Plotinus
The Six Enneads
translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page
First tractate.
The animate and the man.
1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the
Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for
this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a
blend or a distinct form due to the blending.
And what applies to the affections applies also
to whatsoever acts, physical or mental, spring from them.
We have, therefore, to examine
discursive-reason and the ordinary mental action upon objects of sense, and
enquire whether these have the one seat with the affections and experiences, or
perhaps sometimes the one seat, sometimes another.
And we must consider also our acts of
Intellection, their mode and their seat.
And this very examining principle, which
investigates and decides in these matters, must be brought to light.
Firstly, what is the seat of Sense-Perception?
This is the obvious beginning since the affections and experiences either are
sensations of some kind or at least never occur apart from sensation.
2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at
the outset the nature of the Soul that is whether a distinction is to be made
between Soul and Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind
in itself]. *
* All matter shown in brackets is added by the
translator for clearness sake and, therefore, is not canonical. S.M.
If such a distinction holds, then the Soul [in
man] is some sort of a composite and at once we may agree that it is a
recipient and if only reason allows that all the affections and experiences
really have their seat in the Soul, and with the affections every state and
mood, good and bad alike.
But if Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are one
and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those
activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that
native Act of its own which Reason manifests.
If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of
the Soul as an immortal if the immortal, the imperishable, must be impassive,
giving out something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except
for what it receives from the Existents prior to itself from which Existents,
in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered.
Now what could bring fear to a nature thus
unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place for
courage: courage implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are
satisfied by the filling or voiding of the body, must be proper to something
very different from the Soul, to that only which admits of replenishment and
voidance.
And how could the Soul lend itself to any
admixture? An essential is not mixed. Or of the intrusion of anything alien? If
it did, it would be seeking the destruction of its own nature. Pain must be
equally far from it. And Grief how or for what could it grieve? Whatever
possesses Existence is supremely free, dwelling, unchangeable, within its own
peculiar nature. And can any increase bring joy, where nothing, not even
anything good, can accrue? What such an Existent is, it is unchangeably.
Thus assuredly Sense-Perception,
Discursive-Reasoning; and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul:
for sensation is a receiving whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body
and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation.
The question still remains to be examined in
the matter of the intellections whether these are to be assigned to the Soul
and as to Pure-Pleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary
state.
3. We may treat of the Soul as in the body
whether it be set above it or actually within it since the association of the
two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.
Now from this relation, from the Soul using the
body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the bodys
experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with
which he is working.
It may be objected that the Soul must however,
have Sense-Perception since its use of its instrument must acquaint it with the
external conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. Thus, it will be
argued, the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring distress to
the soul: hence the Soul may feel sorrow and pain and every other affection
that belongs to the body; and from this again will spring desire, the Soul
seeking the mending of its instrument.
But, we ask, how, possibly, can these
affections pass from body to Soul? Body may communicate qualities or conditions
to another body: but body to Soul? Something happens to A; does that make it
happen to B? As long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct
entities; if the Soul uses the body it is separate from it.
But apart from the philosophical separation how
does Soul stand to body?
Clearly there is a combination. And for this
several modes are possible. There might be a complete coalescence: Soul might
be interwoven through the body: or it might be an Ideal-Form detached or an
Ideal-Form in governing contact like a pilot: or there might be part of the
Soul detached and another part in contact, the disjoined part being the agent
or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument or thing used.
In this last case it will be the double task of
philosophy to direct this lower Soul towards the higher, the agent, and except
in so far as the conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from
the instrument, the body, so that it need not forever have its Act upon or
through this inferior.
4. Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a
coalescence.
Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is
ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made
participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is
brought lower. How can a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such
as Sense-Perception?
No: the body has acquired life, it is the body
that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation.
Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be
enjoyed by the body. And fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is
the bodys doom to fail of its joys and to perish.
Then again we should have to examine how such a
coalescence could be conceived: we might find it impossible: perhaps all this
is like announcing the coalescence of things utterly incongruous in kind, let
us say of a line and whiteness.
Next for the suggestion that the Soul is
interwoven through the body: such a relation would not give woof and warp
community of sensation: the interwoven element might very well suffer no change:
the permeating soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body
as light goes always free of all it floods and all the more so, since,
precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the entire frame.
Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul
would not be subjected to the bodys affections and experiences: it would be
present rather as Ideal-Form in Matter.
Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as
Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if the first possibility the Soul is an essence,
a self-existent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore
all the more decidedly be the Using-Principle [and therefore unaffected].
Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like
axe-form on iron: here, no doubt, the form is all important but it is still the
axe, the complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the
iron thus modified: on this analogy, therefore, we are even more strictly
compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination to the body: their natural
seat is the material member, the instrument, the potential recipient of life.
Compare the passage where we read* that
"it is absurd to suppose that the Soul weaves"; equally absurd to
think of it as desiring, grieving. All this is rather in the province of
something which we may call the Animate.
* "We read" translates "he
says" of the text, and always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name
does not appear in the translation except where it was written by Plotinus.
S.M.
5. Now this Animate might be merely the body as
having life: it might be the Couplement of Soul and body: it might be a third
and different entity formed from both.
The Soul in turn apart from the nature of the
Animate must be either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its
yoke-fellow, or sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical
experiences with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences: desire for
example in the Animate may be something quite distinct from the accompanying
movement or state in the desiring faculty.
The body, the live-body as we know it, we will
consider later.
Let us take first the Couplement of body and
Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this Couplement?
It may be suggested that some unwelcome state
of the body produces a distress which reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in
turn merges into Soul. But this account still leaves the origin of the
sensation unexplained.
Another suggestion might be that all is due to
an opinion or judgement: some evil seems to have befallen the man or his
belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in
the entire Animate. But this account leaves still a question as to the source
and seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul or to the Couplement? Besides,
the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling of grief: the
judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow: one may think
oneself slighted and yet not be angry; and the appetite is not necessarily
excited by the thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer than before to
any warrant for assigning these affections to the Couplement.
Is it any explanation to say that desire is
vested in a Faculty-of-desire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and,
collectively, that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? Such a
statement of the facts does not help towards making the affections common to
the Couplement; they might still be seated either in the Soul alone or in the
body alone. On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal
passion, there must be a heating of the blood and the bile, a well-defined
state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse towards The Good cannot be a
joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to
the Soul alone.
Reason, then, does not permit us to assign all
the affections to the Couplement.
In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly
be the Man that desires, and yet, on the other hand, there must be desire in
the Desiring-Faculty as well. How can this be? Are we to suppose that, when the
man originates the desire, the Desiring-Faculty moves to the order? How could
the Man have come to desire at all unless through a prior activity in the
Desiring-Faculty? Then it is the Desiring-Faculty that takes the lead? Yet how,
unless the body be first in the appropriate condition?
6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law
that when any powers are contained by a recipient, every action or state
expressive of them must be the action or state of that recipient, they
themselves remaining unaffected as merely furnishing efficiency.
But if this were so, then, since the Animate is
the recipient of the Causing-Principle [i.e., the Soul] which brings life to
the Couplement, this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences
and expressive activities of the life being vested in the recipient, the
Animate.
But this would mean that life itself belongs
not to the Soul but to the Couplement; or at least the life of the Couplement
would not be the life of the Soul; Sense-Perception would belong not to the
Sensitive-Faculty but to the container of the faculty.
But if sensation is a movement traversing the
body and culminating in Soul, how the soul lack sensation? The very presence of
the Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul.
Once again, where is Sense-Perception seated?
In the Couplement.
Yet how can the Couplement have sensation
independently of action in the Sensitive-Faculty, the Soul left out of count
and the Soul-Faculty?
7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the
Couplement subsists by virtue of the Souls presence.
This, however, is not to say that the Soul
gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body.
No; from the organized body and something else,
let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct
Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and
all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate.
But the "We"? How have We Sense-Perception?
By the fact that We are not separate from the
Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler elements go to
make up the entire many-sided nature of Man.
The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot
act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning
of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are
already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other
[of that in the Soul] which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an
impassive reading of Ideal-Forms.
And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the
Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning,
Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We:
before this there was only the "Ours"; but at this stage stands the
WE [the authentic Human-Principle] loftily presiding over the Animate.
There is no reason why the entire compound
entity should not be described as the Animate or Living-Being mingled in a lower
phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from
all that is kin to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute.
And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate of the reasoning
Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in that the use
and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the Soul.
8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what
is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of
the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle
itself [Divine-Mind].
This also we possess as the summit of our
being. And we have It either as common to all or as our own immediate
possession: or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is in common,
since It is indivisible one, everywhere and always Its entire self and
severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the First-Soul [i.e.
in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul].
Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two
modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the
Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one.
And how do we possess the Divinity?
In that the Divinity is contained in the
Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order
after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the
undivided Soul we read and that Soul which is divided among [living]
bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the
All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are
Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or
rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into
them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth,
without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face
caught by many mirrors.
The first of these images is Sense-Perception
seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the successive images are
to be recognized as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one
another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of
all production of offspring offspring efficient in its turn, in
contradistinction to the engendering Soul which [has no direct action within
matter but] produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions.
9. That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature
stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers;
for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the
Couplement.
But there is a difficulty in understanding how
the Soul can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are vested in it: for
all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what
is evil.
When we have done evil it is because we have
been worsted by our baser side for a man is many by desire or rage or some
evil image: the misnamed reasoning that takes up with the false, in reality
fancy, has not stayed for the judgement of the Reasoning-Principle: we have
acted at the call of the less worthy, just as in matters of the sense-sphere we
sometimes see falsely because we credit only the lower perception, that of the
Couplement, without applying the tests of the Reasoning-Faculty.
The Intellectual-Principle has held aloof from
the act and so is guiltless; or, as we may state it, all depends on whether we
ourselves have or have not put ourselves in touch with the Intellectual-Realm
either in the Intellectual-Principle or within ourselves; for it is possible at
once to possess and not to use.
Thus we have marked off what belongs to the
Couplement from what stands by itself: the one group has the character of body
and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its
manifestation belongs peculiarly to Soul: and the Understanding, as passing
judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the point of the vision of Ideal-Forms,
seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (i.e, with consciousness)
this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable Soul. For
Understanding, the true, is the Act of the Intellections: in many of its
manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the
inner.
Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as
to itself and within itself: all the changes and all the turmoil we experience
are the issue of what is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as have said, the
states and experiences of this elusive "Couplement."
10. It will be objected, that if the Soul
constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states then
the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by
the Soul.
But it has been observed that the Couplement,
too especially before our emancipation is a member of this total We, and in
fact what the body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two
distinct notions; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends
the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the true man is the other, going
pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the
Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which
even in its dwelling here may be kept apart. [This Soul constitutes the human
being] for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul which is a radiation
[or emanation] from it withdraws also, drawn after it.
Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring
not from contemplative wisdom but from custom or practical discipline belong to
the Couplement: to the Couplement, too, belong the vices; they are its
repugnances, desires, sympathies.
And Friendship?
This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower
part, sometimes to the interior man.
11. In childhood the main activity is in the
Couplement and there is but little irradiation from the higher principles of
our being: but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us
their action is directed towards the Supreme; they work upon us only when they
stand at the mid-point.
But does not the include that phase of our
being which stands above the mid-point?
It does, but on condition that we lay hold of
it: our entire nature is not ours at all times but only as we direct the
mid-point upwards or downwards, or lead some particular phase of our nature
from potentiality or native character into act.
And the animals, in what way or degree do they
possess the Animate?
If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human
Souls that have sinned, then the Animating-Principle in its separable phase
does not enter directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they
are aware only of the image of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and of that
only by being aware of the body organised and determined by that image.
If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate
is constituted for them by a radiation from the All-Soul.
12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the
expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above
all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation;
it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body.
We may take either view at will: they are
easily reconciled.
When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul
and Essential-Soul one and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity.
By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a
groupment, we include that other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the
states and passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it
falls under the conditions of the entire living experience: this compound it is
that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty.
It is in this sense that we read of the Soul:
"We saw it as those others saw the sea-god Glaukos." "And,"
reading on, "if we mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it
free of all that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it,
examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what Existences it
is what it is."
Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another
and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from
this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at
birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other [lower] phase of
the Soul. For the meaning of birth has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought
about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul other
than that actually coming down in the declension.
Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this
declension is it not certainly sin?
If the declension is no more than the
illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be
attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object
were not there, the light could cause no shadow.
And the Soul is said to go down, to decline,
only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image
fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a
thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image has no further being
when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.
The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems
to give this image separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the
lower world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing
in the two realms at once, he gives us a twofold Hercules.
It is not difficult to explain this
distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble
serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was
action and not the Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the
higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of him remains
below.
13. And the principle that reasons out these
matters? Is it We or the Soul?
We, but by the Soul.
But how "by the Soul"? Does this mean
that the Soul reasons by possession [by contact with the matters of enquiry]?
No; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists
without movement; or any movement that can be ascribed to it must be utterly
distinct from all corporal movement and be simply the Souls own life.
And Intellection in us is twofold: since the
Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we have
Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the
Intellectual-Principle upon us for this Intellectual-Principle is part of us
no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising.
Second tractate.
On virtue.
1. Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by necessary law," and it is the Souls design to escape from Evil, we must escape hence.
But what is this escape?
"In attaining Likeness to God," we
read. And this is explained as "becoming just and holy, living by
wisdom," the entire nature grounded in Virtue.
But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply
Likeness to some being that has Virtue? To what Divine Being, then, would our
Likeness be? To the Being must we not think? in Which, above all, such
excellence seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the
Principle ruling within it, the Principle endowed with a wisdom most wonderful.
What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should become
Like to its ruler?
But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt
whether even in this Divine-Being all the virtues find place Moral-Balance
[Sophrosyne], for example; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since
nothing is alien; where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce
the desire of possession.
If, indeed, that aspiration towards the
Intelligible which is in our nature exists also in this Ruling-Power, then need
not look elsewhere for the source of order and of the virtues in ourselves.
But does this Power possess the Virtues?
We cannot expect to find There what are called
the Civic Virtues, the Prudence which belongs to the reasoning faculty; the
Fortitude which conducts the emotional and passionate nature; the Sophrosyne
which consists in a certain pact, in a concord between the passionate faculty
and the reason; or Rectitude which is the due application of all the other
virtues as each in turn should command or obey.
Is Likeness, then, attained, perhaps, not by
these virtues of the social order but by those greater qualities known by the
same general name? And if so do the Civic Virtues give us no help at all?
It is against reason, utterly to deny Likeness
by these while admitting it by the greater: tradition at least recognizes
certain men of the civic excellence as divine, and we must believe that these
too had in some sort attained Likeness: on both levels there is virtue for us,
though not the same virtue.
Now, if it be admitted that Likeness is
possible, though by a varying use of different virtues and though the civic
virtues do not suffice, there is no reason why we should not, by virtues
peculiar to our state, attain Likeness to a model in which virtue has no place.
But is that conceivable?
When warmth comes in to make anything warm,
must there needs be something to warm the source of the warmth?
If a fire is to warm something else, must there
be a fire to warm that fire?
Against the first illustration it may be
retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not by an
infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to
hold, the argument would make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an
essential constituent of the Principle from which the Soul attaining Likeness
absorbs it.
Against the illustration drawn from the fire,
it may be urged that the analogy would make that Principle identical with
virtue, whereas we hold it to be something higher.
The objection would be valid if what the soul
takes in were one and the same with the source, but in fact virtue is one
thing, the source of virtue quite another. The material house is not identical
with the house conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness: the
material house has distribution and order while the pure idea is not
constituted by any such elements; distribution, order, symmetry are not parts
of an idea.
So with us: it is from the Supreme that we
derive order and distribution and harmony, which are virtues in this sphere:
the Existences There, having no need of harmony, order or distribution, have
nothing to do with virtue; and, none the less, it is by our possession of
virtue that we become like to Them.
Thus much to show that the principle that we
attain Likeness by virtue in no way involves the existence of virtue in the
Supreme. But we have not merely to make a formal demonstration: we must
persuade as well as demonstrate.
2. First, then, let us examine those good
qualities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek to establish what is this
thing which, as we possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Supreme
possesses it, is in the nature of an exemplar or archetype and is not virtue.
We must first distinguish two modes of
Likeness.
There is the likeness demanding an identical
nature in the objects which, further, must draw their likeness from a common
principle: and there is the case in which B resembles A, but A is a Primal, not
concerned about B and not said to resemble B. In this second case, likeness is
understood in a distinct sense: we no longer look for identity of nature, but,
on the contrary, for divergence since the likeness has come about by the mode
of difference.
What, then, precisely is Virtue, collectively
and in the particular? The clearer method will be to begin with the particular,
for so the common element by which all the forms hold the general name will
readily appear.
The Civic Virtues, on which we have touched
above, are a principle or order and beauty in us as long as we remain passing
our life here: they ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and
to our entire sensibility, and dispelling false judgement and this by sheer
efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the bounds, by the fact that the
measured is lifted outside of the sphere of the unmeasured and lawless.
And, further, these Civic Virtues measured
and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which
is as Matter to their forming are like to the measure reigning in the
over-world, and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for,
while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness, any
participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of Likeness to
the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness: the Soul nearer
than the body, therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a
godlike presence, almost cheating us into the delusion that in the Soul we see
God entire.
This is the way in which men of the Civic
Virtues attain Likeness.
3. We come now to that other mode of Likeness
which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier virtues: discussing this we shall
penetrate more deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and be able to
define the nature of the higher kind whose existence we shall establish beyond
doubt.
To Plato, unmistakably, there are two distinct
orders of virtue, and the civic does not suffice for Likeness: "Likeness to
God," he says, "is a flight from this worlds ways and things":
in dealing with the qualities of good citizenship he does not use the simple
term Virtue but adds the distinguishing word civic: and elsewhere he declares
all the virtues without exception to be purifications.
But in what sense can we call the virtues
purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness?
As the Soul is evil by being interfused with
the body, and by coming to share the bodys states and to think the bodys
thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off
the bodys moods and devoted itself to its own Act the state of Intellection
and Wisdom never allowed the passions of the body to affect it the virtue
of Sophrosyne knew no fear at the parting from the body the virtue of
Fortitude and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled in which state
is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the Soul, become thus intellective and
immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the
Divine, too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom.
But would not this make virtue a state of the
Divine also?
No: the Divine has no states; the state is in
the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in the Divine:
of things in the Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at
all.
Then yet again, the one word Intellection
covers two distinct Acts?
Rather there is primal Intellection and there
is Intellection deriving from the Primal and of other scope.
As speech is the echo of the thought in the
Soul, so thought in the Soul is an echo from elsewhere: that is to say, as the
uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a
thought above itself and is the interpreter of the higher sphere.
Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the
Soul: it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence.
4. We come, so, to the question whether
Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the
forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of
purification or does the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of
less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is almost the Term?
To have been purified is to have cleansed away
everything alien: but Goodness is something more.
If before the impurity entered there was
Goodness, the Goodness suffices; but even so, not the act of cleansing but the
cleansed thing that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish what
this emergent is.
It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The
Absolute Good cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can
think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double
allegiance and unable to rest in the Authentic Good.
The Souls true Good is in devotion to the
Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting
strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into
relation with its own; the new phase begins by a new orientation.
After the Purification, then, there is still
this orientation to be made? No: by the purification the true alignment stands
accomplished.
The Souls virtue, then, is this alignment? No:
it is what the alignment brings about within.
And this is...?
That it sees; that, like sight affected by the
thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it,
of the vision it has come to.
But was not the Soul possessed of all this
always, or had it forgotten?
What it now sees, it certainly always
possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it: to dispel
the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust
towards the light.
Besides, it possessed not the originals but
images, pictures; and these it must bring into closer accord with the verities
they represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a
possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is not alien and that
the link becomes very close when the Souls sight is turned towards It:
otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our
knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
5. So we come to the scope of the purification:
that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what
Principle? Identity with what God?
The question is substantially this: how far
does purification dispel the two orders of passion anger, desire and the
like, with grief and its kin and in what degree the disengagement from the
body is possible.
Disengagement means simply that the soul
withdraws to its own place.
It will hold itself above all passions and
affections. Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will
employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it
may combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing
assent to it. All passionate action it will check: the suppression will be
complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire
but will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare
and weak at that. The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt the
involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as
it is purely monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even
the food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the Souls
attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there must be,
it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control;
or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will reach no further than the
imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.
The Soul itself will be inviolately free and
will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or
if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that
any wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Souls
presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the
neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame,
never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.
There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere
intervention of Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of
Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure
its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord.
6. In all this there is no sin there is only
matter of discipline but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be
God.
As long as there is any such involuntary
action, the nature is twofold, God and Demi-God, or rather God in association
with a nature of a lower power: when all the involuntary is suppressed, there
is God unmingled, a Divine Being of those that follow upon The First.
For, at this height, the man is the very being
that came from the Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the essential man
is There: entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning
phase of his nature and this he will lead up into likeness with his highest
self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible it shall never be
inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course displeasing to its overlord.
What form, then, does virtue take in one so
lofty?
It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the
contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and as the
immediate presence of the Intellectual-Principle itself.
And each of these has two modes or aspects:
there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul; and
there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is
present to the Soul: this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not
Virtue.
In the Supreme, then, what is it?
Its proper Act and Its Essence.
That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested
in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the Supreme is not
self-existent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so to
speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue
is dependent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme is self-standing,
independent.
But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering of
faculty, does it not always imply the existence of diverse parts?
No: There is a Rectitude of Diversity
appropriate to what has parts, but there is another, not less Rectitude than
the former though it resides in a Unity. And the authentic Absolute-Rectitude
is the Act of a Unity upon itself, of a Unity in which there is no this and
that and the other.
