as with Aristotle, is in its own nature
“unmixed”; but it has to manifest itself under conditions of time and nodbnion to the composite being. Further dis- cussion of these points will in the main come better under the head of metaphysics than of psychology. A distinctively psychological theory, however, is the explicit transformation of the Platonic ‘“‘reminiscence” into a doctrine of “innate ideas”’ potentially present. The term “memory,” Plotinus observes, is improperly applicd to the intellectual.cnergising of the soul in accordance with its innate principles*. The. reason why the older writers ascribed memory and reminis- cence to the soul when it thus energises, was apparently be- cause it is then energising in accordance with powers it always had (as it has now latent memories) but docs not always bring into action, and especially cannot bring into action on its first arrival in the world. In this place for one Plotinus does not in the least fail to recognise that there has been scientific pro- gress since the time of those whom he calls “the ancients.”
The higher and the tuwer powers of the soul meet in the imaginative faculty (bavracia, To havtagtixov), which is the psychical organ of memory and self-consciousness. By this view the dispersion is avoided that would result from assigning memory of desires to the desiring part of the soul, memories of perception to the perceiving part, and memories of thought to the thinking part. Thought is apprehended by the imagi- nation as ina mirror; the notion (vonua) at first indivisible and implicit being conveyed to it by an explicit discourse (Xovos). Kor thought and the apprehension of thought are not the same (aAXo yap 1) vonats, Kal GAXo 1) THS vorjTEws avTi- Anis); the former can exist without the latter. That which thus apprehends thought apprehends perceptions also*.
' inn. iv. 4, 17. 2 Ena, tv. 3, 25. 3 nn. ty. 3, 28-30.
52 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [CH. :
Here we come to the psychological conception of “conscious- ness,” which Prof. Sicbeck has traced through its formative stages to its practically adequate expression by Plotinus'. By Plato and Aristotle, as he points out, such expressions are used as the “seeing of sight,” and, at a higher degree of generality, the “perceiving of perception” and the “thinking of thought”’;
ut they have no perfectly general term for the consciousness with which we follow any mental process whatever, as distin- guished from the process itself. Approximations to such terms were made in the post-Aristotclian period by the Stoics and others, but it was Plotinus who first gained complete mastery of the idea. Sometimes he speaks of “‘common perception” (cuvatc@nors) in a generalised sense, His most usttal expres- sion is that of an ‘“uccompaniment” (srapaxodovOnars) of its own mental activities by the soul. “‘Self-consciousness,”’ in its distinctive meaning, is expressed by “ accompanying oneself” (zapaxonrovbeiy éavtd). With these terms are joined expres- sions for mental “synthesis” (evv@eows and ovvecis) as 2 unitary activity of the soul in reference to its contents.
Important as the coneeption of consciousness became for modern thought, it is not for Plotinus the highest. Prof. Siebeck himself draws attention to one remarkable passage? in which he points out that many of our best activities, both theoretical and practical, arc unaccompanied at the time by consciousness of them; as for example reading, especially when we are reading intently; similarly, the performance of brave actions; so that there is a danger lest consciousness should make the activities it accompanies feebler (@oTe Tas TmapaxonovOncers xivduvevery ApvdpoTéepas aUTAS TAS evEepycias als mapaxorovOodcr motety). The rank assigned to intro- spective consciousness of mental activities is similar to that which is assigned to memory*. It is above sense, but lower than pure intellect, which energises with more perfection in its absence, The organ of introspection and of memory, as we have seen, is the same,
The highest mode of subjective life, next to the complete
! Geschichte der Psychologie, i. 2, pp. 33! ff. 2 Enn. 1, 4, 10. 3 Enn. tv. 4, 2.
yy as OF PLOTINUS 53
unification in which even thought disappcars, is intellectual self-knowledge. Here the knower is identical with the known. On this too Plotinus is not without keen psychological obser- vations, apart from the metaphysical developments next to be considered. The strong impression of a sense-perception, he remarks, cannot consist with the attainment of this intellec- tual unity. Whatever exaggerates feeling lowers the activity of thought. The perception of evils, for example, carries with it a more vehement shock, but less clear knowledge. We are more ourselves in health than in disease, but disease makes itself more felt, as being other than ourselves. The attitude of self-knowledge, Plotinus adds, is quite unlike that in which we know an object by external perception. Even the knowcer can:ot place himself outside like a perceived object and gaze upon himself with the eyes of the body".
Within the mind as its very centre is the supreme unity, beyond even self-knowledge. This is one with the meta- physical cause of all things, and must first be discussed as such, since the proof of its reality is primarily metaphysical. Its psychological relations will best be dealt with in the chapter on the mysticism of Plotinus,
2. Metaphysics.
Apart from a unifying principle, nothing could exist. All would be formless and indeterminate, and so would have properly no being. A principle of unity has already been recognised in the soul. It is not absent in natural things, but here it is at a lower stage; body having less unity than soul because its parts are locally separate. In soul, however, we cannot rest as the highest term, Particular souls, by reason of what they have in common, can only be understood as derived from a general soul, which is their cause but is not identical with all or any of them. Again, the general soul falls short of complete unity by being the principle of life and motion to the world, which is other than itself. What it points to as a
higher unifying principle is absolutely stable intellect, think-
1 Enn. y. 8, 11: ob8¢ yap 008? avros divarar Ew Oels éavTov ws alaOnrdy ovra 6pParois Tors TOU cowuaros BAéweev.
54 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM PICs
ing itself and not the world, but containing as identical with its own nature the eternal ideas of all the forms, general dnd particular, that become explicit in the things of time and space. Even intellect has still a certain duality, because, though intelligence and the intelligible are the same, that which thinks distinguishes itself from the object of thought. Beyond thought and the being which, while identical with it, is distinguishable in apprehension, is the absolute unity that is simply identical with itself. This is other than all being and is the cause of it. It is the good to which all things aspire; for to particular things the greatest unification attain- able is the greatest good; and neither the goodness and unity they possess, nor their aspiration after a higher degree of it, can be explained without positing the absolute One and the absolute Good as their source and end,
By the path of which this is a slight indication, Plotinus ascends to the summit of his metaphysics. The proof that the first principle has really been attained, must be sought partly in the demonstration of the process by which the whole system of things is derived from it, partly in individual experience. This last, being incommunicable—though not to be had with- out due preparation—belongs to the mystical side of the doctrine. Of the philosophical doctrine itself, the method is not mystical. The theory of “emanation” on which it de- pends is in reality no more than a very systematic expression of the principle common to Plato and Aristotle, that the lower is to be explained by the higher’.
The accepted term, “emanation,” is derived from one of the metaphors by which Plotinus illustrates the production of each order of being from the next above. He compares the cause of all to an overflowing spring which by its excess gives rise to that which comes after it?, This similarly produces the next, and so forth, till at length in matter pure indetermination is reached. The metaphorical character of this representation,
1 See for example Enn. v. 9,4: od yap 54, ws olovrat, yuxh vodv redewOeioa - yevug wbdev yap 7d duvduer evepyeia eoras, ph rod els évépyerav Ayovros alriov Gyros ;...610 Set 7a mpdra evepyela riGecbar al ampooded wat Téa.
2 Enniy, 2, le ;
vy] OF PLOTINUS 66
however, is carefully insisted on. There is no diremption of the higher principle. God and mind do not disperse themselves in individual souls and in natural things, though these are nowhere cut off from their causes. There is a continual process from first to last, of which the law is the same throughout. Each producing cause remains wholly in its proper seat (é€v 77 ¢ otxeia €Spa), while that which is produced takes an inferior station’. The One produces universa] Mind, or Intellect that is one with the Intelligible. Intellect produces the Soul of the Whole. This produces all other existences, but without itself lapsing. Nothing within the series of. the three intelligible principles can be said to lapse in production; the term being applicable only to the descent of the individual soul. The : order throughout, both for the intelligible causes and for the visible universe, is a logical order of causation, not an order in time. All the producing causes and their effects in every grade always existed and always will exist. The production by the higher causes has the undeviating character of natural necessity, and is not by voluntary choice and discursive reason, which are secondary resultants within the world of particulars.
This philosophical meaning Plotinus makes clear again and _again, His metaphors are intended simply as more or less in- adequate illustrations. One that comes nearer to his thought than that of the overflowing spring, is the metaphor of illumin- ation by a central source of light; for according to his own | theory light is an incorporeal energy projected without loss. Since, however, it is still an energy set going from a body, he admits that even this comparison has some inexactitude. In this mode of expression, Mind is the eternal “irradiation” of . the One?, As Mind looks back to the One, Soul looks back to Mind; and this looking back is identical with the process of generation,
Plotinus himself traces the idea of this causal series to Plato, for whom, he says, the Demiurgus is Intellect, which is pro- duced by the Good beyond mind and being, and in its turn
ISinn Vere
* Enn. v. 1, 6: wepitanyuw €& abrot pév, €€ abroi 5¢ pévovros, ofoy ‘nrlov 7d mepi atrov Naumpov pus mepiOdor, éf avrod cel yevywuevov pévorTos.
-
56 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [CH,
produces Soult. This historical derivation, as we have seen, was accepted by Porphyry, Plotinus goes on to interpret earlier philosophers from the same point of view. Ile recog-
‘ces, however, that the distinctions between the One in its .
‘erent senses drawn by the Platonic Parmenides were not
ide with that exactitude by Parmenides himself, Aristotle, he says, coming later, makes the primal reality separable in- deed and intelligible, but deprives it of the first rank by the assertion that it thinks itself. To think itself belongs to Mind, but not to the One?.