On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the
Soul is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle: its
Restraint (Sophrosyne) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle;
its Fortitude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its
gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by
virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising
in its less noble companion.
7. The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence
correspondent to that existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars
in the Intellectual-Principle.
In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes
Knowledge and Wisdom; self-concentration is Sophrosyne; Its proper Act is Its
Dutifulness; Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate within Itself is
the equivalent of Fortitude.
In the Soul, the direction of vision towards
the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate
to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues
have similar correspondences.
And if the term of purification is the
production of a pure being, then the purification of the Soul must produce all
the virtues; if any are lacking, then not one of them is perfect.
And to possess the greater is potentially to
possess the minor, though the minor need not carry the greater with them.
Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the
life of the Sage; but whether his possession of the minor virtues be actual as
well as potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to
qualities higher still, must be decided afresh in each several case.
Take, for example, Contemplative-Wisdom. If
other guides of conduct must be called in to meet a given need, can this virtue
hold its ground even in mere potentiality?
And what happens when the virtues in their very
nature differ in scope and province? Where, for example, Sophrosyne would allow
certain acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them
off altogether? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once
Contemplative-Wisdom comes into action?
The solution is in understanding the virtues
and what each has to give: thus the man will learn to work with this or that as
every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other
standards these in turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its
earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work for the final Disengagement;
he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man such as Civic Virtue
commends but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life,
that of the Gods.
For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that
our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image
of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the
Supreme Exemplar.
Third tractate.
On dialectic [the upward way].
1. What art is there, what method, what
discipline to bring us there where we must go?
The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed: we have established elsewhere, by many considerations, that our journey is to the Good, to the Primal-Principle; and, indeed, the very reasoning which discovered the Term was itself something like an initiation.
But what order of beings will attain the Term?
Surely, as we read, those that have already
seen all or most things, those who at their first birth have entered into the
life-germ from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover,
the metaphysician taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the nature
peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside guidance.
But how lies the course? Is it alike for all,
or is there a distinct method for each class of temperament?
For all there are two stages of the path, as
they are making upwards or have already gained the upper sphere.
The first degree is the conversion from the
lower life; the second held by those that have already made their way to the
sphere of the Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint there but must
still advance within the realm lasts until they reach the extreme hold of the
place, the Term attained when the topmost peak of the Intellectual realm is
won.
But this highest degree must bide its time: let
us first try to speak of the initial process of conversion.
We must begin by distinguishing the three
types. Let us take the musician first and indicate his temperamental equipment
for the task.
The musician we may think of as being
exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to
stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid
are sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that
offends against unison or harmony in melodies and rhythms repels him; he longs
for measure and shapely pattern.
This natural tendency must be made the
starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design
in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the
Authentic-Existent which is the source of all these correspondences and of the
entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led to the Beauty that
manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him
was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that
sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty;
and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in
that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths are we
will show later.
2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician
also may attain and then either come to a stand or pass beyond has a
certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it:
spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must
be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form;
he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and
made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the
material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly
present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably
organized social system may be pointed out to him a first training this in
the loveliness of the immaterial he must learn to recognise the beauty in the
arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be
brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the
virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the
Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way.
3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very
character, winged already and not like those others, in need of disengagement,
stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a
guide. He must be shown, then, and instructed, a willing wayfarer by his very
temperament, all but self-directed.
Mathematics, which as a student by nature he
will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and
to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led
to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a
course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.
4. But this science, this Dialectic essential
to all the three classes alike, what, in sum, is it?
It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings
with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation
of things what each is, how it differs from others, what common quality all
have, to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and
whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many Beings there are, and how many
non-Beings to be distinguished from Beings.
Dialectic treats also of the Good and the
not-Good, and of the particulars that fall under each, and of what is the
Eternal and what the not Eternal and of these, it must be understood, not by
seeming-knowledge ["sense-knowledge"] but with authentic science.
All this accomplished, it gives up its touring
of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there
plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and
falsity, and pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs
the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the
Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it
establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues
from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm: then,
resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point
from which it starts.
Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the
Being in that sphere, it is no longer busy about many things: it has arrived at
Unity and it contemplates: it leaves to another science all that coil of
premisses and conclusions called the art of reasoning, much as it leaves the
art of writing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it considers necessary
to clear the ground but it makes itself the judge, here as in everything
else; where it sees use, it uses; anything it finds superfluous, it leaves to
whatever department of learning or practice may turn that matter to account.
5. But whence does this science derive its own
initial laws?
The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards,
the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. What else is
necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it
has reached perfect Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the
purest [perfection] of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom." And, being
the noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with
Authentic-Existence, The Highest there is: as Contemplative-Wisdom [or
true-knowing] it deals with Being, as Intellection with what transcends Being.
What, then, is Philosophy?
Philosophy is the supremely precious.
Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?
It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must
not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic does not
consist of bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as
it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards Existences,
and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the realities.
Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not
of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside itself, something
which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity
presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic,
that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions collections of words but
it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their
propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of
this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the
denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether propositions
agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of
sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other
science may care for such exercises.
6. Philosophy has other provinces, but
Dialectic is its precious part: in its study of the laws of the universe,
Philosophy draws on Dialectic much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic,
though, of course, the alliance between Philosophy and Dialectic is closer.
And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic:
by Dialectic it comes to contemplation, though it originates of itself the
moral state or rather the discipline from which the moral state develops.
Our reasoning faculties employ the data of
Dialectic almost as their proper possession for they are mainly concerned about
Matter [whose place and worth Dialectic establishes].
And while the other virtues bring the reason to
bear upon particular experiences and acts, the virtue of Wisdom [i.e., the
virtue peculiarly induced by Dialectic] is a certain super-reasoning much
closer to the Universal; for it deals with correspondence and sequence, the
choice of time for action and inaction, the adoption of this course, the
rejection of that other: Wisdom and Dialectic have the task of presenting all
things as Universals and stripped of matter for treatment by the Understanding.
But can these inferior kinds of virtue exist
without Dialectic and philosophy?
Yes but imperfectly, inadequately.
And is it possible to be a Sage, Master in
Dialectic, without these lower virtues?
It would not happen: the lower will spring
either before or together with the higher. And it is likely that everyone
normally possesses the natural virtues from which, when Wisdom steps in, the
perfected virtue develops. After the natural virtues, then, Wisdom and, so the
perfecting of the moral nature. Once the natural virtues exist, both orders,
the natural and the higher, ripen side by side to their final excellence: or as
the one advances it carries forward the other towards perfection.
But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in
vision and in strength and to both orders of virtue the essential matter is
from what principles we derive them.
Fourth tractate.
On true happiness.
1. Are we to make True Happiness one and the same thing with Welfare or Prosperity and therefore within the reach of the other living beings as well as ourselves?
There is certainly no reason to deny well-being
to any of them as long as their lot allows them to flourish unhindered after
their kind.
Whether we make Welfare consist in pleasant
conditions of life, or in the accomplishment of some appropriate task, by
either account it may fall to them as to us. For certainly they may at once be
pleasantly placed and engaged about some function that lies in their nature:
take for an instance such living beings as have the gift of music; finding
themselves well-off in other ways, they sing, too, as their nature is, and so
their day is pleasant to them.
And if, even, we set Happiness in some ultimate
Term pursued by inborn tendency, then on this head, too, we must allow it to
animals from the moment of their attaining this Ultimate: the nature in them
comes to a halt, having fulfilled its vital course from a beginning to an end.
It may be a distasteful notion, this
bringing-down of happiness so low as to the animal world making it over, as
then we must, even to the vilest of them and not withholding it even from the
plants, living they too and having a life unfolding to a Term.
But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to
deny that good of life to animals only because they do not appear to man to be
of great account. And as for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what
we accord to the other forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is true
people might be found to declare prosperity possible to the very plants: they
have life, and life may bring good or evil; the plants may thrive or wither,
bear or be barren.
No: if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the
good of life, it is impossible to deny the good of life to any order of living
things; if the Term be inner-peace, equally impossible; impossible, too, if the
good of life be to live in accordance with the purpose of nature.
2. Those that deny the happy life to the plants
on the ground that they lack sensation are really denying it to all living
things.
By sensation can be meant only perception of
state, and the state of well-being must be Good in itself quite apart from the
perception: to be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or
without knowledge: there is good in the appropriate state even though there be
no recognition of its fitness or desirable quality for it must be in itself
desirable.
This Good exists, then; is present: that in
which it is present has well-being without more ado: what need then to ask for
sensation into the bargain?
Perhaps, however, the theory is that the good
of any state consists not in the condition itself but in the knowledge and
perception of it.
But at this rate the Good is nothing but the
mere sensation, the bare activity of the sentient life. And so it will be possessed
by all that feel, no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that two constituents
are needed to make up the Good, that there must be both feeling and a given
state felt: but how can it be maintained that the bringing together of two
neutrals can produce the Good?
They will explain, possibly, that the state
must be a state of Good and that such a condition constitutes well-being on the
discernment of that present good; but then they invite the question whether the
well-being comes by discerning the presence of the Good that is there, or
whether there must further be the double recognition that the state is
agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes the Good.
If well-being demands this recognition, it
depends no longer upon sensation but upon another, a higher faculty; and
well-being is vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one
competent to discern that pleasure is the Good.
Then the cause of the well-being is no longer
pleasure but the faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasures value. Now a
judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a
principle of Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can
never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason abdicate and declare
nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order?
No: those denying the good of life to the
vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise quality of
sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of,
and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life.
Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found
happiness not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of
Reason?
But they must tell us it should be thus
restricted and why precisely they make Reason an essential to the happiness in
a living being:
"When you insist on Reason, is it because
Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal needs of nature;
or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"
If you call it in as a provider, then the
reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind,
as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason
becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth
in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue.
If you say that reason is to be cherished for
its own sake and not as supplying these human needs, you must tell us what
other services it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the
perfect thing it is.
For, on this admission, its perfection cannot
reside in any such planning and providing: its perfection will be something
quite different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be itself one
of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a cause of those first needs
of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be nobler than any and all of
such things: otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so
highly.
Until these people light upon some nobler
principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where they are
and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to
those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible.
What then is happiness? Let us try basing it
upon Life.
3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of
life, everything that lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be
effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing
is by nature receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing
it to the rational. If happiness were inherent in the bare being-alive, the
common ground in which the cause of happiness could always take root would be
simply life.
Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere
living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not
really making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning
faculty, round which they centre happiness, is a property [not the subject of a
property]: the subject, to them, must be the Reasoning-Life since it is in this
double term that they find the basis of the happiness: so that they are making
it consist not in life but in a particular kind of life not, of course, a
species formally opposite but, in terminology, standing as an
"earlier" to a "later" in the one Kind.
Now in common use this word "Life"
embraces many forms which shade down from primal to secondary and so on, all
massed under the common term life of plant and life of animal each phase
brighter or dimmer than its next: and so it evidently must be with the
Good-of-Life. And if thing is ever the image of thing, so every Good must
always be the image of a higher Good.
If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness
demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all
that belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that
lives fully.
And such a one will possess not merely the
good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the
Supreme Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life
in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something
essential not as something brought from without, a life needing no foreign
substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.
For what could be added to the fullest life to
make it the best life? If anyone should answer, "The nature of Good"
[The Good, as a Divine Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near our
thought, but we are not seeking the Cause but the main constituent.
It has been said more than once that the
perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual
Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are
phantoms of life, imperfect, not pure, not more truly life than they are its
contrary: here let it be said succinctly that since all living things proceed
from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle
must be the first life and the most complete.
4. If, then, the perfect life is within human
reach, the man attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must be made
over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.
But since we hold that happiness is for human
beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be
stated thus:
It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he
commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic
Intellection, has realised the perfect life.
But are we to picture this kind of life as
something foreign imported into his nature?
No: there exists no single human being that
does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which we hold to
constitute happiness.
But are we to think of man as including this
form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent of his
entire nature?
We say, rather, that while in some men it is
present as a mere portion of their total being in those, namely, that have it
potentially there is, too, the man, already in possession of true felicity,
who is this perfection realized, who has passed over into actual identification
with it. All else is now mere clothing about the man, not to be called part of
him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to
himself by any act of the will.
To the man in this state, what is the Good?
He himself by what he has and is.
And the author and principle of what he is and
holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself
within the human being after this other mode.
The sign that this state has been achieved is
that the man seeks nothing else.
What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly none
of the less worthy things; and the Best he carries always within him.
He that has such a life as this has all he
needs in life.
Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness,
the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him.
Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for
himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has
life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of
this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives
to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.
Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity:
the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or
at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the
wise, know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does
bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which
stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no
part.
5. But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else
that inhibit the native activity?
What of the suspension of consciousness which
drugs or disease may bring about? Could either welfare or happiness be present
under such conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which
will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing
"Miseries of Priam."
"The Sage," we shall be told,
"may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never
be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage,
that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of
the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all
bravely... until the bodys appeals come up before him, and longings and
loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must
be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery
of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss
self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined
in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in
some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its
associates distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There
is nothing but to cut away the body or the bodys sensitive life and so secure
that self-contained unity essential to happiness."
6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom
from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone
confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic
Good, why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be
happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into happiness?
If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once
desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one
and not many; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that
only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the
tenderest longings of the soul.
The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed
directly towards freedom from this sphere: the reason which disciplines away
our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this
order; it merely resents their interference; sometimes, even, it must seek
them; essentially all the aspiration is not so much away from evil as towards
the Souls own highest and noblest: this attained, all is won and there is rest
and this is the veritably willed state of life.
There can be no such thing as
"willing" the acquirement of necessaries, if Will is to be taken in
its strict sense, and not misapplied to the mere recognition of need.
It is certain that we shrink from the
unpleasant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what we should have willed; to
have no occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste; but
the things we seek tell the story as soon as they are ours. For instance,
health and freedom from pain; which of these has any great charm? As long as we
possess them, we set no store upon them.
Anything which, present, has no charm and adds
nothing to happiness, which when lacking is desired because of the presence of
an annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good.
Such things can never make part of our final
object: our Term must be such that though these pleasanter conditions be absent
and their contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.
7. Then why are these conditions sought and
their contraries repelled by the man established in happiness?
Here is our answer:
These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is
true, add any particle towards the Sages felicity: but they do serve towards the
integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his
Being or complicates the Term: it is not that the Sage can be so easily
deprived of the Term achieved but simply that he that holds the highest good
desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time, something
which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take place by
its side.
In any case if the man that has attained
felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not
the slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity
would be veering or falling from day to day; the death of a child would bring
him down, or the loss of some trivial possession. No: a thousand mischances and
disappointments may befall him and leave him still in the tranquil possession
of the Term.
But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty
daily chances!
What human thing, then, is great, so as not to
be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no
longer to anything below?
If the Sage thinks all fortunate events,
however momentous, to be no great matter kingdom and the rule over cities and
peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own
handiwork how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or
the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event a great
disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking.
One that sets great store by wood and stones, or... Zeus... by mortality among
mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that
it is better than life in the body.
But suppose that he himself is offered a victim
in sacrifice?
Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?
But if he go unburied?
Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth,
his body will always rot.
But if he has been hidden away, not with costly
ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument?
The littleness of it!
But if he falls into his enemies hands, into
prison?
There is always the way towards escape, if none
towards well-being.
But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons
and daughters dragged away to captivity?
What then, we ask, if he had died without
witnessing the wrong? Could he have quitted the world in the calm conviction
that nothing of all this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to
see that it is possible for such calamities to overtake his household, and does
he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of what may occur? In the
knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease; so, too, when the evil has come
about.
He would reflect that the nature of this All is
such as brings these things to pass and man must bow the head.
Besides in many cases captivity will certainly
prove an advantage; and those that suffer have their freedom in their hands: if
they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real
grievance, or they stay against reason, when they should not, and then they
have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of his neighbours, however
near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil: his state cannot hang upon the fortunes
good or bad of any other men.
8. As for violent personal sufferings, he will
carry them off as well as he can; if they overpass his endurance they will
carry him off.
And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there
is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light
in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and
tempest.
But what if he be put beyond himself? What if
pain grow so intense and so torture him that the agony all but kills? Well,
when he is put to torture he will plan what is to be done: he retains his
freedom of action.
Besides we must remember that the Sage sees
things very differently from the average man; neither ordinary experiences nor
pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner
hold. To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul.
And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should
think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die before they come: this is
not concern for others welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our
imperfection: we must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease to
tremble over what perhaps may be.
Anyone that says that it is in human nature to
grieve over misfortune to our household must learn that this is not so with
all, and that, precisely, it is virtues use to raise the general level of nature
towards the better and finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is to set at
nought what terrifies the common mind.
We cannot be indolent: this is an arena for the
powerful combatant holding his ground against the blows of fortune, and knowing
that, sore though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing
dreadful, nursery terrors.
So, the Sage would have desired misfortune?
It is precisely to meet the undesired when it
appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless
and unshakeable soul.
9. But when he is out of himself, reason
quenched by sickness or by magic arts?
If it be allowed that in this state, resting as
it were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why should he not equally remain
happy? No one rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep; no one counts up
that time and so denies that he has been happy all his life.
If they say that, failing consciousness, he is
no longer the Sage, then they are no longer reasoning about the Sage: but we do
suppose a Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in
the state of felicity.
"Well, a Sage let him remain," they
say, "still, having no sensation and not expressing his virtue in act, how
can he be happy?"
But a man unconscious of his health may be,
none the less, healthy: a man may not be aware of his personal attraction, but
he remains handsome none the less: if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he
be any the less wise?
It may perhaps be urged that sensation and
consciousness are essential to wisdom and that happiness is only wisdom brought
to act.
Now, this argument might have weight if
prudence, wisdom, were something fetched in from outside: but this is not so:
wisdom is, in its essential nature, an Authentic-Existence, or rather is The
Authentic-Existent and this Existent does not perish in one asleep or, to
take the particular case presented to us, in the man out of his mind: the Act
of this Existent is continuous within him; and is a sleepless activity: the
Sage, therefore, even unconscious, is still the Sage in Act.
This activity is screened not from the man
entire but merely from one part of him: we have here a parallel to what happens
in the activity of the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made
known by the sensitive faculty to the rest of the man: if our physical life
really constituted the "We," its Act would be our Act: but, in the
fact, this physical life is not the "We"; the "We" is the
activity of the Intellectual-Principle so that when the Intellective is in Act
we are in Act.
10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity
remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No
doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed
through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there
not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the soul that
attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception? For, if
Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical, this "Earlier-than-perception"
must be a thing having Act.
Let us explain the conditions under which we
become conscious of this Intellective-Act.
When the Intellect is in upward orientation
that [lower part of it] which contains [or, corresponds to] the life of the
Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting
on the smooth and shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the
mirror is in place the image appears but, though the mirror be absent or out of
gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists; so in the
case of the Soul; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of
reflecting the images of the Rational and Intellectual-Principles these images
appear. Then, side by side with the primal knowledge of the activity of the
Rational and the Intellectual-Principles, we have also as it were a
sense-perception of their operation.
When, on the contrary, the mirror within is
shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body, Reason and the
Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by
imagination.
In sum we may safely gather that while the
Intellective-Act may be attended by the Imaging Principle, it is not to be
confounded with it.
And even in our conscious life we can point to
many noble activities, of mind and of hand alike, which at the time in no way
compel our consciousness. A reader will often be quite unconscious when he is
most intent: in a feat of courage there can be no sense either of the brave action
or of the fact that all that is done conforms to the rules of courage. And so
in cases beyond number.
So that it would even seem that consciousness
tends to blunt the activities upon which it is exercised, and that in the
degree in which these pass unobserved they are purer and have more effect, more
vitality, and that, consequently, the Sage arrived at this state has the truer
fulness of life, life not spilled out in sensation but gathered closely within
itself.
11. We shall perhaps be told that in such a
state the man is no longer alive: we answer that these people show themselves
equally unable to understand his inner life and his happiness.
If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them
to keep in mind a living Sage and, under these terms, to enquire whether the
man is in happiness: they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether
he has the happy life; they must not take away man and then look for the
happiness of a man: once they allow that the Sage lives within, they must not
seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the outer world for the
object of his desires. To consider the outer world to be a field to his desire,
to fancy the Sage desiring any good external, would be to deny
Substantial-Existence to happiness; for the Sage would like to see all men
prosperous and no evil befalling anyone; but though it prove otherwise, he is
still content.
If it be admitted that such a desire would be
against reason, since evil cannot cease to be, there is no escape from agreeing
with us that the Sages will is set always and only inward.
12. The pleasure demanded for the life cannot
be in the enjoyments of the licentious or in any gratifications of the body
there is no place for these, and they stifle happiness nor in any violent
emotions what could so move the Sage? it can be only such pleasure as there
must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise from movement and is not a
thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and
the Sage is present to himself: his pleasure, his contentment, stands,
immovable.
Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life
ever untroubled: his state is fixedly happy and nothing whatever of all that is
known as evil can set it awry given only that he is and remains a Sage.
If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleasure
in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is looking for.
13. The characteristic activities are not
hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining always fine,
and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle
particular cases and things, he may not be able to put his vision into act
without searching and thinking, but the one greatest principle is ever present
to him, like a part of his being most of all present, should he be even a
victim in the much-talked-of Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite all that has
been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an agreeable lodging; but what
cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the torture; in the Sage there is
something else as well, The Self-Gathered which, as long as it holds itself by
main force within itself, can never be robbed of the vision of the All-Good.
14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not
the Couplement of soul and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from
the body and disdain its nominal goods.
It would be absurd to think that happiness
begins and ends with the living-body: happiness is the possession of the good
of life: it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul and not of
all the Soul at that: for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative
soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the body.