As in the nature of things there are three principles, so also with us*. For there is reality in this world of ours, and not a mere semblance. The virtue and knowledge here are not simply images of archetypes yonder in the intelligible world, If indeed we take the world here not as meaning simply the visible aspect of things, but as including also the soul and what it contains, everything is “here” that is ‘‘there‘,”’
The order of first, second and third in the intelligible prin- ciples is not spatial5. In the intelligible order, body may be said to be in soul, soul in mind, and mind in the One®, By such expressions is to be understood a relation of dependence, not the being in a place in the sense of locality. If any one objects that place can mean nothing but boundary or interval of space, let him dismiss the word and apply his understanding to the thing signified’?, The incorporeal and unextended in which exténded hody participates is not to be thought of as a point; for mass, which includes an infinity of points, partici- pates in it. Nor yet must we think of it as stretched out over the whole of the mass: but of the whole extended mass as participating in that which is itself without spatial interval,
1 Enn. v. 1,8; dore WAdrwva eldévac dx perv tayabou rav vodv, éx 5¢ rod vod THY Yuxty.
2 Enn. v. 1, 9.
> Enn. y, 1, 10: wowep 6¢ év TH pice TpTTA Ta’TA dort TA Elpnucva, olTw pH vouivey Kai map’ nuiy ravra elvac.
4 Enn. v. 9, 13: wdvra évraida, 00 Kakel.
5 Enn. vi. 5, 4. 6 Enn, v. 5, 9.
7 Enn. vi, 4, 2: ryv rod dvéuaros ddeis xarryopiav rT diavoia 7d Aeyuevov AauBavérw. S Vaio Wile 24, 1B}
v] OF PLOTINUS | ea em aga 1504 This is the general relation of the visible to the intelligible world. As non-spatial dependence and implication, we have found that it runs through the intelligible causes themselves. In what relates to the difference between the extended and _ the unextended, the character of intelligible being is already perfectly determinate not only in soul, but in soul as the principle of organic life. For that principle transcends the opposition between small and great, If it is to be called small as having no extension of its own, it may equally be called great as being adequate to the animation of the whole body with which it is connected, while this is growing in bulk!, The soul is all in the germ; yet in a manner it contains the full- grown plant or animal, In itself it undergoes no change of dimensions, Though the principle of growth, it does not grow; nor, when it causes motion, is it moved in the motion which it causes?, The primal One from which all things are is everywhere and nowhere, As being the cause of all things, it is everywhere. As being other than all things, it is nowhcre, If it were only “every where,” and not also “nowhere,” it would be all things?, No predicate of being can be properly applied to it. To call it the cause is to predicate something, not of it but of ourselves, who have something from it while it remains in itself*, This is not the “fone” that the soul attains by abstracting from magnitude and multitude till it arrives at the point and the arithmetical unit, It is greatest of all, not by magnitude but by potency; in such a manner that it is also by potency that which is without magnitude, It is to be regarded as infinite, not because of the impossibility of measuring or counting it, but because of the impossibility of comprehending its power’. It is perfectly self-sufficing; there is no good that it should seck to acquire by volition, It is good not in relation to itself, but to that which participates in it. And indeed that which ' Enn. vi. 4, 5: waprupet 5¢ ro peyddrw Tis Yuxfs Kal 7d pelfovos Tov byxou ywoudvou Pbdvew eri wav alrod Thy altny uxt, 7 ew éddrrovos OyKoU 7p
2 Enn, mt. 6, 4. 3 Enn. ut. 9, 3. Enon. vi. 9, 3. — :
5 Enn. vi. 9,6: Anwréov 5¢ xal Gwecpov abro ob Tw adieciT7}TW 7 TOD peyéBous ] TOU apiOmov, GAAa TH arEepirAjrTw THs duvduews.
58 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [CH, .
imparts good is not properly to be called ‘‘good,” but “the Good” above all other goods, ‘That alone neither knows, nor has what it. does not know; but being One present to itself it needs not thought of itself.” Yet in a sense it is all beings because all are from it!; and it generates the thought that is one with bzing. As it is the Good above all goods, so, though without shape or form, it possesses beauty above beauty. The love of it is infinite; and the power or vision by which mind thinks it is intellectual love’.
Any inconsistency there might appear to be in making as- sertions about the One is avoided by the position that nothing —not even that it “‘is” any more than that it is “‘good”’—1is to be affirmed of it as a predicate. The names applied to it are meant only to indicate its unique reality’, The question is then raised, whether this reality is best indicated by names that signify freedom, or chance, or necessity. Before we can know whether an expression signifying freedom (10 éf’ nyiv) may be applied in any sense to the gods and to God (émi Geovs eal éTt pGAXov ert Geov), we must know in what sense it is applicable to ourselves‘. If we refer that which is in our power to will (BovAnaus), and place this in right reason (é€y Aoyeo op9s), we may—by stretching the terms a little—reach the conclusion that an unimpeded theorctic activity such as we ascribe in its perfection to the gods who live according to mind, is properly called free. The objection that to be free in this sense is to be “enslaved to one’s own nature” is dismissed with the remark that that only is enslaved which, being with- held by something else, has it not in its power to go towards the good’, The view that seems implied in the objection, | namely, that freedom consists in action contrary to the nature of the agent, is an absurdity®, But to the supreme principle, from which all things have being and power of their own, how ean the term be applied in any sense? The audacious thought might be started that it “happens to be” as it is, and is not
1 Enn. vi. 7, 32: otdév oty roiro rav ovtwy Kal mavta’ older pév, bri tiorepa Ta évra, mavra be, OT ef aro.
* Enn. vi, 7, 35. Vlotinus’s actual expression is vols épar,
3 Enn. vi. 7, 38. 4 Enn. vi. 8, J.
5 Enn. vi. 8, 4. ® Enn. vt. 8, 7.
yy ‘OF PLOTINUS | | 59
master of what it is, but is what it is, not from itself; and so, that it has no freedom, since its doing or not doing what it ‘has been necessitated to do or not to do, is not in its own power, To this the reply is, that we cannot say that the primal cause is by chance, or that it is not master of its . origin; because it has not come to be!, The whole difficulty scems to arise from our positing space (ywpav xal rorov) as a kind of chaos, and then introducing the principle into our imaginary space; whereupon. we inquire whence and how it came there?, We get rid of the difficulty by assigning to the One no place, but simply the being as it is,—and this because we are bound so to express ourselves by necessity of speech, Thus, if we are to speak of it at all, we must say that it is lord of itself and free. Yet it must be allowed that there is here a certain impropriety, for to be lord of itself belongs properly to the essence (ovcia) identical with thought, and the One is before this essence*, With a similar impropriety, its will and its essence may be said to be the same. Each particular being, striving after its good, wills that more than to be what it is, and then most thinks that it is, when it par- ticipates in the good, It wills even itself, so far only as it has the good. Carry this over to the Good which is the principle of all particular goods, and its will to be what it is, is seen to be inseparable from its being what it is. In this mode of speech, accordingly,—having to choose between ascribing to it on the one hand will and creative activity in relation to itself, on the other haud a contingent relation which is the name of unreason,—we must say, not that it is “what it happened to be,” but that it is ‘‘what it willed to be‘.”” We might say also that it is of necessity what it is, and could not be otherwise; but the more exact statement is, not that it is thus because it could not be otherwise, but because the best is thus, It is not taken hold of by necessity, but is itself
' Enn. vi. 8, 7: 7d 62 mpwroy ore kata Tixny dv Ad-youmev, ore Ob KUpLov THs alirod yevéoews, Ort unde yéeyove. 2 Enn. vi. 8, 11. 5 Enn., vi. 8, 12. 4 Enn, vi. 8, 13: Wore obx dmep Cruxév eat, GAN Gwep HBovdAHjOn aires. Cf. e: 20: avrés €or xal 0 mapd-ywv éaursy.
60 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [ox.
the necessity and law of other things?. It is love, and the object of love, and love of itself?. That which as it. were de- sires and that which is desired are one*. When we, observing some such nature in ourselves, rise to this and become this alone, what should we say but that we are more than free and more than in our own power? By analogy with mind, it may be called operation (€vépynua) and energy, Its energy and as it were waking (olov éypyyopats) are eternalt, Reason and mind are derived from.the principle as a circle from its centre’, To allow that it could not make itself other than it did, in the sense that it can produce only good and not evil, is not to limit its freedom and absolute power, The power of choice between opposites belongs to a want of power to persevere in what is best*. The One and Good alone is in truth free; and must be thought and spoken of, though in reality beyond speech and thought, as creating itself by its own energy before all being’.
To the question, why the One should create anything be- yond itself, Plotinus answers that since all things, even those without life, impart of themselves what they can, the most perfect and the first good cannot remain in itself as envious, and the potency of all things as without power®, As that Is the potency of all things, Mind, which it first generates, is all things actually. For knowledge of things in their immaterial essence is the things themselves®. Mind knows its objects not, like perception, as external, but as one with itself!®, Still this unity, as has been said, involves the duality of thinking and
IE nev rerse LO
2 Enn. vi. 8, 15: cal épacutov xai épws 0 atiros Kal avrod tpws.
3 Tbid.: 7d olov édiépevov TG epee ev.
* nn. vr..8, 16. * Enn. vi. 8, 18.