A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even
a happy balance of temperament, these surely do not make felicity; in the
excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed
down and forced more and more within their power. There must be a sort of
counter-pressure in the other direction, towards the noblest: the body must be
lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the
appearances.
Let the earth-bound man be handsome and
powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human
race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such
splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but
if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has
any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear
away by inattention to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he
will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in
sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such troubles should not come to
him of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least: in old
age, it is true, he will desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he
will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will be
to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it
the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and ease of life will
not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their contraries destroy or
lessen it.
When in the one subject, a positive can add
nothing, how can the negative take away?
15. But suppose two wise men, one of them
possessing all that is supposed to be naturally welcome, while the other meets
only with the very reverse: do we assert that they have an equal happiness?
We do, if they are equally wise.
What though the one be favoured in body and in
all else that does not help towards wisdom, still less towards virtue, towards
the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount
to? The man commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself
that he is more truly happy than the man without them: the utmost profusion of
such boons would not help even to make a flute-player.
We discuss the happy man after our own
feebleness; we count alarming and grave what his felicity takes lightly: he
would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all
trifling with such things and become as it were another being, having
confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch him. In such a
spirit he can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is
not perfect virtue; the man is some sort of a half-thing.
As for any involuntary fear rising in him and
taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps are elsewhere, the
Sage will attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory
child within him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an
infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of severity.
This does not make the Sage unfriendly or
harsh: it is to himself and in his own great concern that he is the Sage:
giving freely to his intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of
friends by his very union with the Intellectual-Principle.
16. Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft
in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental, dreading
accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person
altogether; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life
of mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But admitting
the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a
life of happiness; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in
the integrity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a thing of mixture.
And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness
draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to
That, living by That.
He can care for no other Term than That: all
else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not in
expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable
attention to the differing conditions surrounding him as he lives here or
there.
He will give to the body all that he sees to be
useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of another order, not
prevented from abandoning the body, necessarily leaving it at natures hour, he
himself always the master to decide in its regard.
Thus some part of his life considers
exclusively the Souls satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the Terms
sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing
which he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it
can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he will change it, or will give up lyre
and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he
will let it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an
instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him in the
beginning: he has found it useful until now, many a time.
Fifth tractate.
Happiness and extension of time.
1. Is it possible to think that Happiness increases with Time, Happiness which is always taken as a present thing?
The memory of former felicity may surely be
ruled out of count, for Happiness is not a thing of words, but a definite
condition which must be actually present like the very fact and act of life.
2. It may be objected that our will towards
living and towards expressive activity is constant, and that each attainment of
such expression is an increase in Happiness.
But in the first place, by this reckoning every
to-morrows well-being will be greater than to-days, every later instalment
successively larger that an earlier; at once time supplants moral excellence as
the measure of felicity.
Then again the Gods to-day must be happier than
of old: and their bliss, too, is not perfect, will never be perfect. Further,
when the will attains what it was seeking, it attains something present: the
quest is always for something to be actually present until a standing felicity
is definitely achieved. The will to life which is will to Existence aims at
something present, since Existence must be a stably present thing. Even when
the act of the will is directed towards the future, and the furthest future,
its object is an actually present having and being: there is no concern about
what is passed or to come: the future state a man seeks is to be a now to him;
he does not care about the forever: he asks that an actual present be actually
present.
3. Yes, but if the well-being has lasted a long
time, if that present spectacle has been a longer time before the eyes?
If in the greater length of time the man has
seen more deeply, time has certainly done something for him, but if all the
process has brought him no further vision, then one glance would give all he
has had.
4. Still the one life has known pleasure longer
than the other?
But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in with
Happiness unless indeed by pleasure is meant the unhindered Act [of the true
man], in which case this pleasure is simply our "Happiness." And even
pleasure, though it exist continuously, has never anything but the present; its
past is over and done with.
5. We are asked to believe, then, it will be
objected, that if one man has been happy from first to last, another only at
the last, and a third, beginning with happiness, has lost it, their shares are
equal?
This is straying from the question: we were
comparing the happy among themselves: now we are asked to compare the not-happy
at the time when they are out of happiness with those in actual possession of
happiness. If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of
happiness against men without it and their advantage is always by something in
the present.
6. Well, but take the unhappy man: must not
increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness? Do not all troubles
long-lasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type yield a greater sum
of misery in the longer time? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by
time why should not time equally augment happiness when all is well?
In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no
doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase: for example, in a lingering
malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought
lower and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief
grew no worse, then, here too, there would be no trouble but that of the
present moment: we cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness except in
the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state in the sense
that, the evil in the sufferers condition having been extended over a longer
time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is due to
the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time.
It may be pointed out also that this greater
length of time is not a thing existent at any given moment; and surely a
"more" is not to be made out by adding to something actually present
something that has passed away.
No: true happiness is not vague and fluid: it
is an unchanging state.
If there is in this matter any increase besides
that of mere time, it is in the sense that a greater happiness is the reward of
a higher virtue: this is not counting up to the credit of happiness the years
of its continuance; it is simply noting the high-water mark once for all
attained.
7. But if we are to consider only the present
and may not call in the past to make the total, why do we not reckon so in the
case of time itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the
present and call the total greater? Why not suppose a quantity of happiness
equivalent to a quantity of time? This would be no more than taking it lap by
lap to correspond with time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as an
indivisible, measurable only by the content of a given instant.
There is no absurdity in taking count of time
which has ceased to be: we are merely counting what is past and finished, as we
might count the dead: but to treat past happiness as actually existent and as
outweighing present happiness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must be an
achieved and existent state, whereas any time over and apart from the present
is nonexistent: all progress of time means the extinction of all the time that
has been.
Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of
eternity that seeks to break up in its fragmentary flight the permanence of its
exemplar. Thus whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what stands
permanent in eternity is annihilated saved only in so far as in some degree
it still belongs to eternity, but wholly destroyed if it be unreservedly
absorbed into time.
If Happiness demands the possession of the good
of life, it clearly has to do with the life of Authentic-Existence for that
life is the Best. Now the life of Authentic-Existence is measurable not by time
but by eternity; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any
magnitude but is the unchangeable, the indivisible, is timeless Being.
We must not muddle together Being and
Non-Being, time and eternity, not even everlasting time with the eternal; we
cannot make laps and stages of an absolute unity; all must be taken together,
wheresoever and howsoever we handle it; and it must be taken at that, not even
as an undivided block of time but as the Life of Eternity, a stretch not made
up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time.
8. It may be urged that the actual presence of
past experiences, kept present by Memory, gives the advantage to the man of the
longer felicity.
But, Memory of what sort of experiences?
Memory either of formerly attained wisdom and
virtue in which case we have a better man and the argument from memory is
given up or memory of past pleasures, as if the man that has arrived at
felicity must roam far and wide in search of gratifications and is not
contented by the bliss actually within him.
And what is there pleasant in the memory of
pleasure? What is it to recall yesterdays excellent dinner? Still more
ridiculous, one of ten years ago. So, too, of last years morality.
9. But is there not something to be said for
the memory of the various forms of beauty?
That is the resource of a man whose life is
without beauty in the present, so that, for lack of it now, he grasps at the
memory of what has been.
10. But, it may be said, length of time
produces an abundance of good actions missed by the man whose attainment of the
happy state is recent if indeed we can think at all of a state of happiness
where good actions have been few.
Now to make multiplicity, whether in time or in
action, essential to Happiness is to put it together by combining
non-existents, represented by the past, with some one thing that actually is.
This consideration it was that led us at the very beginning to place Happiness
in the actually existent and on that basis to launch our enquiry as to whether
the higher degree was determined by the longer time. It might be thought that
the Happiness of longer date must surpass the shorter by virtue of the greater
number of acts it included.
But, to begin with, men quite outside of the
active life may attain the state of felicity, and not in a less but in a
greater degree than men of affairs.
Secondly, the good does not derive from the act
itself but from the inner disposition which prompts the noble conduct: the wise
and good man in his very action harvests the good not by what he does but by
what he is.
A wicked man no less than a Sage may save the
country, and the good of the act is for all alike, no matter whose was the
saving hand. The contentment of the Sage does not hang upon such actions and
events: it is his own inner habit that creates at once his felicity and
whatever pleasure may accompany it.
To put Happiness in actions is to put it in
things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Souls expression
is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and
this, this alone, is Happiness.
Sixth tractate.
Beauty.
1. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our argument will bring to light.
What, then, is it that gives comeliness to
material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what
is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul?
Is there some One Principle from which all take
their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the
bodiless? Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be?
Consider that some things, material shapes for
instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by something communicated,
while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue.
The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful,
sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body and being
beautiful.
What, then, is this something that shows itself
in certain material forms? This is the natural beginning of our enquiry.
What is it that attracts the eyes of those to
whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls them, lures them, towards it,
and fills them with joy at the sight? If we possess ourselves of this, we have
at once a standpoint for the wider survey.
Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of
parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of
colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things,
as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially
symmetrical, patterned.
But think what this means.
Only a compound can be beautiful, never
anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty,
not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet
beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out
of ugliness; its law must run throughout.
All the loveliness of colour and even the light
of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be
ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing?
And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair?
In sounds also the simple must be proscribed,
though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in
itself.
Again since the one face, constant in symmetry,
appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something
more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?
Turn to what is attractive in methods of life
or in the expression of thought; are we to call in symmetry here? What symmetry
is to be found in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental
pursuit?
What symmetry can there be in points of
abstract thought?
The symmetry of being accordant with each
other? But there may be accordance or entire identity where there is nothing
but ugliness: the proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness
chimes in the most perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means
weakness of will; the accordance is complete.
Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the
soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how does symmetry
enter here? The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue
cannot have the symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement
could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the souls faculties or
purposes?
Finally, how by this theory would there be
beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary?
2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and
indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material things.
Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is
something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names
as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison
with it.
But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at
once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not
accordant, resenting it.
Our interpretation is that the soul by the
very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the
hierarchy of Being when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that
kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus
stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.
But, is there any such likeness between the
loveliness of this world and the splendours in the Supreme? Such a likeness in
the particulars would make the two orders alike: but what is there in common
between beauty here and beauty There?
We hold that all the loveliness of this world
comes by communion in Ideal-Form.
All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern
and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly by that
very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly
thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by
Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to
Ideal-Form.
But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has
grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity:
it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious
coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far
as multiplicity may.
And on what has thus been compacted to unity,
Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it
lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to
that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by
craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some
natural quality may give to a single stone.
This, then, is how the material thing becomes
beautiful by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine.
3. And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly
addressed to Beauty one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own,
never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement.
Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately,
affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form
within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision.
But what accordance is there between the
material and that which antedates all Matter?
On what principle does the architect, when he
finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a
house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones
apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the
indivisible exhibited in diversity?
So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in
certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter,
opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some
shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains
fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts,
and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a
natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth
the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his
own soul.
The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a
unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent
in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a
Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form.
Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond
all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements,
making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near
to the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated
by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has colour primally;
they receive the Form of colour from it: hence the splendour of its light, the
splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but
uncertainly held by its light remains outside of beauty, as not having absorbed
the plenitude of the Form of colour.
And harmonies unheard in sound create the
harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it
the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not
arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter
and bring pattern into being.
Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense,
images and shadow-pictures, fugitives that have entered into Matter to adorn,
and to ravish, where they are seen.
4. But there are earlier and loftier beauties
than these. In the sense-bound life we are no longer granted to know them, but
the soul, taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. To the
vision of these we must mount, leaving sense to its own low place.
As it is not for those to speak of the graceful
forms of the material world who have never seen them or known their grace men
born blind, let us suppose in the same way those must be silent upon the
beauty of noble conduct and of learning and all that order who have never cared
for such things, nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue who have never
known the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of
Evening and of dawn.
Such vision is for those only who see with the
Souls sight and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon
them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are
moving in the realm of Truth.
This is the spirit that Beauty must ever
induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling
that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and
this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more
deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love just as all take
delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those
only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.
5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty
outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.
What do you feel in presence of the grace you
discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits
of virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves are
beautiful within, what do you feel? What is this Dionysiac exultation that
thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your Soul, this
longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self?
These are no other than the emotions of Souls
under the spell of love.
But what is it that awakens all this passion?
No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose
beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all
the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or
admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined
purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and
tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of god-like
Intellection.
All these noble qualities are to be reverenced
and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful?
They exist: they manifest themselves to us:
anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being; and is not
Real-Being, really beautiful?
But we have not yet shown by what property in
them they have wrought the Soul to loveliness: what is this grace, this
splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues?
Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the
Soul, and set that against its beauty: to understand, at once, what this
ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way
before us.
Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute,
unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the
fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little
thought it has, only of the perish able and the base; perverse in all its the
friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation
and delighting in its deformity.
What must we think but that all this shame is
something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it,
soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer
a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering
dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees
what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it
is towards the outer, the lower, the dark?
An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering
hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the
taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in
its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature its
own essential Idea.
If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed
with mud his native comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul
stuff besmearing him: his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has
encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to
scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.
So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly by
something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a
descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to
be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles; if
these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from all that
is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of the
desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from
all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn,
a solitary, to itself again in that moment the ugliness that came only from
the alien is stripped away.
6. For, as the ancient teaching was,
moral-discipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom
itself, all is purification.
Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate
the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the
unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of body find their
joy in foulness.
What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but
to take no part in the pleasures of the body, to break away from them as
unclean and unworthy of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the
death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one
can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but
disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the
Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to
the Above.
The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason,
wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the
wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.
Hence the Soul heightened to the
Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all
that proceeds from Intellection are the Souls beauty, a graciousness native to
it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say
that in the Souls becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to
God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
We may even say that Beauty is the
Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence: and
the Ugly is also the primal evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and
beautiful, or is Good and Beauty: and hence the one method will discover to us
the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.
And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good,
must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First is the
Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty;
through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a
lower order-actions and pursuits for instance comes by operation of the
shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of
sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal
Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever
that it grasps and moulds.
7. Therefore we must ascend again towards the
Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend
when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good.
To attain it is for those that will take the upward path, who will set all
their forces towards it, who will divest themselves of all that we have put on
in our descent: so, to those that approach the Holy Celebrations of the
Mysteries, there are appointed purifications and the laying aside of the
garments worn before, and the entry in nakedness until, passing, on the
upward way, all that is other than the God, each in the solitude of himself
shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the
Pure, that from Which all things depend, for Which all look and live and act
and know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being.
And one that shall know this vision with what
passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing
to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never
seen this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known
must love and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and
gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love, with
sharp desire; all other loves than this he must despise, and disdain all that
once seemed fair.
This, indeed, is the mood even of those who,
having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel
the old delight in the comeliness of material forms: what then are we to think
of one that contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no
accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens so
perfect Its purity far above all such things in that they are non-essential,
composite, not primal but descending from This?
Beholding this Being the Choragos of all
Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth and never takes resting,
rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its
likeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack? For This, the Beauty supreme, the
absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them also
worthy of love.
And for This, the sternest and the uttermost
combat is set before the Souls; all our labour is for This, lest we be left
without part in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the
blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly.
For not he that has failed of the joy that is
in colour or in visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or
of kingdom has failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for Whose
winning he should renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky,
if only, spurning the world of sense from beneath his feet, and straining to
This, he may see.
8. But what must we do? How lies the path? How
come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated
precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane?
He that has the strength, let him arise and
withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away
for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those
shapes of grace that show in body, let him not pursue: he must know them for
copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if
anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water is there not
a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the
current and was swept away to nothingness? So too, one that is held by material
beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul,
down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in
the Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with shadows, there as here.
"Let us flee then to the beloved
Fatherland": this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How
are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he
commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso not content to
linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense
filling his days.
The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come,
and There is The Father.
What then is our course, what the manner of our
flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to
land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of
things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call
instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the
birth-right of all, which few turn to use.
9. And this inner vision, what is its
operation?
Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the
ultimate splendour. Therefore the Soul must be trained to the habit of
remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by
the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness:
lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful
forms.
But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and
know its loveliness?
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do
not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to
be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line
lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do
you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring
light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never
cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the
godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely
established in the stainless shrine.
When you know that you have become this perfect
work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now
remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to
the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature,
wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed
to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever
unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity
when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision:
now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step you need a guide
no longer strain, and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty
Beauty. If the eye that adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or
weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness,
then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight
before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen,
and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first
become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless
itself be beautiful.
Therefore, first let each become godlike and
each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will
come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in
the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For
by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the
Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be
the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the
Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction
there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere;
and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of
Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and,
thus, always, Beautys seat is There.
Seventh tractate.
On the primal good and secondary
forms of good [otherwise, "On happiness"].
1. We can scarcely conceive that for any entity the Good can be other than the natural Act expressing its life-force, or in the case of an entity made up of parts the Act, appropriate, natural and complete, expressive of that in it which is best.
For the Soul, then, the Good is its own natural
Act.
But the Soul itself is natively a
"Best"; if, further, its act be directed towards the Best, the
achievement is not merely the "Souls good" but "The Good"
without qualification.
Now, given an Existent which as being itself
the best of existences and even transcending the existences directs its Act
towards no other, but is the object to which the Act of all else is directed,
it is clear that this must be at once the Good and the means through which all
else may participate in Good.
This Absolute Good other entities may possess
in two ways by becoming like to It and by directing the Act of their being
towards It.
Now, if all aspiration and Act whatsoever are
directed towards the Good, it follows that the Essential-Good neither need nor
can look outside itself or aspire to anything other than itself: it can but
remain unmoved, as being, in the constitution of things, the wellspring and
firstcause of all Act: whatsoever in other entities is of the nature of Good
cannot be due to any Act of the Essential-Good upon them; it is for them on the
contrary to act towards their source and cause. The Good must, then, be the
Good not by any Act, not even by virtue of its Intellection, but by its very
rest within Itself.
Existing beyond and above Being, it must be
beyond and above the Intellectual-Principle and all Intellection.
For, again, that only can be named the Good to
which all is bound and itself to none: for only thus is it veritably the object
of all aspiration. It must be unmoved, while all circles around it, as a
circumference around a centre from which all the radii proceed. Another example
would be the sun, central to the light which streams from it and is yet linked
to it, or at least is always about it, irremoveably; try all you will to
separate the light from the sun, or the sun from its light, for ever the light
is in the sun.
2. But the Universe outside; how is it aligned
towards the Good?
The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul
towards the Good itself, through the Intellectual-Principle.
Everything has something of the Good, by virtue
of possessing a certain degree of unity and a certain degree of Existence and
by participation in Ideal-Form: to the extent of the Unity, Being, and Form
which are present, there is a sharing in an image, for the Unity and Existence
in which there is participation are no more than images of the Ideal-Form.
With Soul it is different; the First-Soul, that
which follows upon the Intellectual-Principle, possesses a life nearer to the
Verity and through that Principle is of the nature of good; it will actually
possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the Intellectual-Principle,
since this follows immediately upon the Good.
In sum, then, life is the Good to the living,
and the Intellectual-Principle to what is intellective; so that where there is
life with intellection there is a double contact with the Good.
3. But if life is a good, is there good for all
that lives?
No: in the vile, life limps: it is like the eye
to the dim-sighted; it fails of its task.
But if the mingled strand of life is to us,
though entwined with evil, still in the total a good, must not death be an
evil?
Evil to What? There must be a subject for the
evil: but if the possible subject is no longer among beings, or, still among
beings, is devoid of life... why, a stone is not more immune.
If, on the contrary, after death life and soul
continue, then death will be no evil but a good; Soul, disembodied, is the
freer to ply its own Act.
If it be taken into the All-Soul what evil
can reach it There? And as the Gods are possessed of Good and untouched by evil
so, certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. And if
it should lose its purity, the evil it experiences is not in its death but in
its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower world, even there the
evil thing is its life and not its death; the misfortune is still life, a life
of a definite character.
Life is a partnership of a Soul and body; death
is the dissolution; in either life or death, then, the Soul will feel itself at
home.
But, again, if life is good, how can death be
anything but evil?
Remember that the good of life, where it has
any good at all, is not due to anything in the partnership but to the repelling
of evil by virtue; death, then, must be the greater good.
In a word, life in the body is of itself an
evil but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the
Couplement but holding itself apart, even here.
Eighth tractate.
On the nature and source of evil.
1. Those enquiring whence Evil enters into beings, or rather into a certain order of beings, would be making the best beginning if they established, first of all, what precisely Evil is, what constitutes its Nature. At once we should know whence it comes, where it has its native seat and where it is present merely as an accident; and there would be no further question as to whether it has Authentic-Existence.
But a difficulty arises. By what faculty in us
could we possibly know Evil?
All knowing comes by likeness. The
Intellectual-Principle and the Soul, being Ideal-Forms, would know Ideal-Forms
and would have a natural tendency towards them; but who could imagine Evil to
be an Ideal-Form, seeing that it manifests itself as the very absence of Good?
If the solution is that the one act of knowing
covers contraries, and that as Evil is the contrary to Good the one act would
grasp Good and Evil together, then to know Evil there must be first a clear
perception and understanding of Good, since the nobler existences precede the
baser and are Ideal-Forms while the less good hold no such standing, are nearer
to Non-Being.
No doubt there is a question in what precise
way Good is contrary to Evil whether it is as First-Principle to last of
things or as Ideal-Form to utter Lack: but this subject we postpone.
2. For the moment let us define the nature of
the Good as far as the immediate purpose demands.
The Good is that on which all else depends,
towards which all Existences aspire as to their source and their need, while
Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure
and Term of all, giving out from itself the Intellectual-Principle and
Existence and Soul and Life and all Intellective-Act.