6 Enn. vi. 8, 21: cal yap 7d 7a dvrexeiueva StivacPa aduvaulas earl rot émi Tov apiorou pévery,
7 Since it is energy in the Aristo’clian sense, or complete realisation, it is dvevépyntov. That is, there is no higher realisation to which it can proceed. Cf. Enn. v. 6, 6: dws wey yap ovdeuia évépyea exe. ab madi évépyecav. In this sense, it is said (Enn. t. 7, 1) to be beyond energy (éréxewa évepyelas).
5 Enn. v. 4, I.
2 Enn. v. 4, 2. Cf. Enn. v. 9, 5: 4 ray dvev vAns émorhun ravrdy TY WpPayLare.
BO TSG We a, St
v] “i OF PLOTINUS 61
being thought, and hence is not the highest, but the second in order, of the supramundane causes. Within its indivisible unity it contains the archetype of the whole visible world and of all that was or is or is to be existent in it. The relation of its Ideas to the whole of Mind resembles that of the pro- positions of a science to the sum of knowledge which consists of them. By this comparison, which frequently recurs, Plotinus seeks. to. convey the notion of a diversity in unity not expressed as local separation of parts!, The archetype of the world being thus existent, the world in space is necessarily produced because its production is possible. We shall see this “possibility”? more exactly formulated in the theory of matter. The general statement is this: that, since there is the ‘‘intelli- gential and all-potent nature” of mind, and nothing stands between that and the production of a world, there must be a formed world corresponding to the formative power. In that which is formed, the ideas are divided; in one part of space the idea of the sun takes shape, in another the idea of man, The archetype embraces all in its unity without spatial division?,
Thus, while supramundane intellect contains all real being, it has also the productive power by which the essential forms of things are made manifest in apparent separation from itself and from one another. Differences, so far as they belong to the real being, or “form,” of things here, are produced by pre- existent forms in the ideal world. So far as they are merely local and temporal, they express only a necessary mode of manifestation of being, under the condition of appearing at a grcater degree of remoteness from the primal cause. What then is the case with individuality? Does it consist merely in differences of position in space and time, the only true reality being the ideal form of the “kind”’; or are there ideal forms of individuals? Plotinus concludes decisively for the latter alternative’, There are as many formal differences as there,
' See for example Enn. v. 9, 8.
2 Enn. v. 9, 9: picews voepas Kal ravtoduvdpuou otons «al ovdevds dtelpyovros, Mybevds Svtos weTatv TovTou Kai Tot d6éfag0a Suvapcvon, avayxn TO Mev KoouNnOjrat,
70 5¢ Koopjoat. Kal ro mer Koounber xe: 7d eldos meuepiopucvory, d\daXOU ayOpwmror kai dd\Naxot nor’? 7d Se vy évl wavra.
3 Sce especially Enn. v. 7: Wept rod ef «al tov xa’ Exaora forw ely.
62 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [cH.
are individuals, and all pre-exist in the intelligible world. What must be their mode of pre-existence we know from the nature of Intellect as already set forth, All things there are together yet distinct. Universal mind contains all! particular minds; and each particular mind expresses the whole in its
wn manner, As Plotinus says in one of those bursts of en- thusiasm where his scientifie doctrine passes into poetry: “They see themselves in others. For all things are trans- parent, and there is nothing dark or resisting, but every one -is manifest to every one internally and all things are mani- fest; for light is manifest to light. For every one has all things in himself and again sees in another all things, so that all things are everywhere and all is all and each is all, and the splendour is infinite. For each of them is great, since the small also is great. And the sun there is all the stars, and again each and all are the sun. In each, one thing is prec- eminent above the rest, but it also shows forth all}.” The wisdom that is there is not put together from separate acts of knowledge, but is a single whole. It does not consist of many brought to one; rather it.is resolved into multitude from unity. By way of illustration Plotinus adds that the Egyptian sages, whether they scized the truth by accurate knowledge or by some native Insight, appear to have cx- pressed the intuitive character of intellectual wisdom in making a picture the sign of each thing’.
In the intelligible world identical with intellect, as thus con- ecived, the time and space in which the visible world appears, though not “there” as such, pre-exist in their causes. So, too, mm the rational order, does perception, before organs of per- ception are formed, This must be so, Plotinus urges, because pereeption and its organs are not a product of deliberation, but are present for example in the pre-existent idea of man, by an eternal necessity and law of perfection, their causes being involved in the perfection of mind*, Not only man, but all animals, plants and clements pre-exist ideally in the
1 Enn.v.8,4. 2? Enn.v. 8,6. Thisis quite an isolated reference to Egypt. > Enn. vt. 7, 3: &yxecrae 70 alaOnrixov elvac kal of'rws alaOyrixdy ev TH efdet e LSND . ‘ a . ’ - ~ . “ bro adiov avdyxns Kai TeNedrnTOs, vou cv alTw ExovTos, eitrep TédeLos, TAS airlas.
v] OF PLOTINUS - 63
intelligible world. For infinite variety is demanded in order that the whole, as one living being, may be perfect in all its parts and to the utmost degree. There, the things we call irrational pre-exist in their rational Jaws!. Nor is the thing here anywhere really mindless, We call it so when it is with- out mind in act; but each part is all in potency, depending as it docs on its ideal cause. In the order of ideal causes there is as it were a stream of living beings from a single spring; as if all sensible qualities were combined in one quality without losing their distinctions?, The particular is not merely the one particular thing that it is called. Rational division of it always brings something new to Jight; so that, in this sense, each part of the whole is infinite, This infinity, whether of whole or part, is one of successive involution. The process of division is not that of bisection, but is like the unfolding of wrappings*, The whole intelligible world may be presented to imagination as a living sphere figured over with every kind of living countenance®, __ Universal mind involves the essence of every form of reason, in one Reason as it were, great, perfect, embracing all (els oloy AOryos, wéyas, TéAELOS, TaVTas TrepLtéywv). As the most exact reasoning would caleulate the things of nature for the best, mind has all things in the rational laws that are before reason- ing’, Each thing being what it is separately, and again all things being in one together, the complex as it were and com- position of all as they are in one is Mind’, In the being that
' KEnn. ve. 7, 9: éxet dé xal 7d ddovyov Aeyduevov Aovyos Fv, Kal 7d dvovv vous jy, érel kal 6 vody immov vos cart, Kai 7» vdnots irmou vois HY.
2 Enon. vi. 7, 12: olov ef res qv wobrys pla mdoas év abr fxovea Kai cwvovca Tus wovdrnTas, yAVKUTHS weT EtwOlas, Kal duod oivwons TowTNS Kai YUAGY aTdvTwr Siders Kal ypwudrwr Opes Kal doa agpal ywwaKxovow, eorwoar dé kai daa axoal axobovot, mavTa mé\n Kal puOmos was,
3 lonn. vi. 7, 13: vods...00...Tavrov Kal év Te tv wéper, AAG WavTa’ ere Kai TO év pepe ai oby év, dda kal Toro ametpov diaiporiuevov. Cf. Knn. vt. 5, 5 on the infinite nature (Greepos gos) of being.
4 Enn, vi. 7, 14: pip ear’ €fO, GAN els TO vos del.
5 Eon. ve. 7, 15 fin.
6 Enn, vi. 2, 21; ws yap dv 6 dxpisécraros Aoy.ouds NoyloatTo ws dpiora, obrws éxew wdvra ev Tots Ndyous pd AoyiapMov ovat.
7 Enn, vi. 2, 2b: xwpls mev exdotwv a éativ dvrwy, ouod 5’ ab év évi dvTwr, 7 wavTwy cv evi OvTwy oiov guuTAOK? Aal civOccts vous EoTL,
64 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [CH.
is mind, all things are together, not only undivided by position in space, but without reference to process in time. This characteristic of intellectual being may be called ‘“‘eternity!.” Time helongs to Soul, as eternity to Mind?, Soul is necessarily produced by Mind, as Mind by the primal One?. Thus it is in contact at: once with eternal being, and with the temporal things which it generates by the power it reccives from its eause. Having its existence from supramundane intellect, it has reason in act so far as that intellect is contemplated by it‘. The Soul of the whole is perpetually in this relation to Mind; particular souls undergo alternation; though even of them there is ever something in the intelligible world’, Soul has for its work, not only to think—for thus it would in no way differ from pure intelleet—-but to order and rule the things after it. These come to be, because production could not stop at intelligibles, the last of which is the rational soul, but must go on to the limit of all possible existence®.
In the relation of the many souls to the one which includes all, Soul imitates Mind. It too is necessarily pluralised; and in the inherent distinctions of the particular souls their coming to birth under different sensible manifestations is already ne- cessitated. The one soul is the same in ali, asin cach part of a system of knowledge the whole is potentially present’, ‘To soul, the higher intellect furnishes the reasons of all its operations’. Knowledge in the rational soul, so far as it is of
Enn, 11, 7, 4: airy 7 didbects avrod Kal diiais ein av aly.
Enn. m1. 7,11. Cf. Enn. iv. 4,15: aidv pev mepi voiv, xpivos dé mepl puyny. Enn. v, “a 7: Wuxi yap yevve vos, vols wy TéXewos. Kal yap TéNEov SvTa yevvar &6e, al un dvvayuy ovcav TocaTny dyovoy eivac.
eo w=
4 Enn. v. 1, 3: 9 Te obv brdoracts airy aro vow 6 Te éveyryela ASYos VOU alTH épwpévov,
5 Enn. tv, 8,8: 00 waca od’ ) Nmerepa Wuxi) du, ANN core Te avrAs Ev TH vonT! del.... maga yap WuxH Exe, Te Kai TOD KadTW Tpds TO OWKA Kal TOO Gyw mpds VOY.