All until The Good is reached is beautiful; The
Good is beyond-beautiful, beyond the Highest, holding kingly state in the
Intellectual-Kosmos, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what
is known as Intelligence in us. Our intelligence is nourished on the
propositions of logic, is skilled in following discussions, works by
reasonings, examines links of demonstration, and comes to know the world of
Being also by the steps of logical process, having no prior grasp of Reality
but remaining empty, all Intelligence though it be, until it has put itself to
school.
The Intellectual-Principle we are discussing is
not of such a kind: It possesses all: It is all: It is present to all by Its
self-presence: It has all by other means than having, for what It possesses is
still Itself, nor does any particular of all within It stand apart; for every
such particular is the whole and in all respects all, while yet not confused in
the mass but still distinct, apart to the extent that any participant in the
Intellectual-Principle participates not in the entire as one thing but in
whatsoever lies within its own reach.
And the First Act is the Act of The Good stationary
within Itself, and the First Existence is the self-contained Existence of The
Good; but there is also an Act upon It, that of the Intellectual-Principle
which, as it were, lives about It.
And the Soul, outside, circles around the
Intellectual-Principle, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of It,
through It sees God.
Such is the untroubled, the blissful, life of
divine beings, and Evil has no place in it; if this were all, there would be no
Evil but Good only, the first, the second and the third Good. All, thus far, is
with the King of All, unfailing Cause of Good and Beauty and controller of all;
and what is Good in the second degree depends upon the Second-Principle and
tertiary Good upon the Third.
3. If such be the Nature of Beings and of That
which transcends all the realm of Being, Evil cannot have place among Beings or
in the Beyond-Being; these are good.
There remains, only, if Evil exist at all, that
it be situate in the realm of Non-Being, that it be some mode, as it were, of
the Non-Being, that it have its seat in something in touch with Non-Being or to
a certain degree communicate in Non-Being.
By this Non-Being, of course, we are not to
understand something that simply does not exist, but only something of an
utterly different order from Authentic-Being: there is no question here of
movement or position with regard to Being; the Non-Being we are thinking of is,
rather, an image of Being or perhaps something still further removed than even
an image.
Now this [the required faint image of Being]
might be the sensible universe with all the impressions it engenders, or it
might be something of even later derivation, accidental to the realm of sense,
or again, it might be the source of the sense-world or something of the same
order entering into it to complete it.
Some conception of it would be reached by
thinking of measurelessness as opposed to measure, of the unbounded against
bound, the unshaped against a principle of shape, the ever-needy against the
self-sufficing: think of the ever-undefined, the never at rest, the
all-accepting but never sated, utter dearth; and make all this character not
mere accident in it but its equivalent for essential-being, so that, whatsoever
fragment of it be taken, that part is all lawless void, while whatever
participates in it and resembles it becomes evil, though not of course to the
point of being, as itself is, Evil-Absolute.
In what substantial-form [hypostasis] then is
all this to be found not as accident but as the very substance itself?
For if Evil can enter into other things, it
must have in a certain sense a prior existence, even though it may not be an
essence. As there is Good, the Absolute, as well as Good, the quality, so,
together with the derived evil entering into something not itself, there must
be the Absolute Evil.
But how? Can there be Unmeasure apart from an
unmeasured object?
Does not Measure exist apart from unmeasured
things? Precisely as there is Measure apart from anything measured, so there is
Unmeasure apart from the unmeasured. If Unmeasure could not exist
independently, it must exist either in an unmeasured object or in something
measured; but the unmeasured could not need Unmeasure and the measured could
not contain it.
There must, then, be some
Undetermination-Absolute, some Absolute Formlessness; all the qualities cited
as characterizing the Nature of Evil must be summed under an Absolute Evil; and
every evil thing outside of this must either contain this Absolute by
saturation or have taken the character of evil and become a cause of evil by
consecration to this Absolute.
What will this be?
That Kind whose place is below all the
patterns, forms, shapes, measurements and limits, that which has no trace of
good by any title of its own, but [at best] takes order and grace from some
Principle outside itself, a mere image as regards Absolute-Being but the
Authentic Essence of Evil in so far as Evil can have Authentic Being. In such
a Kind, Reason recognizes the Primal Evil, Evil Absolute.
4. The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of
Matter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are
without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each
other; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless
flux they are always slipping away from Being.
Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is
evil, is not an evil Kind.
What, then, is the evil Soul?
It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into
the service of that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service
the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil unmeasure, excess and
shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of
the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false
judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or evil not by their
true value but by the mere test of like and dislike.
But what is the root of this evil state? how
can it be brought under the causing principle indicated?
Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter,
is not purely itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut
out from the Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and this because
it is merged into a body made of Matter.
Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken
hurt, the Souls seeing is baulked by the passions and by the darkening that
Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no
longer to Essence but to Process whose principle or source is, again, Matter,
the Kind so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even that which is not in
it but merely looks towards it.
For, wholly without part in Good, the negation
of Good, unmingled Lack, this Matter-Kind makes over to its own likeness
whatsoever comes in touch with it.
The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed
towards the Intellectual-Principle, is steadfastly pure: it has turned away
from Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is
evil, it neither sees nor draws near; it endures in its purity, only, and
wholly, determined by the Intellectual-Principle.
The Soul that breaks away from this source of
its reality to the non-perfect and non-primal is, as it were, a secondary, an
image, to the loyal Soul. By its falling-away and to the extent of the fall
it is stripped of Determination, becomes wholly indeterminate, sees darkness.
Looking to what repels vision, as we look when we are said to see darkness, it
has taken Matter into itself.
5. But, it will be objected, if this seeing and
frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the Souls evil has its
source in that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause and
at once the Principle of Evil is removed from Matter, is made anterior to
Matter.
No: Evil is not in any and every lack; it is in
absolute lack. What falls in some degree short of the Good is not Evil;
considered in its own kind it might even be perfect, but where there is utter
dearth, there we have Essential Evil, void of all share in Good; this is the
case with Matter.
Matter has not even existence whereby to have
some part in Good: Being is attributed to it by an accident of words: the truth
would be that it has Non-Being.
Mere lack brings merely Not-Goodness: Evil
demands the absolute lack though, of course, any very considerable
shortcoming makes the ultimate fall possible and is already, in itself, an
evil.
In fine we are not to think of Evil as some
particular bad thing injustice, for example, or any other ugly trait but as
a principle distinct from any of the particular forms in which, by the addition
of certain elements, it becomes manifest. Thus there may be wickedness in the
Soul; the forms this general wickedness is to take will be determined by the
environing Matter, by the faculties of the Soul that operate and by the nature
of their operation, whether seeing, acting, or merely admitting impression.
But supposing things external to the Soul are
to be counted Evil sickness, poverty and so forth how can they be referred
to the principle we have described?
Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body,
which as a material organism rebels against order and measure; ugliness is but
matter not mastered by Ideal-Form; poverty consists in our need and lack of
goods made necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature is to
be one long want.
If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves,
the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves; Evil was before we came to
be; the Evil which holds men down binds them against their will; and for those
that have the strength not found in all men, it is true there is a
deliverance from the evils that have found lodgement in the soul.
In a word since Matter belongs only to the
sensible world, vice in men is not the Absolute Evil; not all men are vicious;
some overcome vice, some, the better sort, are never attacked by it; and those
who master it win by means of that in them which is not material.
6. If this be so, how do we explain the
teaching that evils can never pass away but "exist of necessity,"
that "while evil has no place in the divine order, it haunts mortal nature
and this place for ever"?
Does this mean that heaven is clear of evil,
ever moving its orderly way, spinning on the appointed path, no injustice There
or any flaw, no wrong done by any power to any other but all true to the
settled plan, while injustice and disorder prevail on earth, designated as
"the Mortal Kind and this Place"?
Not quite so: for the precept to "flee
hence" does not refer to earth and earthly life. The flight we read of
consists not in quitting earth but in living our earth-life "with justice
and piety in the light of philosophy"; it is vice we are to flee, so that
clearly to the writer Evil is simply vice with the sequels of vice. And when
the disputant in that dialogue says that, if men could be convinced of the
doctrine advanced, there would be an end of Evil, he is answered, "That
can never be: Evil is of necessity, for there must be a contrary to good."
Still we may reasonably ask how can vice in man
be a contrary to The Good in the Supernal: for vice is the contrary to virtue
and virtue is not The Good but merely the good thing by which Matter is brought
to order.
How can there any contrary to the Absolute
Good, when the absolute has no quality?
Besides, is there any universal necessity that
the existence of one of two contraries should entail the existence of the
other? Admit that the existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of
the other sickness and health, for example yet there is no universal
compulsion.
Perhaps, however, our author did not mean that
this was universally true; he is speaking only of The Good.
But then, if The Good is an essence, and still
more, if It is that which transcends all existence, how can It have any
contrary?
That there is nothing contrary to essence is
certain in the case of particular existences established by practical proof
but not in the quite different case of the Universal.
But of what nature would this contrary be, the
contrary to universal existence and in general to the Primals?
To essential existence would be opposed the
non-existence; to the nature of Good, some principle and source of evil. Both
these will be sources, the one of what is good, the other of what is evil; and
all within the domain of the one principle is opposed, as contrary, to the
entire domain of the other, and this in a contrariety more violent than any
existing between secondary things.
For these last are opposed as members of one
species or of one genus, and, within that common ground, they participate in
some common quality.
In the case of the Primals or Universals there
is such complete separation that what is the exact negation of one group
constitutes the very nature of the other; we have diametric contrariety if by
contrariety we mean the extreme of remoteness.
Now to the content of the divine order, the
fixed quality, the measuredness and so forth there is opposed the content of
the evil principle, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so forth: total is
opposed to total. The existence of the one genus is a falsity, primarily,
essentially, a falseness: the other genus has Essence-Authentic: the opposition
is of truth to lie; essence is opposed to essence.
Thus we see that it is not universally true
that an Essence can have no contrary.
In the case of fire and water we would admit
contrariety if it were not for their common element, the Matter, about which
are gathered the warmth and dryness of one and the dampness and cold of the
other: if there were only present what constitutes their distinct kinds, the
common ground being absent, there would be, here also, essence contrary to
essence.
In sum, things utterly sundered, having nothing
in common, standing at the remotest poles, are opposites in nature: the
contrariety does not depend upon quality or upon the existence of a distinct
genus of beings, but upon the utmost difference, clash in content, clash in
effect.
7. But why does the existence of the Principle
of Good necessarily comport the existence of a Principle of Evil? Is it because
the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this
All is made up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The Nature
of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is blended from the
Intellectual-Principle and Necessity: what comes into it from God is good; evil
is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet
brought to order by the Ideal-Form.
But, since the expression "this
place" must be taken to mean the All, how explain the words "mortal
nature"?
The answer is in the passage [in which the
Father of Gods addresses the Divinities of the lower sphere], "Since you
possess only a derivative being, you are not immortals... but by my power you
shall escape dissolution."
The escape, we read, is not a matter of place,
but of acquiring virtue, of disengaging the self from the body; this is the
escape from Matter. Plato explains somewhere how a man frees himself and how he
remains bound; and the phrase "to live among the gods" means to live
among the Intelligible-Existents, for these are the Immortals.
There is another consideration establishing the
necessary existence of Evil.
Given that The Good is not the only existent
thing, it is inevitable that, by the outgoing from it or, if the phrase be
preferred, the continuous down-going or away-going from it, there should be
produced a Last, something after which nothing more can be produced: this will
be Evil.
As necessarily as there is Something after the
First, so necessarily there is a Last: this Last is Matter, the thing which has
no residue of good in it: here is the necessity of Evil.
8. But there will still be some to deny that it
is through this Matter that we ourselves become evil.
They will say that neither ignorance nor wicked
desires arise in Matter. Even if they admit that the unhappy condition within
us is due to the pravity inherent in body, they will urge that still the blame
lies not in the Matter itself but with the Form present in it such Form as
heat, cold, bitterness, saltness and all other conditions perceptible to sense,
or again such states as being full or void not in the concrete signification
but in the presence or absence of just such forms. In a word, they will argue,
all particularity in desires and even in perverted judgements upon things, can
be referred to such causes, so that Evil lies in this Form much more than in
the mere Matter.
Yet, even with all this, they can be compelled
to admit that Matter is the Evil.
For, the quality [form] that has entered into
Matter does not act as an entity apart from the Matter, any more than axe-shape
will cut apart from iron. Further, Forms lodged in Matter are not the same as
they would be if they remained within themselves; they are Reason-Principles
Materialized, they are corrupted in the Matter, they have absorbed its nature:
essential fire does not burn, nor do any of the essential entities effect, of
themselves alone, the operation which, once they have entered into Matter, is
traced to their action.
Matter becomes mistress of what is manifested
through it: it corrupts and destroys the incomer, it substitutes its own
opposite character and kind, not in the sense of opposing, for example,
concrete cold to concrete warmth, but by setting its own formlessness against
the Form of heat, shapelessness to shape, excess and defect to the duly
ordered. Thus, in sum, what enters into Matter ceases to belong to itself,
comes to belong to Matter, just as, in the nourishment of living beings, what
is taken in does not remain as it came, but is turned into, say, dogs blood and
all that goes to make a dog, becomes, in fact, any of the humours of any
recipient.
No, if body is the cause of Evil, then there is
no escape; the cause of Evil is Matter.
Still, it will be urged, the incoming Idea
should have been able to conquer the Matter.
The difficulty is that Matters master cannot
remain pure itself except by avoidance of Matter.
Besides, the constitution determines both the
desires and their violence so that there are bodies in which the incoming idea
cannot hold sway: there is a vicious constitution which chills and clogs the
activity and inhibits choice; a contrary bodily habit produces frivolity, lack
of balance. The same fact is indicated by our successive variations of mood: in
times of stress, we are not the same either in desires or in ideas as when we
are at peace, and we differ again with every several object that brings us
satisfaction.
To resume: the Measureless is evil primarily;
whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of
unmeasure, is evil secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal
primarily, the darkness; secondarily, the darkened. Now, Vice, being an
ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the
Essential Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The
Good, or participation in it.
9. But what approach have we to the knowing of
Good and Evil?
And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may
know by the Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but
Vice?
A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so
Vice is known by its divergence from the line of Virtue.
But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision we
can have of it, or is there some other way of knowing it?
Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vision,
for it is utterly outside of bound and measure; this thing which is nowhere can
be seized only by abstraction; but any degree of evil falling short of The
Absolute is knowable by the extent of that falling short.
We see partial wrong; from what is before us we
divine that which is lacking to the entire form [or Kind] thus indicated; we
see that the completed Kind would be the Indeterminate; by this process we are
able to identify and affirm Evil. In the same way when we observe what we feel
to be an ugly appearance in Matter left there because the Reason-Principle
has not become so completely the master as to cover over the unseemliness we
recognise Ugliness by the falling-short from Ideal-Form.
But how can we identify what has never had any
touch of Form?
We utterly eliminate every kind of Form; and
the object in which there is none whatever we call Matter: if we are to see
Matter we must so completely abolish Form that we take shapelessness into our
very selves.
In fact it is another Intellectual-Principle,
not the true, this which ventures a vision so uncongenial.
To see darkness the eye withdraws from the
light; it is striving to cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the light
which would make the darkness invisible; away from the light its power is
rather that of not-seeing than of seeing and this not-seeing is its nearest
approach to seeing Darkness. So the Intellectual-Principle, in order to see its
contrary [Matter], must leave its own light locked up within itself, and as it
were go forth from itself into an outside realm, it must ignore its native
brightness and submit itself to the very contradition of its being.
10. But if Matter is devoid of quality how can
it be evil?
It is described as being devoid of quality in
the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the qualities which
it admits and which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has
no nature; and if it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be evil
though not in the sense of quality?
Quality qualifies something not itself: it is
therefore an accidental; it resides in some other object. Matter does not exist
in some other object but is the substratum in which the accidental resides.
Matter, then, is said to be devoid of Quality in that it does not in itself possess
this thing which is by nature an accidental. If, moreover, Quality itself be
devoid of Quality, how can Matter, which is the unqualified, be said to have
it?
Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that
Matter is without Quality and that it is evil: it is Evil not in the sense of
having Quality but, precisely, in not having it; give it Quality and in its
very Evil it would almost be a Form, whereas in Truth it is a Kind contrary to
Form.
"But," it may be said, "the Kind
opposed to all Form is Privation or Negation, and this necessarily refers to
something other than itself, it is no Substantial-Existence: therefore if Evil
is Privation or Negation it must be lodged in some Negation of Form: there will
be no Self-Existent Evil."
This objection may be answered by applying the
principle to the case of Evil in the Soul; the Evil, the Vice, will be a
Negation and not anything having a separate existence; we come to the doctrine
which denies Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil; we need not seek elsewhere;
we may at once place Evil in the Soul, recognising it as the mere absence of
Good. But if the negation is the negation of something that ought to become
present, if it is a denial of the Good by the Soul, then the Soul produces vice
within itself by the operation of its own Nature, and is devoid of good and,
therefore, Soul though it be, devoid of life: the Soul, if it has no life, is
soulless; the Soul is no Soul.
No; the Soul has life by its own nature and
therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The Good: it
has much good in it; it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and
is not essentially evil: neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil
present in it even as an accidental, for the Soul is not wholly apart from the
Good.
Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should be
described not as an entire, but as a partial, negation of good.
But if this were so, part of the Soul must
possess The Good, part be without it; the Soul will have a mingled nature and
the Evil within it will not be unblended: we have not yet lighted on the
Primal, Unmingled Evil. The Soul would possess the Good as its Essence, the
Evil as an Accidental.
Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the
Soul like something affecting the eye and so hindering sight.
But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an
occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is something quite different. If then Vice
is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not
Evil-Absolute. Virtue is not the Absolute Good, but a co-operator with it; and
if Virtue is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the Absolute Evil. Virtue is
not the Absolute Beauty or the Absolute Good; neither, therefore, is Vice the
Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil.
We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute Good
and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend
it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as,
going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward
from Vice, we reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the starting-point we come to
vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the
extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of
Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in
gloom and mud: for if the Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of
viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still
human, still carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature,
the Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is
twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with
it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it
stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and this is our "going down
to Hades and slumbering there."
11. It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness
in the Soul.
We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is
unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by
appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to
obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or
nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat.
Still the question must be faced what
constitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it comes.
For weakness in the body is not like that in
the Soul: the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack
of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy unless,
indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter.
But we must go more thoroughly into the source
of this weakness, as we call it, in the Soul, which is certainly not made weak
as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or
anything like a disease, like a fever.
Now this weakness must be seated either in
Souls utterly disengaged or in Souls bound to Matter or in both.
It cannot exist in those apart from Matter, for
all these are pure and, as we read, winged and perfect and unimpeded in their
task: there remains only that the weakness be in the fallen Souls, neither
cleansed nor clean; and in them the weakness will be, not in any privation but
in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm or bile in the organs of the
body.
If we form an acute and accurate notion of the
cause of the fall we shall understand the weakness that comes by it.
Matter exists; Soul exists; and they occupy, so
to speak, one place. There is not one place for Matter and another for
Soul-Matter, for instance, kept to earth, Soul in the air: the souls
"separate place" is simply its not being in Matter; that is, its not
being united with it; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of Soul
and Matter; that is that Soul be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix; this is
the Souls apartness.
But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it
has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter appears,
importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all the ground
is holy, nothing there without part in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and
takes light: but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to, for the
Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it
invisible. On the contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the Soul,
is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the Soul,
providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no
recipient were at hand.
This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into
Matter: thence its weakness: not all the faculties of its being retain free
play, for Matter hinders their manifestation; it encroaches upon the Souls
territory and, as it were, crushes the Soul back; and it turns to evil all that
it has stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance again.
Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of
Soul and of all its evil is Matter.
The evil of Matter precedes the weakness, the
vice; it is Primal Evil. Even though the Soul itself submits to Matter and
engenders to it; if it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter,
the cause is still the presence of Matter: the Soul would never have approached
Matter but that the presence of Matter is the occasion of its earth-life.
12. If the existence of Matter be denied, the
necessity of this Principle must be demonstrated from the treatises "On
Matter" where the question is copiously treated.
To deny Evil a place among realities is
necessarily to do away with the Good as well, and even to deny the existence of
anything desirable; it is to deny desire, avoidance and all intellectual act;
for desire has Good for its object, aversion looks to Evil; all intellectual
act, all Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is itself one of the things that
are good.
There must then be The Good good unmixed
and the Mingled Good and Bad, and the Rather Bad than Good, this last ending
with the Utterly Bad we have been seeking, just as that in which Evil
constitutes the lesser part tends, by that lessening, towards the Good.
What, then, must Evil be to the Soul?
What Soul could contain Evil unless by contact
with the lower Kind? There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear:
fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution; pain and sorrow are the
accompaniments of the dissolution; desires spring from something troubling the
grouped being or are a provision against trouble threatened; all impression is
the stroke of something unreasonable outside the Soul, accepted only because
the Soul is not devoid of parts or phases; the Soul takes up false notions
through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be purely itself.
One desire or appetite there is which does not
fall under this condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the
Intellectual-Principle: this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined
within that place of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower.
Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of
Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only: it appears, necessarily, bound
around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold; and
beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by
the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that
when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of Images of the Good
and Beautiful for their Remembrance.
Ninth tractate.
"The reasoned dismissal".
"You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go
forth..." [taking something with it].
For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it; then it makes no departure; it simply finds itself free.
But how does the body come to be separated?
The separation takes place when nothing of Soul
remains bound up with it: the harmony within the body, by virtue of which the
Soul was retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest.
But when a man contrives the dissolution of the
body, it is he that has used violence and torn himself away, not the body that
has let the Soul slip from it. And in loosing the bond he has not been without
passion; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is
unlawful to indulge.
But if a man feel himself to be losing his
reason?
That is not likely in the Sage, but if it
should occur, it must be classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at the
bidding of the fact though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the
release of the Soul seems a strange way of assisting its purposes.