® Enn. iv. 8, 3: mpoo\aBodca yap TW voepa elvat kai A\Xo, cal? 5 Thy oixeiav écxev brdcracw, vous ovx tucwev, Cxer TE Epyov Kal avry, cimep Kal wav, 6 ay H Tw dvTwv, Brérovea dé mpos ev 7d wpo €auT7s voet, els 5€ EauThv owler EauvTHy, els Se TO per’ avriy Koopet Te Kal Orocxes kal Ape avrovu’ Ore pnde oldv TE HY OTHVAL Ta wdyra év TH vonTW, Suvauévou epet*s Kal AANov yeverUar éAarrovos pév, avayKatoy 6€ elvac, elrrep kai 7d mpd avrov. 7 nn, iv. 9, 5.
* Enn, iv. 9, 3. When the general soul impresses form on the clements of the world, vois is the xopryds Tar Noywr,
v] OF PLOTINUS 65
intelligibles, is each thing that it thinks, and has from within both the object of thought and the thinking (76 re vonroy thy Te vonowv), since mind is within’, Plotinus fully recognises the difficulty of the question: How, if Being and Mind and Soul are everywhere numerically one, and not merely of the same formal essence (ojoedés), can there yet be many beings and minds and souls?? The answer, in the case of soul, as of mind and being, is that the one is many by intrinsic differ- ence, not by local situation (éreporntt,ov Tror@). The plurality of souls, as has been said, is in the rational order prior to their embodiment. In the Soul of the Whole, the many souls are present to one another without being alienated from them- selves, They are not divided by spatial limits—just as the many portions of knowledge in each soul are not—and the one can contain in itself all. After this manner the nature of soul is infinite’, The general soul can judge of the individual- ised affections in each without becoming conscious to itself in each that it has passed judgment in the rest also‘, Each. of us is a whole for himself, yet all of us, in the reality that is all, are together one. Looking outward, we forget our unity. Turning back upon ourselves, either of our own accord or seized upon as the goddess seized the hair of Achilles, we behold ourselves and the whole as one with the God within§, The soul is the principle of life and motion to all things; motion being an image of life in things called lifeless, The heaven is one by the power of soul, and this world is divine through it*, The soul of the whole orders the world in accord- ance with the general reasons of things, as animal bodies are fashioned into “‘microcosms”’ under the particular law of the organism’. It creates not by deliberative intelligence, like —
1 Enn, v. 9, 7. ? Enn. vi. 4, 4.
8 Enn, vi. 4, 4 fin.: oltws dorly Areipos ) roxavTn pvois.
4 Enn. vi. 4, 6: da rl obv ob cuvacobdverar 7 érépa ris érépas xpiua; 7 dre xplocs éorly, GXXN’ ob wdOos, elra ovd’ ality 7 Kplvaca Kéxpixa Aéyer, GAN’ Expwe udvor,
5 Enn. vi. 5, 7: dw uev odv dpavres 7 b0ev dtqupeba dyvooduev ev Svres, olor mpbowma moda els TO CEw xopuphy Exovra eis 70 elow play. el Sé ris Emcorpadjvas Sivatro A wap’ avrod n THs’ AOnvas alrhs evruxhoas rijs EAfews, Gedy re xal ardor Kal 7d way Owerou, * Enn. v. 1, 2.
_? Enn. tv, 3, 10: ofa «al ol év oméppags Ad-yos wAdTToves Kol popdodor ra fwa olov puxpovs Twas Kdomous,
Wis Auli, 5
66 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [cH.
human art, which is posterior and extrinsic. In the one soul are the rational laws of all explicit intelligence—“‘ of gods and of all things.” ‘‘ Wherefore also the world has all.”
- Individual souls are the intrinsic laws of particular minds within the universal intellect, made more explicit?. Not only -the soul of the whole, but the soul of each, has all things in itself. Wherein they differ, is in energising with different powers. Before descent and after reascent of the particular soul, each one’s thoughts are manifest to another as in direct vision, without discourse*, Why then does the soul descend and lose knowledge of its unity with the whole? For the choice is better to remain above’. The answer is that the error lies in self-will®, The soul desires to be its own, and so ventures forth to birth, and takes upon itself the ordering of a body which it appropriates, or rather, which appropriates it, | so far as that is possible. Thus the soul, although it does not really belong to this body, yet energises in relation to it, and in a manner becomes a partial soul in separation from the whole?,
But what is finally the explanation of this choice of the worse, and how is it compatil:le with the perfection of the mundane erder? How is the position of the Phaedo, that the: body is a prison, and the true aim of the soul release from it, reconcilable with the optimism of the Timaeus? The answer is that all—descent and reascent alike—has the necessity of a natural law. The optimism has reference to the whole order. Of this order, such as it must be in a world that is still good though below the intelligible and perfectly stable supramun- dane order, temporary descent, dissatisfaction with the con- sequences of the descent, and the effort to return, are all conditions, Any expression that seems to imply arbitrariness at any point, is part of the mythological representation. Thus |
1 Enno, vv, 3, 10 fin.
2 Enn. tv. 3, 5: Adyou vv ofa wal éEerdeyuevar uGdrov 7 exetvos...7d TAVTOV cal Erepov gwfovom péver Te exdatn Ev, Kal ood tv macat,
3 Enn. rv. 3, 6.
* Enn. rv, 3, 18: oloy d¢@arpuds Exacros xal ovdév 3¢ xpuwrov ovde wewhagudvov, adAd wpiv elwety GAdw ldwy exeivos Eyrvw.
5 Enn. tv. 3, 14. 6 Enn. vy. 1, 1. 7 Enn, vi, 4, 16.
v] _ OF PLOTINUS | 67
when in the Timaeus it is said that God “sows” the souls, this is mythical, just as when he is represented as haranguing them}. Necessity and self-caused descent are not discordant. The soul does not go by its will to that which is worse; yet its course is its own?, And it must expiate both the original error, and any evil that it may do actually, Of the first, the mere change of state is the punishment; to the second, further chastisement is assigned. The knowledge acquired bclow is a good, and the soul is not to be blamed overmuch if in its regulation of sensible nature it goes a little beyond what is safe for itself’, On the other hand, a slight inclination at the beginning to the worse, if not immediately corrected, may produce a permanent disposition‘. Be the error light or grave, it comes under an undeviating law of justice. To the particu- lar bodies fitted for them, the souls go neither by voluntary choice nor sent, but as by some natural process for which they are ready. The universai law under which the individual falls is not outside but within each®, The notion that there may be in small thinys an element of contingency which is no part. of the order, is suggested but not accepted*, The whole course of the soul through its series of bodily lives, and its release from the body when this is attained, are alike necessarily determined’, The death of the soul, so far as the soul can die, is to sink to a stage below moral evil—which still contains a mixture of the opposite good—and to be wholly plunged in matter®, Even thence it may still somehow emerge; though souls that have descended to the world of birth need not all
1 Enn. rv. 8, 4. ® Enn. tv. 8, 5.
5 Enn, iv. 8, 7: yewous yap évapyerrépa rdyabod 7m Tov Kaxov weipa ols Sivauis doOeveorépa, 7 Wate emtaThuy Td KaKxdv mpd welpas ywuvat,
4 Enn. un. 2,4. Cf. ut. 3, 4; wal cucxpa pow dpxet els ExBaow rod dpbob,
5 Enn. rv. 3, 13.
® Enn. rv. 3, 16: of yap ra per det voulfey cuvrerdx Oat, ra S¢ xexardoBas els 7d avtetovowov, ef yap war’ airlas ylvecOar det cal puocxds deodovdlas xal xara Adbyov tva kal rdéw lay, cal ra opuxpbrepa Sel cuvrerdy Pas kal cuvuddy Oat router,
7 Enn. tv. 3,24: déperar 62 xal ards 6 rdoxwr dyvowy ep’ a wabeiy rpooixes, dordry mev TH pope wavrayxol aiwpovuevos Tais wAdvais, TeXeuTWH Oé dowep ToAAG kauwy ols dvrérewer els rov mpoohxovra aury Thmov évéwecev, éxovoly ry popa rd axovatov els Td wadety Exwr, Cf. Enn. iv. 4, 45.
8 Enn. 1. 8, 13: xal rodrds dors 7d év Gdov €AObvra éwixaradapbeiv, Cf. Enn. 1, 6, 6.
5—2
68 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [ox.
make the full circle, but may return before reaching the lowest. point?. |
Here we come to the metaphysical doctrine by which Plotinus explains the contrasts the visible world presents. Neither moral good nor evil is with him ultimate. Of virtues, even the highest, the cause is the Good, which in reality is above good (twepdyafov). Of moral evil, so far as it is purely * evil, the cause is that principle of absolute formlessness and indeterminateness called Matter. At the same time, matter is the receptive principle by which alone the present world could be at all, Evils accordingly are an inevitable con-~ stituent of a world that is subject in its parts to birth and change. And indeed without evil there can be no good in our sense of the term. Nor is there evil unmixed in the things of nature, any more than there is unformed matter, Whence then is this principle opposed to form and unity?
That Matter is an independently existing principle over against the One, Plotinus distinctly denies. The supposition is put as inadmissible that there are dpyat mAelous Kal cara cuytuyiay Ta mpara?, Matter is the infinite (ro azrerpov) in the sense of the indeterminate (to dopicrov), and is generated from the infinity of power or of eternal existence that is an appanage of the One, which has not in itself indeterminate- ness, but creates it*. To the term “‘infinite”’ in the sense of an actual extent or number that is immeasurable (aéseEitn Tov), or of a quantitative infinite (xara To 1ocoy a7reipov), there is nothing to correspond. Matter, in itself indeterrninate, is that of which the nature is to be a recipient of forms, Like intel- higible being, it is incorporeal and unextended. Place, indeed, is posterior both to matter and bodies‘. By its absolute want of all form, that is, of all proper being, matter is at the opposite extreme to things intelligible, and is in its own nature ugly and evil’, It receives, indeed, all determinations, but it can-
1 Enn. tv. 4, & fin. 2 Enn. 1. 4, 2. ® Enn. i. 4, 15: ety dv yevunbev ex ris rod évds dreiplas 7 Suvduews 7 Tod ael, ov otons év éxelvw aretplas d\Xd waodrvTos,
4 Enn. 11. 4, 12: 6 6¢ rbros Borepos THs Udns Kal Tov FEEL. 5 Enn. i. 4, 16.
v] OF PLOTINUS 69
not receive them indivisibly (auzepds). One form in matter excludes another; so that they appear as separated by spatial intervals!, The reason of this is precisely that matter has no determination of its own. The soul in taking up the forms of things perceptible, views them with their mass put away (arroBéweva Tov dyxov opa), because by its own form it is in- divisible, and therefore cannot receive the extended as such. Since matter, on the contrary, has no form of its own by which to unite distinctions, the intrinsic differences of being must be represented in it by local separation. Yet, since the intelligible world is in a sense a ‘‘ world,” and is many as well as one, it too must have a kind of matter, This “intelligible matter” is the recipient of formal diversities in the world of being; as sensible matter is the recipient of the varicd appearances in space. _ The matter of the intelligible world, differing in this respect from matter properly so-called, does not receive all forms in- differently; the same matter there having always the same form’. The matter “here” is thus more truly “the indeter- minate”’ than the matter “‘there’’; which, in so far as it has: more real being, is so much less truly “matter‘.” Matter itself may best be called ‘‘not-being>.”’ As the indeterminate, it is- only to be apprehended by a corresponding indeterminateness of the soul*—a difficult state to maintain, for, as matter itself does not remain unformed in things, so the soul hastens to add some positive determination to the abstract formlessness reached by analysis, To be the subject and recipient ever ready for all forms, it must be indestructible and impassible, as it is incorporeal and unextended. It is like a mirror which represents all things so that they seem to be where they are not, and keeps no impression of any’, The appearances of sense, themselves “invulnerable nothings®,” go through it as through water without dividing it, It has not even a falsehood
1 Enn. re. 6, 18. 2 Enn. 11, 4, 4.
3 Enn. i. 4, 3: 7 8¢ ray ywoudrwy Ody dei AANo wal GANo Eidos taxer, Trav de aidlwy 7 al'rh TavTov dei.
4 Enn. rr. 4, 15. 5 Enn. in. 6, 7.
® Enn. 1. 4, 10: dopiorla rijs pexijs. Cf. Enn. 1. 8, 9.
7 Enn. 11. 6, 7.
§ Adonais, xxxix.——an exact expression of the idea of Plotinus.
70 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [cH.
of its own that it can say of things’. In that it can take no permanent hold of any good, it may be called evil*. Fleeing every attempt of perception to grasp it, it is equally receptive in appearance of the contraries which it is equally unable to retain.
3. Cosmology and Theodicy.
The theory of matter set forth, though turned to new meta- physical account, is fundamentally that of Aristotle. As with . Aristotle, Matter is the presupposition of physics, being viewed as the indestructible ‘“‘subject”’ of forms, enduring through all changes in potency of further change; but Plotinus is careful to point out that the world of natural things derives none of its reality from the recipient. The formal reason (Aoyos) that makes matter appear as extended, does not “unfold” it to extension—for this was not implicit in it—but, like that also which makes it appear as coloured, gives it something that was not there*, In that it confers no qualities whatever on that which appears in it, matter is absolutely sterile’. The forms manifested in nature are those already contained in the intellect that is before it, which acquires them by turning towards the Good. All differences of form, down to those of the elements, are the product of Reason and not of Matter®. .
While working out his theory from a direct consideration of the necessity that there should be something indestructible beneath the transformations of body, Plotinus tries to prove it not inconsistent with what is known as Plato’s “theory of matter” in the Timaeus. The phrases in which the “recipient”’ is spoken of as a “‘room” and a “‘seat”’ are interpreted meta- phorically. Here Plotinus is evidently arguing against com- mentators in his own time who took the “ Platonic matter” to be empty space’, This has now become the generally accepted interpretation; opinions differing only as to whether the space or matter in which the ideas manifest themselves is to be re-
1 Enn. rr. 6, 15. 2 Enn, wi. 6, 11.
3 Enn. wu. 4, 9. SPE NW pItO os
5 Enn. vi. 7, 11.
6 See especially Enn. 11. 4, 11: 80ev tues radrov TY Kevyy Thy DAY elpyKace,
Vv) ‘OF PLOTINUS © 71
garded as objective extension or as a subjective form’. Plo- tinus himself approaches the latter view when he consents to call matter a “phantasm of mass” (davracpa Sé dyxou Aéyoo), though stil] regarding it ‘as unextended (apéyeOes). His account of the mental process by which the nature opposed to that of the ideas is known (vo# Aoyrop~@) quite agrees with Plato’s,
On another point of Platonic interpretation, Plotinus and all his successors take the view which modern criticism seems now to find the most satisfactory. Plausible as was the reading of the Timaeus which would regard it as teaching an origin of the world from an absolute beginning of time, this was never, even at the earliest period, really prevalent in the school of Plato, During the Platonising movement that preceded Plo- tinus, the usual interpretation had been to regard what is said about the making of the world from pre-existent elements as mythological. The visible universe, said the earliest like the latest interpreters, is described by Plato as “‘generated”’ be- cause it depends on an unchanging principle while itself per- petually subject to mutation; not because it is supposed to have been called into being at a particular moment. That this was all along the authorised interpretation may be seen even from Plutarch’, who, in defending the opposite thesis, evi- dently feels that he is arguing against the opinion predomi- nant among contemporary Platonists*, Thus Plotinus, when
1 The first is Zeller’s view, in which he is followed by Siebeck and by Baeumker (Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen Philosophie, 1890), who have skilfully defended it against objections. Mr Archer-Hind, in his edition of the T'imaeus, takes the view that the Platonic matter is space as a subjective form, This would bring it very close to the Kantian doctrine. The more usual view would in effect make it an anticipation of Descartes’ attempt in the Principia Philosophiae to construct body out of pure extension. There is certainly a striking resemblance in general conception between Plato’s and ‘Descartes’ corpuscular theory: it has been noted by Mr Benn (The Greek Philosophers, \st ed., vol. ii. pp. 388-389). (In the first edition, I omitted to make this reference, having forgotten the passage and rediscovered the coincidence. )
2 Tlep! rs év Tiwaly Puxoyovlas.
3 It may be noted that the “Platonic matter,” according to Plutarch, is simply body or “corporeal substance.” 7 uév ody awparos ovala THs Neyoudyns um’ atrovd mavdexois picews Edpas Te xal TiO Avs TOY yevntar oly érépa Tis EoTLY (ce. 5 fin.).
72 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [cH. he says that there never was a time when this whole was not, nor was there ever matter unformed, is not introducing a novelty. And on this point we do not hear that opposition to his doctrine arose from any quarter. His difference with Longinus was on the question whether the divine mind eternally contains the ideas in itself or contemplates them eternally as objective existences; not as to whether ideas and unordered matter once stood apart and were then brought tegether by an act or process of creative volition. The dura- tion of the universe without temporal beginning or end was the accepted doctrine of Hellenic Platonism. In accordance with this general view, however, it is possible, as Plotinus recognises!, to hold either that the universe is per- menent only as a whole, while all its parts perish as individual bodies (card ro rode) and are renewed only in type («xara to e(5os), or that some of the bodies in the universe—namely, those that fill the spaces from the sphere of the moon outwards —are always numerically identical. If the former view is the true one, then the heavenly bodies differ from the rest only by lasting a longer time, About the latter view there would be no trouble if we were to accept Aristotle’s doctrine that their substance is a fifth element, not:subjcct like the rest to altera- tion. For those who allow that they consist of the elements of which living bodies on earth are constituted, the difficulty is that they: must be by nature dissoluble. This Plato himself conceded to Heraclitus, As in his physies generally, so here, Plotinus argues in a rather tentative way. He suggests as the true solution, that the heaven with all its parts consists of a purer kind of fire, which we may call “‘light,” moving if at all with a circular motion, losing nothing by efflux, and conse- quently in no need, like mortal bodies, of nourishment from without, This material light, being a kind of body, must of course be distinguished from light as an outflowing energy?. Radiant light, as we have scen’, is for Plotinus an activity carrying with it no loss either of substance or of efficiency ;
Penns ils * Enn. 1m. 1, 7: 7d ducdvupoy aire pis, 8 51) payer xal dowuarov elvar, ® Cf. Enn. rv. 5.
a
pee — = SNe ;
v] ““OF PLOTINUS 73 whence it furnished an analogy closer than is possible on any modern theory for the metaphysical doctrine of emanation.