And if there be a period allotted to all by
fate, to anticipate the hour could not be a happy act, unless, as we have
indicated, under stern necessity.
If everyone is to hold in the other world a
standing determined by the state in which he quitted this, there must be no
withdrawal as long as there is any hope of progress.
First tractate.
On the kosmos or on the heavenly
system.
1. We hold that the ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed for ever and will for ever endure: but simply to refer this perdurance to the Will of God, however true an explanation, is utterly inadequate.
The elements of this sphere change; the living
beings of earth pass away; only the Ideal-form [the species] persists: possibly
a similar process obtains in the All.
The Will of God is able to cope with the
ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known
forms in new substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item
but to the unity of idea: now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no
more than duration of form, why should celestial objects, and the celestial
system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular entity?
Let us suppose this persistence to be the
result of the all-inclusiveness of the celestial and universal with its
consequence, the absence of any outlying matter into which change could take
place or which could break in and destroy.
This explanation would, no doubt, safeguard the
integrity of the Whole, of the All; but our sun and the individual being of the
other heavenly bodies would not on these terms be secured in perpetuity: they
are parts; no one of them is in itself the whole, the all; it would still be
probable that theirs is no more than that duration in form which belongs to
fire and such entities.
This would apply even to the entire ordered
universe itself. For it is very possible that this too, though not in process
of destruction from outside, might have only formal duration; its parts may be
so wearing each other down as to keep it in a continuous decay while, amid the
ceaseless flux of the Kind constituting its base, an outside power ceaselessly
restores the form: in this way the living All may lie under the same conditions
as man and horse and the rest man and horse persisting but not the individual
of the type.
With this, we would have no longer the
distinction of one order, the heavenly system, stable for ever, and another,
the earthly, in process of decay: all would be alike except in the point of
time; the celestial would merely be longer lasting. If, then, we accepted this
duration of type alone as a true account of the All equally with its partial
members, our difficulties would be eased or indeed we should have no further
problem once the Will of God were shown to be capable, under these conditions
and by such communication, of sustaining the Universe.
But if we are obliged to allow individual
persistence to any definite entity within the Kosmos then, firstly, we must
show that the Divine Will is adequate to make it so; secondly, we have to face
the question, What accounts for some things having individual persistence and
others only the persistence of type? and, thirdly, we ask how the partial
entities of the celestial system hold a real duration which would thus appear
possible to all partial things.
2. Supposing we accept this view and hold that,
while things below the moons orb have merely type-persistence, the celestial
realm and all its several members possess individual eternity; it remains to
show how this strict permanence of the individual identity the actual item
eternally unchangeable can belong to what is certainly corporeal, seeing that
bodily substance is characteristically a thing of flux.
The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no
less than by the other philosophers who have dealt with physical matters, and
is applied not only to ordinary bodies but to those, also, of the heavenly
sphere.
"How," he asks, "can these
corporeal and visible entities continue eternally unchanged in identity?"
evidently agreeing, in this matter also, with Herakleitos who maintained that
even the sun is perpetually coming anew into being. To Aristotle there would be
no problem; it is only accepting his theories of a fifth-substance.
But to those who reject Aristotles
Quintessence and hold the material mass of the heavens to consist of the
elements underlying the living things of this sphere, how is individual
permanence possible? And the difficulty is still greater for the parts, for the
sun and the heavenly bodies.
Every living thing is a combination of soul and
body-kind: the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an
individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of
one of them, by the combination of soul and body or by soul only or by body
only.
Of course anyone that holds body to be
incorruptible secures the desired permanence at once; no need, then, to call on
a soul or on any perdurable conjunction to account for the continued
maintenance of a living being.
But the case is different when one holds that
body is, of itself, perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence:
this view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself fatal
either to the coherence or to the lasting stability which are imperative: it
must be shown that the two elements of the union envisaged are not inevitably
hostile, but that on the contrary [in the heavens] even Matter must conduce to
the scheme of the standing result.
3. We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this
entity of ceaseless flux constituting the physical mass of the universe, could
serve towards the immortality of the Kosmos.
And our answer is "Because the flux is not
outgoing": where there is motion within but not outwards and the total
remains unchanged, there is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Kosmos
never ages.
We have a parallel in our earth, constant from
eternity to pattern and to mass; the air, too, never fails; and there is always
water: all the changes of these elements leave unchanged the Principle of the
total living thing, our world. In our own constitution, again, there is a
ceaseless shifting of particles and that with outgoing loss and yet the
individual persists for a long time: where there is no question of an outside
region, the body-principle cannot clash with soul as against the identity and
endless duration of the living thing.
Of these material elements for example
fire, the keen and swift, cooperates by its upward tendency as earth by its
lingering below; for we must not imagine that the fire, once it finds itself at
the point where its ascent must stop, settles down as in its appropriate place,
no longer seeking, like all the rest, to expand in both directions. No: but
higher is not possible; lower is repugnant to its Kind; all that remains for it
is to be tractable and, answering to a need of its nature, to be drawn by the
Soul to the activity of life, and so to move to in a glorious place, in the
Soul. Anyone that dreads its falling may take heart; the circuit of the Soul
provides against any declination, embracing, sustaining; and since fire has of
itself no downward tendency it accepts that guiding without resistance. The
partial elements constituting our persons do not suffice for their own
cohesion; once they are brought to human shape, they must borrow elsewhere if
the organism is to be maintained: but in the upper spheres since there can be
no loss by flux no such replenishment is needed.
Suppose such loss, suppose fire extinguished
there, then a new fire must be kindled; so also if such loss by flux could
occur in some of the superiors from which the celestial fire depends, that too
must be replaced: but with such transmutations, while there might be something
continuously similar, there would be, no longer, a Living All abidingly
self-identical.
4. But matters are involved here which demand
specific investigation and cannot be treated as incidental merely to our
present problem. We are faced with several questions: Is the heavenly system
exposed to any such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration
corresponding to nourishment; or do its members, once set in their due places,
suffer no loss of substance, permanent by Kind? Does it consist of fire only,
or is it mainly of fire with the other elements, as well, taken up and carried
in the circuit by the dominant Principle?
Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly
system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent,
the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily
substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest,
and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle
appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt
Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting;
but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars.
Still, the great argument remains, the Soul,
moving in its marvellous might second only to the very loftiest Existents: how
could anything once placed within this Soul break away from it into non-being?
No one that understands this principle, the support of all things, can fail to
see that, sprung from God, it is a stronger stay than any bonds.
And is it conceivable that the Soul, valid to
sustain for a certain space of time, could not so sustain for ever? This would
be to assume that it holds things together by violence; that there is a
"natural course" at variance with what actually exists in the nature
of the universe and in these exquisitely ordered beings; and that there is some
power able to storm the established system and destroy its ordered coherence,
some kingdom or dominion that may shatter the order founded by the Soul.
Further: The Kosmos has had no beginning the
impossibility has been shown elsewhere and this is warrant for its continued
existence. Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet
occurred? The elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they
hold sound for ever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these
elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the ground of
all the change must itself be changeless.
As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul we
have already shown the emptiness of that fancy: the administration of the
universe entails neither labour nor loss; and, even supposing the possibility
of annihilating all that is material, the Soul would be no whit the better or
the worse.
5. But how explain the permanence There, while
the content of this sphere its elements and its living things alike are
passing?
The reason is given by Plato: the celestial
order is from God, the living things of earth from the gods sprung from God;
and it is law that the offspring of God endures.
In other words, the celestial soul and our
souls with it springs directly next from the Creator, while the animal life
of this earth is produced by an image which goes forth from that celestial soul
and may be said to flow downwards from it.
A soul, then, of the minor degree
reproducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but lacking in power inasmuch as
it must exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region
the substances taken up into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to
duration; with such an origin the living things of this realm cannot be of
strength to last for ever; the material constituents are not as firmly held and
controlled as if they were ruled immediately by a Principle of higher potency.
The heavens, on the contrary, must have
persistence as a whole, and this entails the persistence of the parts, of the
stars they contain: we could not imagine that whole to endure with the parts in
flux though, of course, we must distinguish things sub-celestial from the
heavens themselves whose region does not in fact extend so low as to the moon.
Our own case is different: physically we are
formed by that [inferior] soul, given forth [not directly from God but] from
the divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it is by way
of that inferior soul that we are associated with the body [which therefore
will not be persistent]; for the higher soul which constitutes the We is the
principle not of our existence but of our excellence or, if also of our
existence, then only in the sense that, when the body is already constituted,
it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the Divine Reason in support of
the existence.
6. We may now consider the question whether
fire is the sole element existing in that celestial realm and whether there is
any outgoing thence with the consequent need of renewal.
Timaeus pronounced the material frame of the
All to consist primarily of earth and fire for visibility, earth for solidity
and deduced that the stars must be mainly composed of fire, but not solely
since there is no doubt they are solid.
And this is probably a true account. Plato
accepts it as indicated by all the appearances. And, in fact, to all our perception
as we see them and derive from them the impression of illumination the
stars appear to be mostly, if not exclusively, fire: but on reasoning into the
matter we judge that since solidity cannot exist apart from earth-matter, they
must contain earth as well.
But what place could there be for the other
elements? It is impossible to imagine water amid so vast a conflagration; and
if air were present it would be continually changing into fire.
Admitting [with Timaeus; as a logical truth]
that two self-contained entities, standing as extremes to each other need for
their coherence two intermediaries; we may still question whether this holds
good with regard to physical bodies. Certainly water and earth can be mixed
without any such intermediate. It might seem valid to object that the
intermediates are already present in the earth and the water; but a possible
answer would be, "Yes, but not as agents whose meeting is necessary to the
coherence of those extremes."
None the less we will take it that the coherence
of extremes is produced by virtue of each possessing all the intermediates. It
is still not proven that fire is necessary to the visibility of earth and earth
to the solidarity of fire.
On this principle, nothing possesses an
essential-nature of its very own; every several thing is a blend, and its name
is merely an indication of the dominant constituent.
Thus we are told that earth cannot have
concrete existence without the help of some moist element the moisture in
water being the necessary adhesive but admitting that we so find it, there is
still a contradiction in pretending that any one element has a being of its own
and in the same breath denying its self-coherence, making its subsistence
depend upon others, and so, in reality, reducing the specific element to
nothing. How can we talk of the existence of the definite Kind, earth earth
essential if there exists no single particle of earth which actually is earth
without any need of water to secure its self-cohesion? What has such an adhesive
to act upon if there is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth to which it
may bind particle after particle in its business of producing the continuous
mass? If there is any such given magnitude, large or small, of pure earth, then
earth can exist in its own nature, independently of water: if there is no such
primary particle of pure earth, then there is nothing whatever for the water to
bind. As for air air unchanged, retaining its distinctive quality how could
it conduce to the subsistence of a dense material like earth?
Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks of
it as necessary not to the existence but to the visibility of earth and the
other elements; and certainly light is essential to all visibility we cannot
say that we see darkness, which implies, precisely, that nothing is seen, as
silence means nothing being heard.
But all this does not assure us that the earth
to be visible must contain fire: light is sufficient: snow, for example, and
other extremely cold substances gleam without the presence of fire though of
course it might be said that fire was once there and communicated colour before
disappearing.
As to the composition of water, we must leave
it an open question whether there can be such a thing as water without a
certain proportion of earth.
But how can air, the yielding element, contain
earth?
Fire, again: is earth perhaps necessary there
since fire is by its own nature devoid of continuity and not a thing of three
dimensions?
Supposing it does not possess the solidity of
the three dimensions, it has that of its thrust; now, cannot this belong to it
by the mere right and fact of its being one of the corporeal entities in
nature? Hardness is another matter, a property confined to earth-stuff.
Remember that gold which is water becomes dense by the accession not of
earth but of denseness or consolidation: in the same way fire, with Soul
present within it, may consolidate itself upon the power of the Soul; and there
are living beings of fire among the Celestials.
But, in sum, do we abandon the teaching that
all the elements enter into the composition of every living thing?
For this sphere, no; but to lift clay into the
heavens is against nature, contrary to the laws of her ordaining: it is
difficult, too, to think of that swiftest of circuits bearing along earthly
bodies in its course nor could such material conduce to the splendour and white
glint of the celestial fire.
7. We can scarcely do better, in fine, than
follow Plato.
Thus:
In the universe as a whole there must necessarily
be such a degree of solidity, that is to say, of resistance, as will ensure
that the earth, set in the centre, be a sure footing and support to the living
beings moving over it, and inevitably communicate something of its own density
to them: the earth will possess coherence by its own unaided quality, but
visibility by the presence of fire: it will contain water against the dryness
which would prevent the cohesion of its particles; it will hold air to lighten
its bulky matters; it will be in contact with the celestial fire not as being
a member of the sidereal system but by the simple fact that the fire there and
our earth both belong to the ordered universe so that something of the earth is
taken up by the fire as something of the fire by the earth and something of
everything by everything else.
This borrowing, however, does not mean that the
one thing taking-up from the other enters into a composition, becoming an
element in a total of both: it is simply a consequence of the kosmic
fellowship; the participant retains its own being and takes over not the thing
itself but some property of the thing, not air but airs yielding softness, not
fire but fires incandescence: mixing is another process, a complete surrender
with a resultant compound not, as in this case, earth remaining earth, the
solidity and density we know with something of fires qualities superadded.
We have authority for this where we read:
"At the second circuit from the earth, God
kindled a light": he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the
all-glowing and, again, the all-gleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to
be anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is
light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm: this light
is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that other
"light" which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce
incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the
veritable "incandescent body." Platos word earthy is commonly taken
in too depreciatory a sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of
solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the concrete clay.
Fire of this order, giving forth this purest
light, belongs to the upper realm, and there its seat is fixed by nature; but
we must not, on that account, suppose the flame of earth to be associated with
the beings of that higher sphere.
No: the flame of this world, once it has
attained a certain height, is extinguished by the currents of air opposed to
it. Moreover, as it carries an earthy element on its upward path, it is weighed
downwards and cannot reach those loftier regions. It comes to a stand somewhere
below the moon making the air at that point subtler and its flame, if any
flame can persist, is subdued and softened, and no longer retains its first
intensity, but gives out only what radiance it reflects from the light above.
And it is that loftier light falling
variously upon the stars; to each in a certain proportion that gives them
their characteristic differences, as well in magnitude as in colour; just such
light constitutes also the still higher heavenly bodies which, however, like
clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and unresisting
transparency of their material substance and also by their very distance.
8. Now: given a light of this degree, remaining
in the upper sphere at its appointed station, pure light in purest place, what
mode of outflow from it can be conceived possible?
Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow
downwards of its own accord; and there exists in those regions no power to
force it down. Again, body in contact with soul must always be very different
from body left to itself; the bodily substance of the heavens has that contact
and will show that difference.
Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to the
heavens would be air or fire: air has no destructive quality; fire would be
powerless there since it could not enter into effective contact: in its very
rush it would change before its attack could be felt; and, apart from that, it
is of the lesser order, no match for what it would be opposing in those higher
regions.
Again, fire acts by imparting heat: now it
cannot be the source of heat to what is already hot by nature; and anything it
is to destroy must as a first condition be heated by it, must be brought to a
pitch of heat fatal to the nature concerned.
In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to
the heavens to ensure their permanence or to produce their circular movement,
for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line;
on the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move
by circle; all other movement indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think,
therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of replenishment; we must not
argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining
soul is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not
those which make restoration necessary in this realm of composite bodies always
in flux: we must recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here
represent a slipping-away from the being [a phenomenon not incident to the
celestial sphere] and take place at the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in
the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the
existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in
its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have
shown, cannot at every point possess the unchangeable identity of the
Intellectual Realm.
Second tractate.
The heavenly circuit.
1. But whence that circular movement?
In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle.
And does this movement belong to the material
part or to the Soul? Can we account for it on the ground that the Soul has
itself at once for centre and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly
moving; or that, being self-centred it is not of unlimited extension [and
consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent], and that its revolution
carries the material mass with it?
If the Soul had been the moving power [by any
such semi-physical action] it would be so no longer; it would have accomplished
the act of moving and have brought the universe to rest; there would be an end
of this endless revolution.
In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least
cannot have spatial movement; how then, having itself a movement of quite
another order, could it communicate spatial movement?
But perhaps the circular movement [of the
Kosmos as soul and body] is not spatial or is spatial not primarily but only
incidentally.
What, by this explanation, would be the
essential movement of the kosmic soul?
A movement towards itself, the movement of
self-awareness, of self-intellection, of the living of its life, the movement
of its reaching to all things so that nothing shall lie outside of it, nothing
anywhere but within its scope.
The dominant in a living thing is what
compasses it entirely and makes it a unity.
If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it would
not vitally compass the Kosmos nor would the Kosmos, a thing of body, keep its
content alive, for the life of body is movement.
Any spatial motion there is will be limited; it
will be not that of Soul untrammelled but that of a material frame ensouled, an
animated organism; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the
body tending to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul
restraining it; the resultant will be the compromise movement of a thing at once
carried forward and at rest.
But supposing that the circular movement is to
be attributed to the body, how is it to be explained, since all body, including
fire [which constitutes the heavens] has straightforward motion?
The answer is that forthright movement is
maintained only pending arrival at the place for which the moving thing is
destined: where a thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its nature, to
come for its rest; its motion is its tendence to its appointed place.
Then, since the fire of the sidereal system has
attained its goal, why does it not stay at rest?
Evidently because the very nature of fire is to
be mobile: if it did not take the curve, its straight line would finally fling
it outside the universe: the circular course, then, is imperative.
But this would imply an act of providence?
Not quite: rather its own act under providence;
attaining to that realm, it must still take the circular course by its
indwelling nature; for it seeks the straight path onwards but finds no further
space and is driven back so that it recoils on the only course left to it:
there is nothing beyond; it has reached the ultimate; it runs its course in the
regions it occupies, itself its own sphere, not destined to come to rest there,
existing to move.
Further, the centre of a circle [and therefore
of the Kosmos] is distinctively a point of rest: if the circumference outside
were not in motion, the universe would be no more than one vast centre. And
movement around the centre is all the more to be expected in the case of a
living thing whose nature binds it within a body. Such motion alone can
constitute its impulse towards its centre: it cannot coincide with the centre,
for then there would be no circle; since this may not be, it whirls about it;
so only can it indulge its tendence.
If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is
due to the Soul, we are not to think of a painful driving [wearing it down at
last]; the soul does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for
"Nature" is no other than the custom the All-Soul has established.
Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe
communicates that quality of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their
degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing towards it.
If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Kosmos,
too, brought so far, would halt: but the Soul encompasses all, and so the
Kosmos moves, seeking everything.
Yet never to attain?
On the contrary this very motion is its eternal
attainment.
Or, better; the Soul is ceaselessly leading the
Kosmos towards itself: the continuous attraction communicates a continuous
movement not to some outside space but towards the Soul and in the one sphere
with it, not in the straight line [which would ultimately bring the moving body
outside and below the Soul], but in the curving course in which the moving body
at every stage possesses the Soul that is attracting it and bestowing itself
upon it.
If the soul were stationary, that is if
[instead of presiding over a Kosmos] it dwelt wholly and solely in the realm in
which every member is at rest, motion would be unknown; but, since the Soul is
not fixed in some one station There, the Kosmos must travel to every point in
quest of it, and never outside it: in a circle, therefore.
2. And what of lower things? [Why have they not
this motion?]
[Their case is very different]: the single
thing here is not an all but a part and limited to a given segment of space;
that other realm is all, is space, so to speak, and is subject to no hindrance
or control, for in itself it is all that is.
And men?
As a self, each is a personal whole, no doubt;
but as member of the universe, each is a partial thing.
But if, wherever the circling body be, it
possesses the Soul, what need of the circling?
Because everywhere it finds something else
besides the Soul [which it desires to possess alone].
The circular movement would be explained, too,
if the Souls power may be taken as resident at its centre.
Here, however, we must distinguish between a
centre in reference to the two different natures, body and Soul.
In body, centre is a point of place; in Soul it
is a source, the source of some other nature. The word, which without
qualification would mean the midpoint of a spheric mass, may serve in the
double reference; and, as in a material mass so in the Soul, there must be a
centre, that around which the object, Soul or material mass, revolves.
The Soul exists in revolution around God to
whom it clings in love, holding itself to the utmost of its power near to Him
as the Being on which all depends; and since it cannot coincide with God it
circles about Him.
Why then do not all souls [i.e., the lower,
also, as those of men and animals] thus circle about the Godhead?
Every Soul does in its own rank and place.
And why not our very bodies, also?
Because the forward path is characteristic of
body and because all the bodys impulses are to other ends and because what in
us is of this circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears
with it, while in the higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and
easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion in it
at all.
And it may very well be that even in us the
Spirit which dwells with the Soul does thus circle about the divinity. For
since God is omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union must take the circular
course: God is not stationed.
Similarly Plato attributes to the stars not
only the spheric movement belonging to the universe as a whole but also to each
a revolution around their common centre; each not by way of thought but by
links of natural necessity has in its own place taken hold of God and exults.
3. The truth may be resumed in this way:
There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest
to earth, and this is interwoven throughout the entire universe: another phase
possesses sensation, while yet another includes the Reason which is concerned
with the objects of sensation: this higher phase holds itself to the spheres,
poised towards the Above but hovering over the lesser Soul and giving forth to
it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital.
The lower Soul is moved by the higher which,
besides encircling and supporting it, actually resides in whatsoever part of it
has thrust upwards and attained the spheres. The lower then, ringed round by
the higher and answering its call, turns and tends towards it; and this upward
tension communicates motion to the material frame in which it is involved: for
if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree moved, without being drawn
away from the rest, it moves the whole, and the sphere is set in motion.
Something of the same kind happens in the case of our bodies: the unspatial
movement of the Soul in happiness, for instance, or at the idea of some
pleasant event sets up a spatial movement in the body: the Soul, attaining in
its own region some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what
pleases it; and so, by force of the union established in the order of nature,
it moves the body, in the bodys region, that is in space.