For the rest, this picture of the physical universe does not essentially differ from Aristotle’s. The whole forms a single system, with the fixed stars and the seven planets (including the sun and moon) revolving round the spherical earth in com- binations of perfect circles, Like the stars, the earth too has a divinity of its own’. The space which the universe fills is finite. Body is not atomic in constitution but continuous. The complex movements of the whole system recur in astro- nomical cycles, In order to solve difficulties connected with the infinite duration of a world in constant change, Plotinus sometimes takes up the Stoical theory that in the recurrent periods the sequence of events is exactly repeated. This he does especially where the question presents itself, how that infinity in the world of sense is possible which is required by his doctrine that there are ‘ideas of particulars,” Individual differences, he allows, must according to this view be infinite, seeing that there is no limit to the duration of the world either in the past or in the future. The difficulty would be met by supposing that differences finite in number recur exactly in succeeding cycles. Thus, in any one cycle no two individuals are without all formal difference, and yet the number of ‘“‘forms’’ is limited?,. This solution, however, seems to be offered with no great confidence, The point about which Plotinus is quite clear is that individual as well as specific differences have their rational determination in the ideal world, From this he deduces that, in any one period of the cosmos at least, there are no two individuals that differ only numerically, without a trace of inward distinction®, About infinity in the ideal world or in the soul there is no difficulty. The conception of an actual quantitative infinite is not merely difficult, but impossible.
Yet, while repeatedly laying down this position, Plotinus allows that space and number as prefigured in eternal intellect
4 Enn. tv. 4, 22-27. 2 Enn. v. 7, 2. 3 Enn. v. 7, 3. * Enn. v. 7, 1: rqv dé év rp vonr@ dmetplay ov det dediévar’ waoa yap év duwepet. As regards the soul and its Adyor, cf. c. 3.
74 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [oH.
have an infinitude of their own. We may say that number is infinite, though infinity is repugnant to number (ro d7re:pov paxerar TO aprOue), as we Speak of an infinite line; not that there is any such (ovy dre €ote Tis ToLtavTn), but that we can go in thought beyond the greatest existing, This means that in intellect the rational law of linear magnitude does not carry with it the thought of a lirnit!, Similarly, number in intellect is unmeasured. No actual number can be assigned that goes beyond what is already involved in the idea of number. In- tellectual being is beyond measure because it is itself the measure, The limited and measured is that which is prevented from running to infinity in its other sense of indeterminate- ness?, Thus limited and measured is the visible cosmos,
To time is allowed an explicit infinity that is denied to space. It is the “image of eternity,” reflecting the infinite already existent whole of being by the continual going to infinity of successive realisations’, Time belongs to apartness of life (Sudaracis ody Cons ypovoy elye). The Soul of the Whole generates time and not eternity, because the things it produces are not imperishable. It is not itself in time; nor are individual souls themselves, but only their affections and deeds*, which are really those of the composite nature, Thus the past which is the object of memory is in things done; in the soul itself there is nothing past, Of Zeus, whether regarded as Demi- urgus or as Soul of the World, we must deny even the “before and after” implied in memory®. That which guides the whole (TO Hyovpevoy Tov travTos) knows the future as present (cata to éordvat), and has therefore no need of memory and dis- cursive reason to infer it from the past’. These facultics be- long to acquired intellect, and, as we shall see, are dismissed
1 Enn. vi. 6, 17: 4 7d Garetpov adXov rpdrov, oby ws adretirnrov’ GhAa ros Gretpos; 7 év TW AOywW TIS alToypayurs ovK Eve mpoovootmevor mwépas,
2 Ennavi. 6; 18: BIBI, iis Uy We
AS Hnmnentiver aslo.
5 Enn. iv, 4, 16: dda wdvres of Adyou Gua, Worep eipnrat...7d 5é 7b5€ wera
7éde €y Tois mpayuacw ov duvapuévors dua mavra.
® Enn. rv. 4, 10.
7 Enn, rv. 4, 12. Hence, adds Plotinus, the creative power (70 rood) is not subject to lubour and difficulty, as was in the imagination of those who thought the regulation of the whole would be a troublesome business.
Vn OF PLOTINUS 15
. even by the individual soul when it has reascended to intuitive knowledge.
If things eternal were altogether alien to us, we could not speak of them with intelligence. We also then must participate in eternity, How the soul’s essence can be in eternity while the composite nature consisting of soul and body is in time, can only be understood when the definition of time has been ‘more strictly investigated. To define it in relation to physical movement does not express its essential character. The means by which we learn to know time is no doubt observation of motion, and especially of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Yet while ordered external motion more than any- thing else shows time forth to mental conception, it does not make time be. When the motion of the whole is measured in terms of time, which itself is fixed according to certain inter- vals marked out in the space through which the motions proceed, this is an “‘accidental”’ relation. The parts of time, invisible and inapprehensible in themselves, must have re- — mained unknown till thus measured, but time itself is prior to the measurement of its parts. We must bring it back
. finally to a movement of the soul, though the soul could hardly have known it to any purpose without the movement of the heaven. Time is not, however, in the merely individual soul, but in all souls so far as they are one. Therefore there is one uniform time, and not a multitude of disparate times; as in another relation there is one eternity in which all par- ticipate?, Thus the one soul, in which individual souls are metaphysically contained, participates in eternity and pro- duces time, which is the form of a soul living in apparent detachment from its higher cause.
Unity in the soul of the whole, here so strongly insisted on, does not with Plotinus exclude the reality of particular souls, We have seen that he regards individuality as determined by differences in the Ideas, and not by the metaphysically uarcal
1 Enn. ur. 7, 7: det dpakal nuiv pereivar Tov aiwyos.
2 Enn. 11. 7,13: ap otv xal év quiv [0] xpdvos; 7 év Yuxy TH ToLa’TyN Wdo7n Kal | dmocdds év mact Kuial macarpla. 5d od dtacmacOjceras 0 xpdvos* éwel ovd’ o alwy 6 Kar’ ddXo év Tots Gpoerdéor waou.
76 - THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM ~ [OH.
modes of pluralising ascribed to Matter. What comes from matter is separateness of external manifestation, and muta- bility in the realisations attained; not inner diversity, which pre-exists in the world of being. This view he turns against the fatalism that would make the agency of the individual soul count for nothing in the sum of things. He is without the least hesitation a determinist. Within the universal order, he premises, the uncaused (7d dvaitiov) is not to be received, whether under the form of ’‘empty declinations,” or of a sudden movement of bodies without preceding movement, or of 2 capricious impulse of soul not assignable to any motive’, But to say that everything in each is determined by one soul that runs through all, is, by an excess of necessity, to take away necessity itself and the causal order; for in this case it would not be true that all comes to pass by causes, but all. things would be one, without distinction between that which causes and that which is caused; ‘‘so that neither we are we nor is anything our work?.”” Each must be each, and actions and thoughts must belong to us as our own’, This is the truth that physical, and especially astrological, fatalism denies. To preserve the causal order without exception while at the same time allowing that we ourselves are something, we must in- troduce the soul as another principle into the contexture of things,—and not only the soul of the whole, but along with it the soul of each, Being in a contexture, and not by itself, it is not wholly master, and so far fate or destiny (e(uappévn) regarded as external, has a real existence. Thus all things
1 Enn, im. 1,-1: 7 yap 7d Boudnréyv—robro 6é 7 étw 7 elaw— 7d émiOuunrov éxivnoey’ H, ef undev dpexrdv éxtynoev, ob5’ av Grws éxev7}Oy. The principle of psychological determinism could not be more clearly put. In view of this, it is not a little surprising that Zeller should vaguely class Plotinus and his successors as champions of *free-will.”’ On the other hand Jules Simon, who quite recognises the determinism of the school, misstates the doctrine of Plotinus as regards the nature of the individual when he says (/Zistoire de L’Ecole d’ Alexandrie, t. i. pp. 570-1) that that which is not of the essence of each soul, and must consequently perish, is, according to Plotinus, its in- dividuality, and that this comes from matter,
= Ninn. wer, 1, +:
3 Cf. Enn, rt. 4, 6: of yap opolws év Tots avrots was xivetrac 4 Bovderar n EVEpyet.
+ Enn. ut. f, 8.
yd OF PLOTINUS 277
come to pass according to causes; but some by the soul, and some through the other causes among which it is placed. Of its not thinking and acting rationally (rod uy dpovetv) other things are the causes. Rational action has its cause within; being only not hindered from without?.
Virtue therefore is free; and the more completely free the more the soul is purified from mixture, To the bad, who do most things according to the imaginations excited by bodily affections, we must assign neither a power of their own nor & proper volition®, How then can punishment be just? The answer is that the composite nature, which sins, is also that which pays the penalty of sin’, The involuntariness of sin (Ore dpaptia dxovatov) does not prevent the deed being from the doer‘, Some men indeed come into being as if by a witch- craft of external things, and are little or nothing of them- selves: others preserve the original nature of the soul’s essence, For it is not to be thought that the soul alone of all things is without such a nature®, In preserving or recovering this lie virtue and freedom.
A more elaborate treatment of the problem of theodicy here raised is contained in three books that belong to Plotinus’s last period*. This problem he does not minimise, Although, in metaphysical reality, the world has not come to be by a process of contrivance resembling human art, yet, he says, if reasoning had made it, it would have no reason to be ashamed of its work’, This whole, with everything in it, is as it would be if providentially ordered by the rational choice of the Maker®,
If, indeed, the world had come into existence a certain time ago, and before was not, then the providence which regulates
1 Enn. ur. 1, 10,
2 Enn. vi. 8, 3: odte 7d €w avrois obTe Td éxovatov SWoopev.
3 Enn. 1 1, 12. 4 Ean. un 2, 10.
5 Enn. 11. 3, 15: ob yap 5h vomordow roovroy eivar Yuxry, olov, & rs dy EFwher wan, TaUTny puow toxyew udvnv Tov WdvTwy olkelay dow ovK EXovgar.
6 Enn. mi. 2, 1. 3,1. 8.
7 Enn. ut. 2, 3: 008’ ef Aopsopds ely 6 worjoas, aicxuvetrar TH wounOevre.
8 Enn, vi. 8, 17.
78 | THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM {cH.
it would be like that of rational beings within the world; it would be a certain foresight and reasoning of God how this whole should come to exist, and how it should be in the best manner possible. Since, however, the world is without begin- ning and end, the providence that governs the whole consists in its being in accordance with mind, which is before it not in time but as its cause and model so to speak, | From mind procecds a rational! law which imposes harmony on the cosmos. This law, however, cannot be unmixed intel- lect like the fst. The condition of there being a world below the purely intelligible order—and there must be such a world, that every possible degree of perfection may be realised—is mutual hindrance and separation of parts. The unjust deal- ings of men with one another arise from an aspiration alter the good along with a want of power to attain it, Evil is a defection (€\XevWrus) of good; and, in a universe of separated existences, absence of good in one place follows with necessity from its presence in another. Therefore evils cannot be de- stroyed from the world. What are commonly called evils, as " poverty and disease, Plotinus continues to assert with the Stoical tradition, are nothing to those who possess true good, which is virtue; and they are not useless to the order of the — whole. Yet, he proceeds, it may still be argued that the dis- tribution of what the Stoics after all allow to be things ‘“‘aoreeable” and ‘“‘not agreeable” to nature, is unfair, That the bad should be lords and rulers of cities, and that men of worth should be slaves, is not fitting, even though lordship and slavery are nothing as regards the possession of real good. And with a perfect providence every detail must be as it ought to be. We are not to evade the difficulty by saying that providence does not extend to earth, or that through chance and necessity it is not strong enough to sway things here. The earth too is as one of the stars (a> éy te THY aotpwv)'. If, however, we bear in mind that we are to look for the greatest possible perfection that can belong to a world of mixture, not for that which can belong only to the intelli- _ gible order, the argument may be met in full, Among men
Johto 6G Bp teh
v] OF PLOTINUS 79
there are higher and lower and intermediate natures,—the last being the most numerous. Those that are so degenerate as to come within the neighbourhood of irrational animals do violence to the intermediate natures. These are better than those that maltreat them, and yet are conquered by the worse in so far as they themselves are worse in relation to the par- ticular kind of contest to be undergone. If they are content to be fatted sheep, they should not complain of becoming a prey to the wolves. And, Plotinus adds parenthetically, the spoilers too pay the penalty ; first in being wolves and wretched men, and then in having a worse fate after death, according to their acquired character. For the complete order of justice has regard to the series of past and future lives, not to each present life by itself. But to take things as seen in one life: always the mundane order demands certain means if we are to attain the end, Those who have done nothing worthy of happiness cannot reasonably expect to be happy. The law is, for example, that out of wars we are to come safe by proving our courage, not by prayer. Were the opposite the case,— could peace be preserved amid every kind of folly and coward- ice,—then indeed would providence be neglectful, When the bad rule, it is by the unmanliness of those that are ruled; and it is just that it should be so, Yet, such as man is, holding a middle rank, providence does not suffer him to be destroyed, but he is borne up ever toward the higher; the divine element giving virtue the mastery in the long run. The human race participates, if not to the height, in wisdom and mind, and art and justice, and man is a beautiful creation so far as he can be consistently with his place in the universe, Reason (6 Xeyos) made things in their different orders, not because it envied a greater good to those that are lower placed, but because the law itself of intelligential existence carries with it variety (ov dOovw, dAda Ady TotKiALay voepay ExovTt). Thus in a drama all the personages cannot be heroes. And reason does not take the souls from outside itself and fit them into the poem by constraining a portion of them from their own nature for the worse. The souls are as it. were parts of reason itself, and it fits them in not by making them worse,
80 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [cH
but by bringing them to the place suitable to their nature.
fthen, it may be asked, we are not to explain evil by external constraint, but reason is the principle and is all, what is the rational necessity of the truceless war among animals and men? First, destructions of animals are necessary because, in a world composed of changing existences, they could not be born imperishable. Thus, if they were not destroyed by one another they would no less perish, Transference of the animating principle from body to body, which is promoted by their devouring each other, is better than that they should not have been at al], The ordered battles men fight as if dancing the Pyrrhie dance, show that what we take for the serious affairs of mankind are but child’s play, and declare that death is nothing terrible'. It is not the inward soul but the outward shadow of a man that groans and laments over the things of hfe, But how then, the philosopher proceeds, ° can there be any such thing as wickedness if this is the true account? The answer which he ventures? is in effect that of maleficent natures the Reason in the world night say: ‘‘ These too have their part in me, as I too in these.’’ This reason (ottoes 6 Aéyos) is not unmixed mind (dxpatos vods). Its essence is to consist of the contraries that were in need of strife with one another so that thus a world of birth might hold together (rv cveTacww avT® Kai oloy ovciay THs ToLaUTNS evavTLWTEWS depovans). Inthe universal drama the good and the bad must perform the opposite parts assigned them, But from this does it not follow that all is pardonable?? No, answers Plotinus, for the reason which is the creative word of the drama fixes the place both of pardon and of its opposite; and it does not assign to men as their part that they should have nothing but forgiveness for the bad‘. In the consequences of evil for the
* Enn, ut. 2, 15: dowep b¢ éml trav Oedrpwy rais oxnvais, olrw xph Kal rods Povous BedoPar Kal wdvras Oavdrovs kal rorewv aruoes kal aprayds, perabécas wdyra xal peracxnuarices Kal Opjvwy xal oluwyav broxpices.
* Enn. m1. 2, 16: rerodputobw ydp* rdxa 8’ dv cal réxoimer.
* “Tout comprendre est tout pardonner.”’
* Enn, mi. 2,17: adn’ lows ovyyvwun rois kaxois* ef wh nal ro THs ovyyvauns kal uy d Adyos moet? moe? 5é€ 6 Abyos pNde ovyyvapovas emt Trois ToLOvTOAS €tyat,
v] OF PLOTINUS : 81
whole there is nevertheless a rational order, and an order out- of which good may come},
Still, that good may come of evil is not the deepest ground of its existence. Some one might argue that. evil, while it is actual, was not necessary. In that case, even if good comes of it, the justification of providence must fail. The reply has been given already in outline, The necessity of evil results from matter. Matter is necessary because, the principle of — things having infinite productive power, that power must manifest itself in every possible degree: there must therefore be alast term, ro évyarov, which can produce nothing beyond itself. ‘This is matter, having nothing any longer of its own; and this is the necessity of evil?.” If it is argued that moral evil in us, coming as it does from association with the body, is to be ascribed rather to form than to matter, since bodies derive their distinctive character from form, the reply is that it is not in so far as the forms are pure that they are the source of ignorance and bad desires, but in so far as they are mixed with matter (Aoyou évvAor). The fall of the soul is its approach to matter, and it is made weak because its energies are im- peded by the presence of matter, which does not allow all its powers to arrive at their realisation®, Yet without this prin- ciple of indeterminateness that vitiates the pure forms, causing them to miss their true boundary by excess or defect, there would be for us neither good nor any object of desire. There would be neither striving after one thing nor turning away from another nor yet thought. ‘For our striving is after good and our turning away is from evil, and thought with a purpose is of good and evil, and this is a good*.”
The last sentence contains one of the two or three very
1 Enn. ut. 2, 18: olov éx poryelas xal alyuadwrov dywys raises xara pvow Bedrlous nal Avdpes, el tux, kal wéAers dAAat ayecvous THY rewopOnpdywy Uwd avdpav wovnpOy. From a passage like this may we not infer that Plotinus was able to see the barbarian inroads without despairing of the future?
2 Knn, 1. 8, 7.
® Enn. 1. 8, 14: BA» 7olxuy wal dodevelas Wuy7 alrla xal xaxlas airla, wpérepor pa xaxn abt) kal wpwrov Kaxdv.
4 Enn. 1. 8, 15: 7 yap Spekis dyaGod, 4 8¢ Exxdios waxod, } de mness xal } ppbynats dya000 nal xaxod, cal adry ty Te Tay dyabar.
WwW. 6
82 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [CH.
slight possible allusions in the whole of the Enneads to ortho- dox Christianity. With Christian Gnosticism Plotinus deals expressly in a book which Porphyry has placed at the end of the second Ennead}. A separate exposition of it may be given here, both because it is in some ways specially interesting, and because it brings together Plotinus’s theory of the physical order of the world and of its divine government. Any ob- security that there is in it comes from the allusive mode of dealing with the Gnostic theories, of which no exposition is given apart from the refutation. The main points of the speculations opposed are, however, sufficiently clear.