As for that phase of the Soul in which
sensation is vested, it, too, takes its good from the Supreme above itself and
moves, rejoicingly, in quest of it: and since the object of its desire is
everywhere, it too ranges always through the entire scope of the universe.
The Intellectual-Principle has no such progress
in any region; its movement is a stationary act, for it turns upon itself.
And this is why the All, circling as it does,
is at the same time at rest.
Third tractate.
Are the stars causes?
1. That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but without being the cause direct of all that happens, has been elsewhere affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument: but the subject demands more precise and detailed investigation for to take the one view rather than the other is of no small moment.
The belief is that the planets in their courses
actually produce not merely such conditions as poverty, wealth, health and
sickness but even ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all, vices and virtue and
the very acts that spring from these qualities, the definite doings of each
moment of virtue or vice. We are to suppose the stars to be annoyed with men
and upon matters in which men, moulded to what they are by the stars themselves,
can surely do them no wrong.
They will be distributing what pass for their
good gifts, not out of kindness towards the recipients but as they themselves
are affected pleasantly or disagreeably at the various points of their course;
so that they must be supposed to change their plans as they stand at their
zeniths or are declining.
More absurdly still, some of them are supposed
to be malicious and others to be helpful, and yet the evil stars will bestow
favours and the benevolent act harshly: further, their action alters as they
see each other or not, so that, after all, they possess no definite nature but
vary according to their angles of aspect; a star is kindly when it sees one of
its fellows but changes at sight of another: and there is even a distinction to
be made in the seeing as it occurs in this figure or in that. Lastly, all
acting together, the fused influence is different again from that of each
single star, just as the blending of distinct fluids gives a mixture unlike any
of them.
Since these opinions and others of the same
order are prevalent, it will be well to examine them carefully one by one,
beginning with the fundamental question:
2. Are these planets to be thought of as
soulless or unsouled?
Suppose them, first, to be without Soul.
In that case they can purvey only heat or cold
if cold from the stars can be thought of that is to say, any communication
from them will affect only our bodily nature, since all they have to
communicate to us is merely corporeal. This implies that no considerable change
can be caused in the bodies affected since emanations merely corporeal cannot
differ greatly from star to star, and must, moreover, blend upon earth into one
collective resultant: at most the differences would be such as depend upon local
position, upon nearness or farness with regard to the centre of influence. This
reasoning, of course, is as valid of any cold emanation there may be as of the
warm.
Now, what is there in such corporeal action to
account for the various classes and kinds of men, learned and illiterate,
scholars as against orators, musicians as against people of other professions?
Can a power merely physical make rich or poor? Can it bring about such
conditions as in no sense depend upon the interaction of corporeal elements?
Could it, for example, bring a man such and such a brother, father, son, or
wife, give him a stroke of good fortune at a particular moment, or make him
generalissimo or king?
Next, suppose the stars to have life and mind
and to be effective by deliberate purpose.
In that case, what have they suffered from us
that they should, in free will, do us hurt, they who are established in a
divine place, themselves divine? There is nothing in their nature of what makes
men base, nor can our weal or woe bring them the slightest good or ill.
3. Possibly, however, they act not by choice
but under stress of their several positions and collective figures?
But if position and figure determined their
action each several one would necessarily cause identical effects with every
other on entering any given place or pattern.
And that raises the question what effect for
good or bad can be produced upon any one of them by its transit in the parallel
of this or that section of the Zodiac circle for they are not in the Zodiacal
figure itself but considerably beneath it especially since, whatever point they
touch, they are always in the heavens.
It is absurd to think that the particular
grouping under which a star passes can modify either its character or its
earthward influences. And can we imagine it altered by its own progression as
it rises, stands at centre, declines? Exultant when at centre; dejected or
enfeebled in declension; some raging as they rise and growing benignant as they
set, while declension brings out the best in one among them; surely this cannot
be?
We must not forget that invariably every star,
considered in itself, is at centre with regard to some one given group and in
decline with regard to another and vice versa; and, very certainly, it is not
at once happy and sad, angry and kindly. There is no reasonable escape in
representing some of them as glad in their setting, others in their rising:
they would still be grieving and glad at one and the same time.
Further, why should any distress of theirs work
harm to us?
No: we cannot think of them as grieving at all
or as being cheerful upon occasions: they must be continuously serene, happy in
the good they enjoy and the Vision before them. Each lives its own free life;
each finds its Good in its own Act; and this Act is not directed towards us.
Like the birds of augury, the living beings of
the heavens, having no lot or part with us, may serve incidentally to foreshow
the future, but they have absolutely no main function in our regard.
4. It is again not in reason that a particular
star should be gladdened by seeing this or that other while, in a second
couple, such an aspect is distressing: what enmities can affect such beings?
what causes of enmity can there be among them?
And why should there be any difference as a
given star sees certain others from the corner of a triangle or in opposition
or at the angle of a square?
Why, again, should it see its fellow from some
one given position and yet, in the next Zodiacal figure, not see it, though the
two are actually nearer?
And, the cardinal question; by what conceivable
process could they affect what is attributed to them? How explain either the
action of any single star independently or, still more perplexing, the effect
of their combined intentions?
We cannot think of them entering into
compromises, each renouncing something of its efficiency and their final action
in our regard amounting to a concerted plan.
No one star would suppress the contribution of
another, nor would star yield to star and shape its conduct under suasion.
As for the fancy that while one is glad when it
enters anothers region, the second is vexed when in its turn it occupies the
place of the first, surely this is like starting with the supposition of two
friends and then going on to talk of one being attracted to the other who,
however, abhors the first.
5. When they tell us that a certain cold star
is more benevolent to us in proportion as it is further away, they clearly make
its harmful influence depend upon the coldness of its nature; and yet it ought
to be beneficent to us when it is in the opposed Zodiacal figures.
When the cold planet, we are told, is in
opposition to the cold, both become meanacing: but the natural effect would be
a compromise.
And we are asked to believe that one of them is
happy by day and grows kindly under the warmth, while another, of a fiery
nature, is most cheerful by night as if it were not always day to them, light
to them, and as if the first one could be darkened by night at that great
distance above the earths shadow.
Then there is the notion that the moon, in
conjunction with a certain star, is softened at her full but is malignant in
the same conjunction when her light has waned; yet, if anything of this order
could be admitted, the very opposite would be the case. For when she is full to
us she must be dark on the further hemisphere, that is to that star which
stands above her; and when dark to us she is full to that other star, upon
which only then, on the contrary, does she look with her light. To the moon
itself, in fact, it can make no difference in what aspect she stands, for she
is always lit on the upper or on the under half: to the other star, the warmth
from the moon, of which they speak, might make a difference; but that warmth
would reach it precisely when the moon is without light to us; at its darkest
to us it is full to that other, and therefore beneficent. The darkness of the
moon to us is of moment to the earth, but brings no trouble to the planet
above. That planet, it is alleged, can give no help on account of its
remoteness and therefore seems less well disposed; but the moon at its full
suffices to the lower realm so that the distance of the other is of no
importance. When the moon, though dark to us, is in aspect with the Fiery Star
she is held to be favourable: the reason alleged is that the force of Mars is
all-sufficient since it contains more fire than it needs.
The truth is that while the material emanations
from the living beings of the heavenly system are of various degrees of warmth
planet differing from planet in this respect no cold comes from them: the
nature of the space in which they have their being is voucher for that.
The star known as Jupiter includes a due
measure of fire [and warmth], in this resembling the Morning-star and therefore
seeming to be in alliance with it. In aspect with what is known as the Fiery
Star, Jupiter is beneficent by virtue of the mixing of influences: in aspect
with Saturn unfriendly by dint of distance. Mercury, it would seem, is
indifferent whatever stars it be in aspect with; for it adopts any and every
character.
But all the stars are serviceable to the
Universe, and therefore can stand to each other only as the service of the
Universe demands, in a harmony like that observed in the members of any one
animal form. They exist essentially for the purpose of the Universe, just as
the gall exists for the purposes of the body as a whole not less than for its
own immediate function: it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits but
without allowing the entire organism and its own especial region to run riot.
Some such balance of function was indispensable in the All bitter with sweet.
There must be differentiation eyes and so forth but all the members will be
in sympathy with the entire animal frame to which they belong. Only so can
there be a unity and a total harmony.
And in such a total, analogy will make every
part a Sign.
6. But that this same Mars, or Aphrodite, in
certain aspects should cause adulteries as if they could thus, through the
agency of human incontinence, satisfy their own mutual desires is not such a
notion the height of unreason? And who could accept the fancy that their
happiness comes from their seeing each other in this or that relative position
and not from their own settled nature?
Again: countless myriads of living beings are
born and continue to be: to minister continuously to every separate one of
these; to make them famous, rich, poor, lascivious; to shape the active
tendencies of every single one what kind of life is this for the stars, how
could they possibly handle a task so huge?
They are to watch, we must suppose, the rising
of each several constellation and upon that signal to act; such a one, they
see, has risen by so many degrees, representing so many of the periods of its
upward path; they reckon on their fingers at what moment they must take the
action which, executed prematurely, would be out of order: and in the sum,
there is no One Being controlling the entire scheme; all is made over to the
stars singly, as if there were no Sovereign Unity, standing as source of all
the forms of Being in subordinate association with it, and delegating to the
separate members, in their appropriate Kinds, the task of accomplishing its
purposes and bringing its latent potentiality into act.
This is a separatist theory, tenable only by
minds ignorant of the nature of a Universe which has a ruling principle and a
first cause operative downwards through every member.
7. But, if the stars announce the future as
we hold of many other things also what explanation of the cause have we to
offer? What explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied? Obviously, unless
the particular is included under some general principle of order, there can be
no signification.
We may think of the stars as letters
perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet
moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks
will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying any
living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for example we
may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the
eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are members of a
whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies.
All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man
who in any one thing can read another, a process familiar to all of us in not a
few examples of everyday experience.
But what is the comprehensive principle of
co-ordination? Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for the
divination, not only by stars but also by birds and other animals, from which
we derive guidance in our varied concerns.
All things must be enchained; and the sympathy
and correspondence obtaining in any one closely knit organism must exist,
first, and most intensely, in the All. There must be one principle constituting
this unit of many forms of life and enclosing the several members within the
unity, while at the same time, precisely as in each thing of detail the parts
too have each a definite function, so in the All each several member must have
its own task but more markedly so since in this case the parts are not merely
members but themselves Alls, members of the loftier Kind.
Thus each entity takes its origin from one
Principle and, therefore, while executing its own function, works in with every
other member of that All from which its distinct task has by no means cut it
off: each performs its act, each receives something from the others, every one
at its own moment bringing its touch of sweet or bitter. And there is nothing
undesigned, nothing of chance, in all the process: all is one scheme of
differentiation, starting from the Firsts and working itself out in a
continuous progression of Kinds.
8. Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon
a task of its own; alike in its direct course and in its divagation it is the
cause of all by its possession of the Thought of the First Principle: thus a
Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise,
would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is guided as
much by the orderliness as by the power of the controlling force. And in this
order the stars, as being no minor members of the heavenly system, are co-operators
contributing at once to its stately beauty and to its symbolic quality. Their
symbolic power extends to the entire realm of sense, their efficacy only to
what they patently do.
For our part, nature keeps us upon the work of
the Soul as long as we are not wrecked in the multiplicity of the Universe:
once thus sunk and held we pay the penalty, which consists both in the fall
itself and in the lower rank thus entailed upon us: riches and poverty are
caused by the combinations of external fact.
And what of virtue and vice?
That question has been amply discussed
elsewhere: in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient staple of the Soul; vice is
due to the commerce of a Soul with the outer world.
9. This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun
according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the
co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit: the
Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth
of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.
In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the
essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos [the
stars] that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse
and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain and that lower phase of the
Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is
bound up with the stars, whence our Soul [as total of Principle and affections]
takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the
world: our temperament will be of the stars ordering, and so, therefore, the
actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature
shaped to impressions.
What, after all this, remains to stand for the
"We"?
The "We" is the actual resultant of a
Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing
them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the
midst of all this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of
tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.
Our task, then, is to work for our liberation
from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the
total man is to be something better than a body ensouled the bodily element
dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course
mainly of the body for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There
is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher
realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one
possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each
personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and
by It unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to
live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the
sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along
with the whole thus adopted.
For every human Being is of twofold character;
there is that compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so
with the Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a
certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it is the
Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays
into the embodied Soul: and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the
other members of the heavenly system.
To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars
communicate no baseness. In their efficacy upon the [material] All, they act as
parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it; and they act only upon what is
partial; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle
through which is transmitted something of the stars will and of that authentic
Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.
But [with every allowance to the lower forces]
all follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It we
may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe
or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul [the divine first Soul] to
the other, its Kin [the Soul of any particular being]. All that is graceless is
admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate
from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a God when the
divine Soul is counted in with it; "the rest," we read, "is a
mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine."
10. If all this be true, we must at once admit
signification, though, neither singly nor collectively, can we ascribe to the
stars any efficacy except in what concerns the [material] All and in what is of
their own function.
We must admit that the Soul before entering
into birth presents itself bearing with it something of its own, for it could
never touch body except under stress of a powerful inner impulse; we must admit
some element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and
conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit: and we must admit some
effective power in that circuit itself; it is co-operative, and completes of
its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit
takes the rank and function of a part.
11. And we must remember that what comes from
the supernals does not enter into the recipients as it left the source; fire,
for instance, will be duller; the loving instinct will degenerate and issue in
ugly forms of the passion; the vital energy in a subject not so balanced as to
display the mean of manly courage, will come out as either ferocity or
faint-heartedness; and ambition... in love...; and the instinct towards good
sets up the pursuit of semblant beauty; intellectual power at its lowest
produces the extreme of wickedness, for wickedness is a miscalculating effort
towards Intelligence.
Any such quality, modified at best from its
supreme form, deteriorates again within itself: things of any kind that
approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further
still by their blending with bodies, with Matter, with each other.
12. All that thus proceeds from the supernal
combines into a unity and every existing entity takes something from this
blended infusion so that the result is the thing itself plus some quality. The
effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it; for horse comes by
horse, and man by man: the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping, but the
man has his origin in the Human-Principle. Outer things have their effect,
sometimes to hurt and sometimes to help; like a father, they often contribute
to good but sometimes also to harm; but they do not wrench the human being from
the foundations of its nature; though sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the
human principle takes the second place so that there is a failure to achieve
perfection; the Ideal has been attenuated.
13. Of phenomena of this sphere some derive
from the Kosmic Circuit and some not: we must take them singly and mark them
off, assigning to each its origin.
The gist of the whole matter lies in the
consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the
Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular
principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and
adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions; the entire force of the
Soul is represented in the All, but, in the parts, Soul is present only in
proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such partial
objects. Surrounding every separate entity there are other entities, whose
approach will sometimes be hostile and sometimes helpful to the purpose of its
nature; but to the All taken in its length and breadth each and every separate
existent is an adjusted part, holding its own characteristic and yet contributing
by its own native tendency to the entire life-history of the Universe.
The soulless parts of the All are merely
instruments; all their action is effected, so to speak, under a compulsion from
outside themselves.
The ensouled fall into two classes. The one
kind has a motion of its own, but haphazard like that of horses between the
shafts but before their driver sets the course; they are set right by the whip.
In the Living-Being possessed of Reason, the nature-principle includes the
driver; where the driver is intelligent, it takes in the main a straight path
to a set end. But both classes are members of the All and co-operate towards
the general purpose.
The greater and most valuable among them have
an important operation over a wide range: their contribution towards the life
of the whole consists in acting, not in being acted upon; others, but feebly
equipped for action, are almost wholly passive; there is an intermediate order
whose members contain within themselves a principle of productivity and
activity and make themselves very effective in many spheres or ways and yet
serve also by their passivity.
Thus the All stands as one all-complete Life,
whose members, to the measure in which each contains within itself the Highest,
effect all that is high and noble: and the entire scheme must be subordinate to
its Dirigeant as an army to its general, "following upon Zeus" it
has been said "as he proceeds towards the Intelligible Kind."
Secondary in the All are those of its parts
which possess a less exalted nature just as in us the members rank lower than
the Soul; and so all through, there is a general analogy between the things of
the All and our own members none of quite equal rank.
All living things, then all in the heavens
and all elsewhere fall under the general Reason-Principle of the All they
have been made parts with a view to the whole: not one of these parts, however
exalted, has power to effect any alteration of these Reason-Principles or of
things shaped by them and to them; some modification one part may work upon
another, whether for better or for worse; but there is no power that can wrest
anything outside of its distinct nature.
The part effecting such a modification for the
worse may act in several ways.
It may set up some weakness restricted to the
material frame. Or it may carry the weakness through to the sympathetic Soul
which by the medium of the material frame, become a power to debasement, has
been delivered over, though never in its essence, to the inferior order of being.
Or, in the case of a material frame ill-organized, it may check all such action
[of the Soul] upon the material frame as demands a certain collaboration in the
part acted upon: thus a lyre may be so ill-strung as to be incapable of the
melodic exactitude necessary to musical effect.
14. What of poverty and riches, glory and
power?
In the case of inherited fortune, the stars
merely announce a rich man, exactly as they announce the high social standing
of the child born to a distinguished house.
Wealth may be due to personal activity: in this
case if the body has contributed, part of the effect is due to whatever has
contributed towards the physical powers, first the parents and then, if place
has had its influence, sky and earth; if the body has borne no part of the
burden, then the success, and all the splendid accompaniments added by the
Recompensers, must be attributed to virtue exclusively. If fortune has come by
gift from the good, then the source of the wealth is, again, virtue: if by gift
from the evil, but to a meritorious recipient, then the credit must be given to
the action of the best in them: if the recipient is himself unprincipled, the
wealth must be attributed primarily to the very wickedness and to whatsoever is
responsible for the wickedness, while the givers bear an equal share in the
wrong.
When the success is due to labour, tillage for
example, it must be put down to the tiller, with all his environment as
contributory. In the case of treasure-trove, something from the All has entered
into action; and if this be so, it will be foreshown since all things make a
chain, so that we can speak of things universally. Money is lost: if by
robbery, the blame lies with the robber and the native principle guiding him:
if by shipwreck, the cause is the chain of events. As for good fame, it is
either deserved and then is due to the services done and to the merit of those
appraising them, or it is undeserved, and then must be attributed to the
injustice of those making the award. And the same principle holds is regards
power for this also may be rightly or unrightly placed it depends either
upon the merit of the dispensers of place or upon the man himself who has
effected his purpose by the organization of supporters or in many other
possible ways. Marriages, similarly, are brought about either by choice or by
chance interplay of circumstance. And births are determined by marriages: the
child is moulded true to type when all goes well; otherwise it is marred by
some inner detriment, something due to the mother personally or to an
environment unfavourable to that particular conception.
15. According to Plato, lots and choice play a
part [in the determination of human conditions] before the Spindle of Necessity
is turned; that once done, only the Spindle-destiny is valid; it fixes the
chosen conditions irretrievably since the elected guardian-spirit becomes
accessory to their accomplishment.
But what is the significance of the Lots?
By the Lots we are to understand birth into the
conditions actually existent in the All at the particular moment of each entry
into body, birth into such and such a physical frame, from such and such
parents, in this or that place, and generally all that in our phraseology is
the External.
For Particulars and Universals alike it is
established that to the first of those known as the Fates, to Clotho the
Spinner, must be due the unity and as it were interweaving of all that exists:
Lachesis presides over the Lots: to Atropos must necessarily belong the conduct
of mundane events.
Of men, some enter into life as fragments of
the All, bound to that which is external to themselves: they are victims of a
sort of fascination, and are hardly, or not at all, themselves: but others
mastering all this straining, so to speak, by the head towards the Higher, to
what is outside even the Soul preserve still the nobility and the ancient
privilege of the Souls essential being.
For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as a
thing whose nature is just a sum of impressions from outside as if it, alone,
of all that exists, had no native character.
No: much more than all else, the Soul,
possessing the Idea which belongs to a Principle, must have as its native
wealth many powers serving to the activities of its Kind. It is an
Essential-Existent and with this Existence must go desire and act and the
tendency towards some good.
While body and soul stand one combined thing,
there is a joint nature, a definite entity having definite functions and
employments; but as soon as any Soul is detached, its employments are kept
apart, its very own: it ceases to take the bodys concerns to itself: it has
vision now: body and soul stand widely apart.
16. The question arises what phase of the Soul
enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains
distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general
what the Living-Being is.
On all this there has been a conflict of
teaching: the matter must be examined later on from quite other considerations
than occupy us here. For the present let us explain in what sense we have
described the All as the expressed idea of the Governing Soul.
One theory might be that the Soul creates the
particular entities in succession man followed by horse and other animals
domestic or wild: fire and earth, though, first of all that it watches these
creations acting upon each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no
more, the tangled web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing
sequences; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the
reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon
each other according to their definite natures.
Another view makes the soul answerable for all
that thus comes about, since its first creations have set up the entire
enchainment.
No doubt the Reason-Principle [conveyed by the
Soul] covers all the action and experience of this realm: nothing happens, even
here, by any form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order.
Is everything, then, to be attributed to the
act of the Reason-Principles?
To their existence, no doubt, but not to their
effective action; they exist and they know; or better, the Soul, which contains
the engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has brought to
pass. For whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to each other,
similar consequences must inevitably ensue: the Soul adopting or foreplanning
the given conditions accomplishes the due outcome and links all into a total.
All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each
sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once it has taken its place among
things. And perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for
instance, are not as they were of old; by dint of interval and of the
inevitable law, the Reason-Principles have ceded something to the
characteristics of the Matter.
But:
The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing
universe and follows all the fate of all its works: this is its life, and it
knows no respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about
perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of excellence like a
farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where
rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc.
If such a conception of Soul be rejected as
untenable, we are obliged to think that the Reason-Principles themselves
foreknew or even contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw.
But then we would be imputing the creation of
evil to the Reason-Principles, though the arts and their guiding principle do
not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the
work of art.
And here it will be objected that in All there
is nothing contrary to nature, nothing evil.
Still, by the side of the better there exists
also what is less good.
Well, perhaps even the less good has its
contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be
good. Contraries may co-operate; and without opposites there could be no
ordered Universe: all living beings of the partial realm include contraries.
The better elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function
by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentially present in the
Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Souls
power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into
complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter
had already from its own stock produced the less good.
Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled
towards the better; so that out of the total of things modified by Soul on
the one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as
in the Reason-Principles there is, in the end, a Unity.
17. But these Reason-Principles, contained in
the Soul, are they Thoughts?
And if so, by what process does the Soul create
in accordance with these Thoughts?
It is upon Matter that this act of the Reason
is exercised; and what acts physically is not an intellectual operation or a
vision, but a power modifying matter, not conscious of it but merely acting
upon it: the Reason-Principle, in other words, acts much like a force producing
a figure or pattern upon water that of a circle, suppose, where the formation
of the ring is conditioned by something distinct from that force itself.
If this is so, the prior puissance of the Soul
[that which conveys the Reason-Principles] must act by manipulating the other
Soul, that which is united with Matter and has the generative function.
But is this handling the result of calculation?
Calculation implies reference. Reference, then,
to something outside or to something contained within itself? If to its own
content, there is no need of reasoning, which could not itself perform the act
of creation; creation is the operation of that phase of the Soul which contains
Ideal-Principles; for that is its stronger puissance, its creative part.
It creates, then, on the model of the Ideas;
for, what it has received from the Intellectual-Principle it must pass on in turn.
In sum, then, the Intellectual-Principle gives
from itself to the Soul of the All which follows immediately upon it: this
again gives forth from itself to its next, illuminated and imprinted by it; and
that secondary Soul at once begins to create, as under order, unhindered in
some of its creations, striving in others against the repugnance of Matter.
It has a creative power, derived; it is stored
with Reason-Principles not the very originals: therefore it creates, but not in
full accordance with the Principles from which it has been endowed: something
enters from itself; and, plainly, this is inferior. The issue then is something
living, yes; but imperfect, hindering its own life, something very poor and
reluctant and crude, formed in a Matter that is the fallen sediment of the
Higher Order, bitter and embittering. This is the Souls contribution to the
All.
18. Are the evils in the Universe necessary
because it is of later origin than the Higher Sphere?
Perhaps rather because without evil the All
would be incomplete. For most or even all forms of evil serve the Universe
much as the poisonous snake has its use though in most cases their function
is unknown. Vice itself has many useful sides: it brings about much that is
beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it stirs us to thoughtful
living, not allowing us to drowse in security.
If all this is so, then [the secret of creation
is that] the Soul of the All abides in contemplation of the Highest and Best,
ceaselessly striving towards the Intelligible Kind and towards God: but, thus
absorbing and filled full, it overflows so to speak and the image it gives
forth, its last utterance towards the lower, will be the creative puissance.
This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker,
secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is primarily saturated from the
Divine Intelligence. But the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle,
as giver, to the Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the
Third Kind.
Rightly, therefore, is this Kosmos described as
an image continuously being imaged, the First and the Second Principles
immobile, the Third, too, immobile essentially, but, accidentally and in
Matter, having motion.
For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the
divine Thought-Forms will pour forth into that phase of the Soul: as long as
there is a sun, all that streams from it will be some form of Light.
Fourth tractate.
Matter in its two kinds.
1. By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception of such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far all go the same way. But departure begins with the attempt to establish what this basic Kind is in itself, and how it is a recipient and of what.
To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are
the Real Beings; existence is limited to bodies; there is one only Matter, the
stuff underlying the primal-constituents of the Universe: existence is nothing
but this Matter: everything is some modification of this; the elements of the
Universe are simply this Matter in a certain condition.
The school has even the audacity to foist
Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of
Matter and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body void
of quality, but a magnitude.
Another school makes it incorporeal: among
these, not all hold the theory of one only Matter; some of them while they
maintain the one Matter, in which the first school believes, the foundation of
bodily forms, admit another, a prior, existing in the divine-sphere, the base
of the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings.
2. We are obliged, therefore, at the start,
both to establish the existence of this other Kind and to examine its nature
and the mode of its Being.
Now if Matter must characteristically be
undetermined, void of shape, while in that sphere of the Highest there can be
nothing that lacks determination, nothing shapeless, there can be no Matter
there. Further, if all that order is simplex, there can be no need of Matter,
whose function is to join with some other element to form a compound: it will
be found of necessity in things of derived existence and shifting nature the
signs which lead us to the notion of Matter but it is unnecessary to the
primal.
And again, where could it have come from?
whence did it take its being? If it is derived, it has a source: if it is
eternal, then the Primal-Principles are more numerous than we thought, the
Firsts are a meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea,
the union constitutes a body; and, so, there is Body in the Supreme.
3. Now it may be observed, first of all, that
we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose
very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its
Priors and [through them] to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the
Soul itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine
Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form.
Further, a compound in the Intellectual order
is not to be confounded with a compound in the realm of Matter; the Divine
Reasons are compounds and their Act is to produce a compound, namely that
[lower] Nature which works towards Idea. And there is not only a difference of
function; there is a still more notable difference of source. Then, too, the
Matter of the realm of process ceaselessly changes its form: in the eternal,
Matter is immutably one and the same, so that the two are diametrically
opposites. The Matter of this realm is all things in turn, a new entity in
every separate case, so that nothing is permanent and one thing ceaselessly
pushes another out of being: Matter has no identity here. In the Intellectual
it is all things at once: and therefore has nothing to change into: it already
and ever contains all. This means that not even in its own Sphere is the Matter
there at any moment shapeless: no doubt that is true of the Matter here as
well; but shape is held by a very different right in the two orders of Matter.
As to whether Matter is eternal or a thing of
process, this will be clear when we are sure of its precise nature.
4. The present existence of the Ideal-Forms has
been demonstrated elsewhere: we take up our argument from that point.
If, then, there is more than one of such
forming Ideas, there must of necessity be some character common to all and
equally some peculiar character in each keeping them distinct.
This peculiar characteristic, this
distinguishing difference, is the individual shape. But if shape, then there is
the shaped, that in which the difference is lodged.
There is, therefore, a Matter accepting the
shape, a permanent substratum.
Further, admitting that there is an
Intelligible Realm beyond, of which this world is an image, then, since this
world-compound is based on Matter, there must be Matter there also.
And how can you predicate an ordered system
without thinking of form, and how think of form apart from the notion of
something in which the form is lodged?
No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact,
utterly without parts, but in some sense there is part there too. And in so far
as these parts are really separate from each other, any such division and
difference can be no other than a condition of Matter, of a something divided
and differentiated: in so far as that realm, though without parts, yet consists
of a variety of entities, these diverse entities, residing in a unity of which
they are variations, reside in a Matter; for this unity, since it is also a
diversity, must be conceived of as varied and multiform; it must have been
shapeless before it took the form in which variation occurs. For if we abstract
from the Intellectual-Principle the variety and the particular shapes, the
Reason-Principles and the Thoughts, what precedes these was something shapeless
and undetermined, nothing of what is actually present there.
5. It may be objected that the
Intellectual-Principle possesses its content in an eternal conjunction so that
the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there.
But that argument would equally cancel the
Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never
existed, always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover
these two Matter and Idea by sheer force of our reasoning which
distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working
on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry.
And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must
be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a
Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle
lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to
be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks
light and colours which are modes of light, and dismisses all that is below the
colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is
the order of Matter.
The dark element in the Intelligible, however,
differs from that in the sense-world: so therefore does the Matter as much as
the forming-Idea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine Matter, though
it is the object of determination has, of its own nature, a life defined and
intellectual; the Matter of this sphere while it does accept determination is
not living or intellective, but a dead thing decorated: any shape it takes is
an image, exactly as the Base is an image. There on the contrary the shape is a
real-existent as is the Base. Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must be
admitted to be right as long as they keep to the Matter of the Intelligible
Realm: for the Base there is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the
higher that accompanies it, is illuminated Being.
But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm,
possess eternal existence?
The solution of that question is the same as
for the Ideas.
Both are engendered, in the sense that they
have had a beginning, but unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time:
they have a derived being but by an eternal derivation: they are not, like the
Kosmos, always in process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their
Being permanently. For that differentiation within the Intelligible which
produces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which produces the
Matter there: it is the first movement; and movement and differentiation are
convertible terms since the two things arose as one: this motion, this
cleavage, away from the first is indetermination [= Matter], needing The First
to its determination which it achieves by its Return, remaining, until then, an
Alienism, still lacking good; unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that
all light comes, and, until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of
light can be authentic; any light from elsewhere is of another order than the
true.
6. We are led thus to the question of
receptivity in things of body.
An additional proof that bodies must have some
substratum different from themselves is found in the changing of the
basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the
elements passing over is not complete if it were we would have a Principle of
Being wrecked in Non-being nor does an engendered thing pass from utter non-being
into Being: what happens is that a new form takes the place of an old. There
is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one form to receive the form of
the incoming entity.
The same fact is clearly established by decay,
a process implying a compound object; where there is decay there is a
distinction between Matter and Form.
And the reasoning which shows the destructible
to be a compound is borne out by practical examples of reduction: a drinking
vessel is reduced to its gold, the gold to liquid; analogy forces us to believe
that the liquid too is reducible.
The basic-constituents of things must be either
their Form-Idea or that Primal Matter [of the Intelligible] or a compound of
the Form and Matter.
Form-Idea, pure and simple, they cannot be: for
without Matter how could things stand in their mass and magnitude?
Neither can they be that Primal Matter, for
they are not indestructible.
They must, therefore, consist of Matter and
Form-Idea Form for quality and shape, Matter for the base, indeterminate as
being other than Idea.
7. Empedokles in identifying his
"elements" with Matter is refuted by their decay.
Anaxagoras, in identifying his
"primal-combination" with Matter to which he allots no mere aptness
to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all
withdraws in this way the very Intellectual-Principle he had introduced; for
this Mind is not to him the bestower of shape, of Forming Idea; and it is
co-aeval with Matter, not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible:
for if the combination derives Being by participation, Being is the prior; if
both are Authentic Existents, then an additional Principle, a third, is
imperative [a ground of unification]. And if this Creator, Mind, must
pre-exist, why need Matter contain the Forming-Ideas parcel-wise for the Mind,
with unending labour, to assort and allot? Surely the undetermined could be
brought to quality and pattern in the one comprehensive act?
As for the notion that all is in all, this
clearly is impossible.
Those who make the base to be "the
infinite" must define the term.
If this "infinite" means "of
endless extension" there is no infinite among beings; there is neither an
infinity-in-itself [Infinity Abstract] nor an infinity as an attribute to some
body; for in the first case every part of that infinity would be infinite and
in the second an object in which the infinity was present as an attribute could
not be infinite apart from that attribute, could not be simplex, could not
therefore be Matter.
Atoms again cannot meet the need of a base.
There are no atoms; all body is divisible
endlessly: besides neither the continuity nor the ductility of corporeal things
is explicable apart from Mind, or apart from the Soul which cannot be made up
of atoms; and, again, out of atoms creation could produce nothing but atoms: a
creative power could produce nothing from a material devoid of continuity. Any
number of reasons might be brought, and have been brought, against this
hypothesis and it need detain us no longer.
8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter,
described as one stuff, continuous and without quality?
Clearly since it is without quality it is
incorporeal; bodiliness would be quality.
It must be the basic stuff of all the entities
of the sense-world and not merely base to some while being to others achieved
form.
Clay, for example, is matter to the potter but
is not Matter pure and simple. Nothing of this sort is our object: we are
seeking the stuff which underlies all alike. We must therefore refuse to it all
that we find in things of sense not merely such attributes as colour, heat or
cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness or thinness, shape and therefore
magnitude; though notice that to be present within magnitude and shape is very
different from possessing these qualities.
It cannot be a compound, it must be a simplex,
one distinct thing in its nature; only so can it be void of all quality. The
Principle which gives it form gives this as something alien: so with magnitude
and all really-existent things bestowed upon it. If, for example, it possessed
a magnitude of its own, the Principle giving it form would be at the mercy of
that magnitude and must produce not at will, but only within the limit of the
Matters capacity: to imagine that Will keeping step with its material is
fantastic.
The Matter must be of later origin than the
forming-power, and therefore must be at its disposition throughout, ready to
become anything, ready therefore to any bulk; besides, if it possessed
magnitude, it would necessarily possess shape also: it would be doubly
inductile.
No: all that ever appears upon it is brought in
by the Idea: the Idea alone possesses: to it belongs the magnitude and all else
that goes with the Reason-Principle or follows upon it. Quantity is given with
the Ideal-Form in all the particular species man, bird, and particular kind
of bird.
The imaging of Quantity upon Matter by an
outside power is not more surprising than the imaging of Quality; Quality is no
doubt a Reason-Principle, but Quantity also being measure, number is
equally so.
9. But how can we conceive a thing having
existence without having magnitude?
We have only to think of things whose identity
does not depend on their quantity for certainly magnitude can be
distinguished from existence as can many other forms and attributes.
In a word, every unembodied Kind must be
classed as without quantity, and Matter is unembodied.
Besides quantitativeness itself [the
Absolute-Principle] does not possess quantity, which belongs only to things participating
in it, a consideration which shows that Quantitativeness is an Idea-Principle.
A white object becomes white by the presence of whiteness; what makes an
organism white or of any other variety of colour is not itself a specific
colour but, so to speak, a specific Reason-Principle: in the same way what
gives an organism a certain bulk is not itself a thing of magnitude but is
Magnitude itself, the abstract Absolute, or the Reason-Principle.
This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and beats
the Matter out into Magnitude?
Not at all: the Matter was not previously
shrunken small: there was no littleness or bigness: the Idea gives Magnitude
exactly as it gives every quality not previously present.
10. But how can I form the conception of the
sizelessness of Matter?
How do you form the concept of any absence of
quality? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such
a case?
The secret is Indetermination.
Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate
knows the indeterminate. Around this indefinite a definite conception will be
realized, but the way lies through indefiniteness.
All knowledge comes by Reason and the
Intellectual Act; in this case Reason conveys information in any account it
gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection
but rather its failure: therefore the representation of Matter must be
spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up
with the alien reason.
This is Platos meaning where he says that
Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning.
What, then, is this indetermination in the
Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind
had withdrawn?
No: the indeterminate has some footing in the
sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of
receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all
attributes perceptible to sense all that corresponds to light comes upon a
residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus in the state of
the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in some way identical
with the object of its spurious vision.
There is vision, then, in this approach of the
Mind towards Matter?
Some vision, yes; of shapelessness, of colourlessness,
of the unlit, and therefore of the sizeless. More than this would mean that the
Soul is already bestowing Form.
But is not such a void precisely what the Soul
experiences when it has no intellection whatever?
No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather
has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be
described as the impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of
objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds [i.e., as
possessing with these forms a formless base] for they appear as things that
have accepted colour and other quality.
It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two
components; it has a clear Knowledge or perception of the overlie [the Ideas]
but only a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an
Ideal-Principle.
With what is perceptible to it there is
presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as
its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows
dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing.
And just as even Matter itself is not stably
shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw
over it the thing-form; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads,
almost, to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being.
11. "But, given Magnitude and the
properties we know, what else can be necessary to the existence of body?"
Some base to be the container of all the rest.
"A certain mass then; and if mass, then
Magnitude? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any
entrant. And suppose it sizeless; then, what end does it serve? It never helped
Idea or quality; now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude,
though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to find its way into embodied
entities by way of Matter."
"Or, taking a larger view, observe that
actions, productive operations, periods of time, movements, none of these have
any such substratum and yet are real things; in the same way the most
elementary body has no need of Matter; things may be, all, what they are, each
after its own kind, in their great variety, deriving the coherence of their
being from the blending of the various Ideal-Forms. This Matter with its
sizelessness seems, then, to be a name without a content."
Now, to begin with: extension is not an
imperative condition of being a recipient; it is necessary only where it
happens to be a property inherent to the recipients peculiar mode of being.
The Soul, for example, contains all things but holds them all in an unextended
unity; if magnitude were one of its attributes it would contain things in
extension. Matter does actually contain in spatial extension what it takes in;
but this is because itself is a potential recipient of spatial extension:
animals and plants, in the same way, as they increase in size, take quality in
parallel development with quantity, and they lose in the one as the other
lessens.
No doubt in the case of things as we know them
there is a certain mass lying ready beforehand to the shaping power: but that
is no reason for expecting bulk in Matter strictly so called; for in such cases
Matter is not the absolute; it is that of some definite object; the Absolute Matter
must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside itself.
A thing then need not have magnitude in order
to receive form: it may receive mass with everything else that comes to it at
the moment of becoming what it is to be: a phantasm of mass is enough, a
primary aptness for extension, a magnitude of no content whence the
identification that has been made of Matter with The Void.
But I prefer to use the word phantasm as
hinting the indefiniteness into which the Soul spills itself when it seeks to
communicate with Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it, neither
encompassing it nor able to penetrate to any fixed point of it, either of which
achievements would be an act of delimitation.
In other words, we have something which is to be
described not as small or great but as the great-and-small: for it is at once a
mass and a thing without magnitude, in the sense that it is the Matter on which
Mass is based and that, as it changes from great to small and small to great,
it traverses magnitude. Its very undeterminateness is a mass in the same sense
that of being a recipient of Magnitude though of course only in the visible
object.
In the order of things without Mass, all that
is Ideal-Principle possesses delimitation, each entity for itself, so that the
conception of Mass has no place in them: Matter, not delimited, having in its
own nature no stability, swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go
here, there and everywhere, becomes a thing of multiplicity: driven into all
shapes, becoming all things, it has that much of the character of mass.
12. It is the corporeal, then, that demands
magnitude: the Ideal-Forms of body are Ideas installed in Mass.
But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude
itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose
them entering into Magnitude and not into Matter is to represent them as
being either without Magnitude and without Real-Existence [and therefore
undistinguishable from the Matter] or not Ideal-Forms [apt to body] but
Reason-Principles [utterly removed] whose sphere could only be Soul; at this,
there would be no such thing as body [i.e., instead of Ideal-Forms shaping
Matter and so producing body, there would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling
remote in Soul.]
The multiplicity here must be based upon some
unity which, since it has been brought to Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct
from Magnitude. Matter is the base of Identity to all that is composite: once
each of the constituents comes bringing its own Matter with it, there is no
need of any other base. No doubt there must be a container, as it were a place,
to receive what is to enter, but Matter and even body precede place and space;
the primal necessity, in order to the existence of body, is Matter.
There is no force in the suggestion that, since
production and act are immaterial, corporeal entities also must be immaterial.
Bodies are compound, actions not. Further,
Matter does in some sense underlie action; it supplies the substratum to the
doer: it is permanently within him though it does not enter as a constituent
into the act where, indeed, it would be a hindrance. Doubtless, one act does
not change into another as would be the case if there were a specific Matter
of actions but the doer directs himself from one act to another so that he is
the Matter, himself, to his varying actions.
Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to
quantity, and, therefore, to body.
It is, thus, no name void of content; we know
there is such a base, invisible and without bulk though it be.
If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning
reject qualities and mass: for quality, or mass, or any such entity, taken by
itself apart, might be said not to exist. But these do exist, though in an
obscure existence: there is much less ground for rejecting Matter, however it
lurk, discerned by none of the senses.
It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of
colour: it is not heard, for it is no sound: it is no flavour or savour for
nostrils or palate: can it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for neither is it
corporeal; and touch deals with body, which is known by being solid, fragile,
soft, hard, moist, dry all properties utterly lacking in Matter.
It is grasped only by a mental process, though
that not an act of the intellective mind but a reasoning that finds no subject;
and so it stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called. No
bodiliness belongs to it; bodiliness is itself a phase of Reason-Principle and
so is something different from Matter, as Matter, therefore, from it:
bodiliness already operative and so to speak made concrete would be body
manifest and not Matter unelaborated.
13. Are we asked to accept as the substratum
some attribute or quality present to all the elements in common?
Then, first, we must be told what precise
attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum.
The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an
attribute where there is neither base nor bulk?
Again, if the quality possesses determination,
it is not Matter the undetermined; and anything without determination is not a
quality but is the substratum the very Matter we are seeking.
It may be suggested that perhaps this absence
of quality means simply that, of its own nature, it has no participation in any
of the set and familiar properties, but takes quality by this very
non-participation, holding thus an absolutely individual character, marked off
from everything else, being as it were the negation of those others.
Deprivation, we will be told, comports quality: a blind man has the quality of
his lack of sight. If then it will be urged Matter exhibits such a
negation, surely it has a quality, all the more so, assuming any deprivation to
be a quality, in that here the deprivation is all comprehensive.
But this notion reduces all existence to
qualified things or qualities: Quantity itself becomes a Quality and so does
even Existence. Now this cannot be: if such things as Quantity and Existence
are qualified, they are, by that very fact, not qualities: Quality is an
addition to them; we must not commit the absurdity of giving the name Quality
to something distinguishable from Quality, something therefore that is not
Quality.
Is it suggested that its mere Alienism is a
quality in Matter?
If this Alienism is difference-absolute [the
abstract entity] it possesses no Quality: absolute Quality cannot be itself a
qualified thing.
If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning
only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself [since
it is certainly not an absolute] but by this Difference, just as all identical
objects are so by virtue of Identicalness [the Absolute principle of Identity].