After a preliminary outline of his own metaphysico-theo- logical doctrine, in which he dwells on the sufficiency of three principles in the intelligible world, as against the long series of “aeons” introduced by the Platonising Gnostics?, Plotinus begins by asking them to assign the cause of the “ fall” (agan- pa) which they attribute to the soul of the world. When did this fall take place? If from eternity, the soul remains fallen. If the fall had a beginning, why at that particular moment and not earlier? Evidently, to undergo this lapse, the soul must have forgotten the things in the intelligible world; but if so, how did it create without ideas? To say that it created in order to be honoured is a ridiculous metaphor taken from statuaries on earth’, Then, as to its future destruction of the _ world, if it repented of its creation, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, it is not likely to repent now that it has become more accustomed to that which it made, and more attached to it by length of time. Those who hold that, because there are many hardships in the world, it has therefore come into existence for ill, must think that it ought to be identical with the intelligible world, and not merely an image of it. Taken as what it is, there could be no fairer image. And why this refusal to the heavenly bodies of all participation in the
1 Enn. 11. 9, IIpés robs caxdv tov Snusoupydy Tod Kbcpou Kal rov Kbo,sov KaKOV elvac éyovras, or IIpds Tovs yuwortxols.
? Cf. Enn. mu. 9, 6: ras 5€ &dXas drocrdces rl ypn AEyew ds elodyova, Taponoes Kal dvritirous cal weravolas ;
* Enn. 1. 9, 4: rh yap dy éaury wal édoylfero yevéoOat éx Tod Koopomajoa; . yerotov yap 7d iva Tiu@ro, Kal weTahepsyTw ard Tay dyahuaroroay Tay évraida.
v] ‘ OF PLOTINUS | 83
intelligible,—especially by men who complain of the disorder in terrestrial things? Then they introduce another soul, which they make to be compacted of the material elements, as if that was possible for a soul, Not honouring this earth, they say that there is a.“’new earth” to which they are to go, made in the pattern of a world,—and yet they hate ‘“‘the world.” Whence this pattern if not from the creative power which they say has lapsed? Much in their teaching Plotinus never- theless acknowledges to be true. The immortality of the soul, the intelligible world, the first God, the doctrine that the soul ought to flee association with the body, the theory of its separation, the flight from the realm of birth to that of being, all these are doctrines to be found in Plato; and they do well in proclaiming them. On the part of Plato’s disciples, there is no disposition to grudge them the right to declare also the points wherein they differ. They ought, however, to try to prove what they have to say of their own on its merits, putting their opinions with good feeling and like philosophers; not with contumely towards ‘‘the Greeks,” and with assertions that they themselves are better men. As a matter of fact, they have only made incongruous additions to that which was better in the form given to it by the ancients*; introducing all sorts of births and destructions, and finding fault with the universe, and blaming the soul of the whole for its communion with the body, and casting reproach upon the ruler of this whole, and identifying the Demiurgus with the Soul of the World’, and attributing the same affections to that which rules the whole as to particular things.
That it is not so good for our soul to be in communion with the body as to be separate, others have said before; but the . ease is different with the soul of the whole, which rules the frame of the world unimpeded, whereas ours is fettered by
1 Enn. 1. 9, 5: was yap av fwyy qyrivody Exo 7 ex THY cToLXelwy avaTasts ;
2 Enn. 11. 9,6: éwel rd ye elpnudva rois madacois wept Tav vonrav wordy duelvw kal meratdevpévws elpnra kal rots uy étararwuevas Thy émOéovoay els dvOpwrous amdrnv padlws yywoOnoerat.
3 Enn. 11. 9, 6: «al els radrdv Ayovres Tov Snuoupydv Ty Wuxy. Both Vacherot and Jules Simon find this identification in the system of Plotinus himself. The error is corrected by Zeller, iii. 2, p. 633, n. 3.
6—2
$4 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [ox.
the body. The question wherefore the creative power made a, world is the same as the question wherefore there is a soul | and wherefore the Demiurgus made it. It involves the error, first, of supposing a beginning of that which is for ever; in the next place, those who put it think that the cause of the | creation was a turning from something to something else. The ground of that creative action which is from eternity, is not really in discursive thought and contrivance, but in the necessity that intelligible things should not be the ultimate product of the power that manifests itself in them, And if | this whole is such as to permit us while we are in it to have wisdom, and being here to live in accordance with things yonder, how does it not bear witness that it has its attach- ment there?
In the distribution of riches and poverty and such things: the man of elevated character (0 orovdaios) does not look for equality, nor does he think that the possessors of wealth and power have any real advantage, How if the things done and suffered in life are an exercise to try who will come out vic- torious in the struggle? Is there not a beauty in such an order!? If you are treated with injustice, is that so great a matter to your immortal being? Should you be slain, you have your wish, since you escape from the world. Do you find fault with civic life? You are not compelled to take part in it. ‘Yet in the State, over and above legal justice with its punishments, there is honour for virtue, and vice meets with its appropriate dishonour, In one life, no doubt the fulfilment is incomplete, but it is completed in the succession of lives; the gods giving to each the lot that is consequent on former existences. Good men should try to rise to such height of goodness as their nature allows, but should think that others also have their place with God, and not dream that after God they themselves are alone in their goodness, and that other men and the whole visible world are without all part in the divine. It is easy, however, to persuade unintelligent men
1 Enn. 1. 9, 9: ef 8¢ yuuvdovoy ef vinwyrwv nal nrrwudvwr, ras ov Kal cauTn Kaos Exec;
v] OF PLOTINUS 85
who have no real knowledge what goodness is, that they alone are good and the sons of God!,
Having remarked on some of the inconsistencies in ihe mythological cosmogonies of the Gnostics, Plotinus returns again to the point that the causation of natural things should not be compared to the devices of an artist, the arts being posterior to nature and the world*. We must not blame the universe because all is not equally good. That is as if one were to call the power of growth evil because it is not per- ception, or the perceptive faculty because it is not reason. There are necessarily degrees i in things.
The practice of exorcisms and incantations by the Gnostics is especially attacked. They compose charms, says Plotinus, addressed not only to the soul of the world but to still higher powers, as if incorporeal things could be acted on by the sounds of the voice modulated according to some cunningly devised rules of art. Claiming as they do to have power against diseases, they would say rightly if, with the philosophers, they said that the means of keeping. clear of thern is temperance and a regular mode of life. They ascribe them, however, to the entrance of demons into the body, and profess to expe! them by forms of words, Thus they become of great repute with the | many, who stand in awe of magical powers; but they will not persuade rational men that diseases have not their physical cause in “changes externally or internally initiated*.” If the demon can enter without a cause, why is the disease not always present? If there is a physical cause, that is sufficient without the demon. To say that, as soon as the cause comes to exist, the demonic agency, being ready, straightway takes up its position beside it, is ludicrous,
Next the antinomian tendency of the Gnostic sects is
1 Near the end of o. 9, a comparison is borrowed from Plato, Rep. iv. 426: n ole: oldv 7’ elvar dvdpt uh emcorauevy petpeiv, Erépwv TovovTwy wodGw heydyruw én rerpdanxts dor, abrov raira un nyetoOat wepl atrod;: >
2 Enn. 1. 9, 12: duoccwrepow yap wdvtws, ddr’ obx ws al réxvac ers Oorepar yap THs picews xal rod ebcpuov al réxvai.
3 Enn. 11.9, 14: rods uévroe e& ppovodvras ovKx dv welOoev, ws ovx al Ee ras alrlas Eyovow 7 kaudros 4} rAnopovais 7} évdelars 7 of Weor Kal SAws weraPorais 7 éfwhev rhv dpxhy 7 évbo0er AaPovcass.
86 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM [cH.
touched upon. This way of thinking, the philosopher pro- ceeds, with its positive blame of providence going beyond even the Epicurean denial, and dishonouring all the laws of our mundane life, takes away temperance, and the justice implanted in moral habits and perfected by reason and prac- tice, and in general all human excellence, For those who hold such opinions, if their own nature is not better than their teaching, nothing is left but to follow pleasure and self- interest; nothing thought excellent here being in their view good, but only some object of pursuit in the future. Those who have no part in virtue, have nothing by which they can be set in motion towards the world beyond. To say, ‘‘ Look to God,” is of no use unless you teach men how to look. This was taught in the moral discourses of the ancients, which the present doctrine entirely neglects. It is virtue carried to the end and fixed in the soul with moral wisdom that points to God. Withcut true virtue, God is but a name}.
_ The concluding chapters are directed against the refusal to recognise in sensible things any resemblance to intelligible beauty. How, Plotinus asks the Gnostic pessimists, can this world be cut off from its intelligible cause? If that cause is absent from the world, then it must also be absent from you; for the providence that is over the parts must first be over the whole. What man is there who can perceive the intelligible harmony of music and is not moved when he hears that which ' is In sensible sounds? Or who is there that is skilled in geometry and numbers and does not take pleasure in seeing the orderly and proportionate with his eyes? And is there any one who, perceiving all the sensible beauty of the world, has no feeling of anything beyond it? Then he did not apprehend sensible things with his mind. Nothing can be really fair outside and foul within. Those who are called beautiful and internally are ugly, either have a false exterior beauty also, or their ugliness is adventitious, their nature being originally beautiful. For the hindrances here are many to arriving at the end. Since this reason of shortcoming does not apply to the whole visible world, which contains all, that
1 Enn. 1. 9, 15: dvev 5¢ dperijs adnOuwijs Peds Aeyouevos dvoud cori,
Vie OF PLOTINUS dk 87 must necessarily be beautiful. Nor does admiration of the beauty by which the physical universe participates in good tend to bind us more to the body. Rather, it gives us reasons for living well the life that is in the body. By taking all strokes from without as far as possible with equanimity, we can make our souls resemble, as nearly as