An absence is neither a Quality nor a qualified
entity; it is the negation of a Quality or of something else, as noiselessness
is the negation of noise and so on. A lack is negative; Quality demands
something positive. The distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the lack of
qualification and of form; surely then it is absurd to pretend that it has
Quality in not being qualified; that is like saying that sizelessness
constitutes a certain size.
The distinctive character of Matter, then, is
simply its manner of being not something definite inserted in it but, rather
a relation towards other things, the relation of being distinct from them.
Other things possess something besides this
relation of Alienism: their form makes each an entity. Matter may with
propriety be described as merely alien; perhaps, even, we might describe it as
"The Aliens," for the singular suggests a certain definiteness while
the plural would indicate the absence of any determination.
14. But is Absence this privation itself, or
something in which this Privation is lodged?
Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation
are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be
excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in
reason from the other: that which defines Matter must be kept quite apart from
that defining the Privation and vice versa.
There are three possibilities: Matter is not in
Privation and Privation is not in Matter; or each is in each; or each is in
itself alone.
Now if they should stand quite apart, neither
calling for the other, they are two distinct things: Matter is something other
than Privation even though Privation always goes with it: into the principle of
the one, the other cannot enter even potentially.
If their relation to each other is that of a
snubnose to snubness, here also there is a double concept; we have two things.
If they stand to each other as fire to heat
heat in fire, but fire not included in the concept of heat if Matter is
Privation in the way in which fire is heat, then the Privation is a form under
which Matter appears but there remains a base distinct from the Privation and
this base must be the Matter. Here, too, they are not one thing.
Perhaps the identity in substance with
differentiation in reason will be defended on the ground that Privation does
not point to something present but precisely to an absence, to something
absent, to the negation or lack of Real-being: the case would be like that of
the affirmation of non-existence, where there is no real predication but simply
a denial.
Is, then, this Privation simply a
non-existence?
If a non-existence in the sense that it is not
a thing of Real-being, but belongs to some other Kind of existent, we have
still two Principles, one referring directly to the substratum, the other
merely exhibiting the relation of the Privation to other things.
Or we might say that the one concept defines
the relation of substratum to what is not substratum, while that of Privation,
in bringing out the indeterminateness of Matter, applies to the Matter in
itself: but this still makes Privation and Matter two in reason though one in
substratum.
Now if Matter possesses an identity though
only the identity of being indeterminate, unfixed and without quality how can
we bring it so under two principles?
15. The further question, therefore, is raised
whether boundlessness and indetermination are things lodging in something other
than themselves as a sort of attribute and whether Privation [or Negation of
quality] is also an attribute residing in some separate substratum.
Now all that is Number and Reason-Principle is
outside of boundlessness: these bestow bound and settlement and order in
general upon all else: neither anything that has been brought under order nor
any Order-Absolute is needed to bring them under order. The thing that has to
be brought under order [e.g., Matter] is other than the Ordering Principle
which is Limit and Definiteness and Reason-Principle. Therefore, necessarily,
the thing to be brought under order and to definiteness must be in itself a
thing lacking delimitation.
Now Matter is a thing that is brought under
order like all that shares its nature by participation or by possessing the
same principle therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited and not
merely the recipient of a nonessential quality of Indefiniteness entering as an
attribute.
For, first, any attribute to any subject must
be a Reason-Principle; and Indefiniteness is not a Reason-Principle.
Secondly, what must a thing be to take
Indefiniteness as an attribute? Obviously it must, beforehand, be either
Definiteness or a defined thing. But Matter is neither.
Then again Indefiniteness entering as an
attribute into the definite must cease to be indefinite: but Indefiniteness has
not entered as an attribute into Matter: that is, Matter is essentially
Indefiniteness.
The Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is the
Indefinite, [the undelimited]; it must be a thing generated by the undefined
nature, the illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The One illimitableness,
however, not possessing native existence There but engendered by The One.
But how can Matter be common to both spheres,
be here and be There?
Because even Indefiniteness has two phases.
But what difference can there be between phase
and phase of Indefiniteness?
The difference of archetype and image.
So that Matter here [as only an image of
Indefiniteness] would be less indefinite?
On the contrary, more indefinite as an
Image-thing remote from true being. Indefiniteness is the greater in the less
ordered object; the less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The Indeterminate in
the Intellectual Realm, where there is truer being, might almost be called
merely an Image of Indefiniteness: in this lower Sphere where there is less
Being, where there is a refusal of the Authentic, and an adoption of the
Image-Kind, Indefiniteness is more authentically indefinite.
But this argument seems to make no difference
between the indefinite object and Indefiniteness-essential. Is there none?
In any object in which Reason and Matter
co-exist we distinguish between Indeterminateness and the Indeterminate
subject: but where Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we
would say right out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not
present; for it is a Reason-Principle and could not lodge in the indeterminate
object without at once annulling the indeterminateness.
Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite
of itself, by its natural opposition to Reason-Principle. Reason is Reason and
nothing else; just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to Reason, is
Indeterminateness and nothing else.
16. Then Matter is simply Alienism [the
Principle of Difference]?
No: it is merely that part of Alienism which
stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are
Reason-Principles. So understood, this non-existent has a certain measure of
existence; for it is identical with Privation, which also is a thing standing
in opposition to the things that exist in Reason.
But must not Privation cease to have existence,
when what has been lacking is present at last?
By no means: the recipient of a state or character
is not a state but the Privation of the state; and that into which
determination enters is neither a determined object nor determination itself,
but simply the wholly or partly undetermined.
Still, must not the nature of this Undetermined
be annulled by the entry of Determination, especially where this is no mere
attribute?
No doubt to introduce quantitative
determination into an undetermined object would annul the original state; but
in the particular case, the introduction of determination only confirms the
original state, bringing it into actuality, into full effect, as sowing brings
out the natural quality of land or as a female organism impregnated by the male
is not defeminized but becomes more decidedly of its sex; the thing becomes
more emphatically itself.
But on this reasoning must not Matter owe its
evil to having in some degree participated in good?
No: its evil is in its first lack: it was not a
possessor (of some specific character).
To lack one thing and to possess another, in
something like equal proportions, is to hold a middle state of good and evil:
but whatsoever possesses nothing and so is in destitution and especially what
is essentially destitution must be evil in its own Kind.
For in Matter we have no mere absence of means
or of strength; it is utter destitution of sense, of virtue, of beauty, of
pattern, of Ideal principle, of quality. This is surely ugliness, utter
disgracefulness, unredeemed evil.
The Matter in the Intellectual Realm is an
Existent, for there is nothing previous to it except the Beyond-Existence; but
what precedes the Matter of this sphere is Existence; by its alienism in regard
to the beauty and good of Existence, Matter is therefore a non-existent.
Fifth tractate.
On potentiality and actuality.
1. A distinction is made between things existing actually and things existing potentially; a certain Actuality, also, is spoken of as a really existent entity. We must consider what content there is in these terms.
Can we distinguish between Actuality [an
absolute, abstract Principle] and the state of being-in-act? And if there is
such an Actuality, is this itself in Act, or are the two quite distinct so that
this actually existent thing need not be, itself, an Act?
It is indubitable that Potentiality exists in
the Realm of Sense: but does the Intellectual Realm similarly include the
potential or only the actual? and if the potential exists there, does it remain
merely potential for ever? And, if so, is this resistance to actualization due
to its being precluded [as a member of the Divine or Intellectual world] from
time-processes?
First we must make clear what potentiality is.
We cannot think of potentiality as standing by
itself; there can be no potentiality apart from something which a given thing
may be or become. Thus bronze is the potentiality of a statue: but if nothing
could be made out of the bronze, nothing wrought upon it, if it could never be
anything as a future to what it has been, if it rejected all change, it would
be bronze and nothing else: its own character it holds already as a present
thing, and that would be the full of its capacity: it would be destitute of
potentiality. Whatsoever has a potentiality must first have a character of its
own; and its potentiality will consist in its having a reach beyond that
character to some other.
Sometimes after it has turned its potentiality
into actuality it will remain what it was; sometimes it will sink itself to the
fullest extent in the new form and itself disappear: these two different modes
are exemplified in (1) bronze as potentially a statue and (2) water [=
primal-liquid] as potentially bronze or, again, air as potentially fire.
But if this be the significance of
potentiality, may we describe it as a Power towards the thing that is to be? Is
the Bronze a power towards a statue?
Not in the sense of an effectively productive
force: such a power could not be called a potentiality. Of course Potentiality
may be a power, as, for instance, when we are referring not merely to a thing
which may be brought into actualization but to Actuality itself [the Principle
or Abstract in which potentiality and the power of realizing potentiality may
be thought of as identical]: but it is better, as more conducive to clarity, to
use "Potentiality" in regard to the process of Actualization and
"Power" in regard to the Principle, Actuality.
Potentiality may be thought of as a Substratum
to states and shapes and forms which are to be received, which it welcomes by
its nature and even strives for sometimes in gain but sometimes, also, to
loss, to the annulling of some distinctive manner of Being already actually
achieved.
2. Then the question rises whether Matter
potentially what it becomes by receiving shape is actually something else or
whether it has no actuality at all. In general terms: When a potentiality has
taken a definite form, does it retain its being? Is the potentiality, itself,
in actualization? The alternative is that, when we speak of the "Actual
Statue" and of the "Potential Statue," the Actuality is not predicated
of the same subject as the "Potentiality." If we have really two
different subjects, then the potential does not really become the actual: all
that happens is that an actual entity takes the place of a potential.
The actualized entity is not the Matter [the
Potentiality, merely] but a combination, including the Form-Idea upon the
Matter.
This is certainly the case when a quite
different thing results from the actualization-statue, for example, the
combination, is distinctly different from the bronze, the base; where the
resultant is something quite new, the Potentiality has clearly not, itself,
become what is now actualized. But take the case where a person with a capacity
for education becomes in fact educated: is not potentiality, here, identical with
actualization? Is not the potentially wise Socrates the same man as the
Socrates actually wise?
But is an ignorant man a being of knowledge
because he is so potentially? Is he, in virtue of his non-essential ignorance,
potentially an instructed being?
It is not because of his accidental ignorance
that he is a being of Knowledge: it is because, ignorant though he be by
accident, his mind, apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through which he may
become so. Thus, in the case of the potentially instructed who have become so
in fact, the potentiality is taken up into the actual; or, if we prefer to put
it so, there is on the one side the potentiality while, on the other, there is
the power in actual possession of the form.
If, then, the Potentiality is the Substratum
while the thing in actualization the Statue for example a combination, how
are we to describe the form that has entered the bronze?
There will be nothing unsound in describing
this shape, this Form which has brought the entity from potentiality to
actuality, as the actualization; but of course as the actualization of the
definite particular entity, not as Actuality the abstract: we must not confuse
it with the other actualization, strictly so called, that which is contrasted
with the power producing actualization. The potential is led out into
realization by something other than itself; power accomplishes, of itself, what
is within its scope, but by virtue of Actuality [the abstract]: the relation is
that existing between a temperament and its expression in act, between courage
and courageous conduct. So far so good:
3. We come now to the purpose of all this
discussion; to make clear in what sense or to what degree Actualization is
predicable in the Intellectual Realm and whether all is in Actualization there,
each and every member of that realm being an Act, or whether Potentiality also
has place there.
Now: if there is no Matter there to harbour
potentiality: if nothing there has any future apart from its actual mode: if
nothing there generates, whether by changes or in the permanence of its
identity; if nothing goes outside of itself to give being to what is other than
itself; then, potentiality has no place there: the Beings there possess
actuality as belonging to eternity, not to time.
Those, however, who assert Matter in the
Intellectual Realm will be asked whether the existence of that Matter does not
imply the potential there too; for even if Matter there exists in another mode
than here, every Being there will have its Matter, its form and the union of
the two [and therefore the potential, separable from the actual]. What answer
is to be made?
Simply, that even the Matter there is Idea,
just as the Soul, an Idea, is Matter to another [a higher] Being.
But relatively to that higher, the Soul is a
potentiality?
No: for the Idea [to which it is Matter] is
integral to the Soul and does not look to a future; the distinction between the
Soul and its Idea is purely mental: the Idea and the Matter it includes are
conceived as a conjunction but are essentially one Kind: remember that
Aristotle makes his Fifth Body immaterial.
But surely Potentiality exists in the Soul?
Surely the Soul is potentially the living-being of this world before it has
become so? Is it not potentially musical, and everything else that it has not
been and becomes? Does not this imply potentiality even in the Intellectual
Existences?
No: the Soul is not potentially these things;
it is a Power towards them.
But after what mode does Actualization exist in
the Intellectual Realm?
Is it the Actualization of a statue, where the
combination is realized because the Form-Idea has mastered each separate
constituent of the total?
No: it is that every constituent there is a
Form-Idea and, thus, is perfect in its Being.
There is in the Intellectual Principle no
progression from some power capable of intellection to the Actuality of
intellection: such a progression would send us in search of a Prior Principle
not progressing from Power to Act; there all stands ever realized. Potentiality
requires an intervention from outside itself to bring it to the actualization
which otherwise cannot be; but what possesses, of itself, identity unchangeable
for ever is an actualization: all the Firsts then are actualizations, simply
because eternally and of themselves they possess all that is necessary to their
completion.
This applies equally to the Soul, not to that
in Matter but to that in the Intellectual Sphere; and even that in Matter, the
Soul of Growth, is an actualization in its difference; it possesses actually
[and not, like material things, merely in image] the Being that belongs to it.
Then, everything, in the intellectual is in
actualization and so all There is Actuality?
Why not? If that Nature is rightly said to be
"Sleepless," and to be Life and the noblest mode of Life, the noblest
Activities must be there; all then is actualization there, everything is an
Actuality, for everything is a Life, and all Place there is the Place of Life,
in the true sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the Intellectual
Principle.
4. Now, in general anything that has a
potentiality is actually something else, and this potentiality of the future
mode of being is an existing mode.
But what we think of as Matter, what we assert
to be the potentiality of all things, cannot be said to be actually any one
being among beings: if it were of itself any definite being, it could not be
potentially all.
If, then, it is not among existences, it must
necessarily be without existence.
How, therefore, can it be actually anything?
The answer is that while Matter can not be any
of the things which are founded upon it, it may quite well be something else,
admitting that all existences are not rooted in Matter.
But once more, if it is excluded from the
entities founded upon it and all these are Beings, it must itself be a
Non-Being.
It is, further, by definition, formless and
therefore not an Idea: it cannot then be classed among things of the
Intellectual Realm, and so is, once more, a Non-Being. Falling, as regards both
worlds, under Non-Being, it is all the more decidedly the Non-Being.
It has eluded the Nature of the Authentic
Existences; it has even failed to come up with the things to which a spurious
existence can be attributed for it is not even a phantasm of Reason as these
are how is it possible to include it under any mode of Being?
And if it falls under no mode of Being, what
can it actually be?
5. How can we talk of it? How can it be the
Matter of real things?
It is talked of, and it serves, precisely, as a
Potentiality.
And, as being a Potentiality, it is not of the
order of the thing it is to become: its existence is no more than an
announcement of a future, as it were a thrust forward to what is to come into
existence.
As Potentiality then, it is not any definite
thing but the potentiality of everything: being nothing in itself beyond what
being Matter amounts to it is not in actualization. For if it were actually
something, that actualized something would not be Matter, or at least not
Matter out and out, but merely Matter in the limited sense in which bronze is
the matter of the statue.
And its Non-Being must be no mere difference
from Being.
Motion, for example, is different from Being,
but plays about it, springing from it and living within it: Matter is, so to speak,
the outcast of Being, it is utterly removed, irredeemably what it was from the
beginning: in origin it was Non-Being and so it remains.
Nor are we to imagine that, standing away at
the very beginning from the universal circle of Beings, it was thus necessarily
an active Something or that it became a Something. It has never been able to
annex for itself even a visible outline from all the forms under which it has
sought to creep: it has always pursued something other than itself; it was
never more than a Potentiality towards its next: where all the circle of Being
ends, there only is it manifest; discerned underneath things produced after it,
it is remoter [from Real-Being] even than they.
Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order of
Being, it can be no actualization of either: all that is allowed to it is to be
a Potentiality, a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing incapable of a Shape of
its own.
Its actuality is that of being a phantasm, the
actuality of being a falsity; and the false in actualization is the veritably
false, which again is Authentic Non-Existence.
So that Matter, as the Actualization of
Non-Being, is all the more decidedly Non-Being, is Authentic Non-Existence.
Thus, since the very reality of its Nature is
situated in Non-Being, it is in no degree the Actualization of any definite
Being.
If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an
Actualization, for then it would not be the stray from Authentic Being which it
is, the thing having its Being in Non-Beingness: for, note, in the case of things
whose Being is a falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away what Being
they have, and if we introduce actualization into things whose Being and
Essence is Potentiality, we destroy the foundation of their nature since their
Being is Potentiality.
If Matter is to be kept as the unchanging
substratum, we must keep it as Matter: that means does it not? that we must
define it as a Potentiality and nothing more or refute these considerations.
Sixth tractate.
Quality and form-idea.
1. Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct; must we not envisage Being as the substance stripped of all else, while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference so that these are the specific constituents of Reality?
The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which
Being, Movement, and so on are separate constituents.
Now Movement has Being as an accident and
therefore should have Reality as an accident; or is it something serving to the
completion of Reality?
No: Movement is a Reality; everything in the
Supreme is a Reality.
Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally, in
this sphere?
In the Supreme there is Reality because all
things are one; ours is the sphere of images whose separation produces grades
of difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are present
undistinguishably; there is no separation of head and hand: their distinct
existence begins in the life here, whose content is image, not Authentic
Existence.
And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic
Realm to be explained in the same way? Are they differing Realities centred in
one Reality or gathered round Being differences which constitute Realities
distinct from each other within the common fact of Reality?
This is sound enough; but it does not apply to
all the qualities of this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are differentiations
of Reality such as the quality of two-footedness or four-footedness but
others are not such differentiations of Reality and, because they are not so,
must be called qualities and nothing more.
On the other hand, one and the same thing may
be sometimes a differentiation of Reality and sometimes not a differentiation
when it is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some other thing,
where it is not a constitutive element but an accidental. The distinction may
be seen in the [constitutive] whiteness of a swan or of ceruse and the
whiteness which in a man is an accidental.
Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-Form
of the thing it is a constitutive element and not a quality; where it is a
superficial appearance it is a quality.
In other words, qualification may be
distinguished. We may think of a qualification that is of the very substance of
the thing, something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying
that is nothing more, [not constituting but simply] giving some particular
character to the real thing; in this second case the qualification does not
produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it; the Reality has existed
fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which whether in
soul or body merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition
elaborates the Reality into the particular thing.
But what if [the superficial appearance such
as] the visible whiteness in ceruse is constitutive? In the swan the whiteness
is not constitutive since a swan need not be white: it is constitutive in
ceruse, just as warmth is constitutive of the Reality, fire.
No doubt we may be told that the Reality in
fire is [not warmth but] fieriness and in ceruse an analogous abstraction: yet
the fact remains that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is constitutive and
in the ceruse whiteness.
Thus the same entities are represented at once
as being not qualities but constituents of Reality and not constituents but
qualities.
Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical
thing changed its own nature according to whether it is present as a
constituent or as an accidental.
The truth is that while the Reason-Principles
producing these entities contain nothing but what is of the nature of Reality,
yet only in the Intellectual Realm do the produced things possess real
existence: here they are not real; they are qualified.
And this is the starting-point of an error we
constantly make: in our enquiries into things we let realities escape us and
fasten on what is mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the
observation of certain qualities present; fire is a Reality [not a combination
of material phenomena]; the phenomena observed here and leading us to name fire
call us away from the authentic thing; a quality is erected into the very
matter of definition a procedure, however, reasonable enough in regard to
things of the realm of sense which are in no case realities but accidents of
Reality.
And this raises the question how Reality can
ever spring from what are not Realities.
It has been shown that a thing coming into
being cannot be identical with its origins: it must here be added that nothing
thus coming into being [no "thing of process"] can be a Reality.
Then how do we assert the rising in the Supreme
of what we have called Reality from what is not Reality [i.e., from the pure
Being which is above Reality]?
The Reality there possessing Authentic Being
in the strictest sense, with the least admixture is Reality by existing among
the differentiations of the Authentic Being; or, better, Reality is affirmed in
the sense that with the existence of the Supreme is included its Act so that Reality
seems to be a perfectionment of the Authentic Being, though in the truth it is
a diminution; the produced thing is deficient by the very addition, by being
less simplex, by standing one step away from the Authentic.
2. But we must enquire into Quality in itself:
to know its nature is certainly the way to settle our general question.
The first point is to assure ourselves whether
or not one and the same thing may be held to be sometimes a mere qualification
and sometimes a constituent of Reality not staying on the point that
qualification could not be constitutive of a Reality but of a qualified Reality
only.
Now in a Reality possessing a determined
quality, the Reality and the fact of existence precede the qualified Reality.
What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality
which precedes the qualified Reality?
Its mere body, perhaps? If so, body being the
Reality, fire is a warmed body; and the total thing is not the Reality; and the
fire has warmth as a man might have a snub nose.
Rejecting its warmth, its glow, its lightness
all which certainly do seem to be qualities and its resistance, there is left
only its extension by three dimensions: in other words, its Matter is its
Reality.
But that cannot be held: surely the form is
much more likely than the Matter to be the Reality.
But is not the Form of Quality?
No, the Form is not a Quality: it is a
Reason-Principle.
And the outcome of this Reason-Principle
entering into the underlying Matter, what is that?
Certainly not what is seen and burns, for that
is the something in which these qualities inhere.
We might define the burning as an Act springing
from the Reason-Principle: then the warming and lighting and other effects of
fire will be its Acts and we still have found no foothold for its quality.
Such completions of a Reality cannot be called
qualities since they are its Acts emanating from the Reason-Principles and from
the essential powers. A quality is something persistently outside Reality; it
cannot appear as Reality in one place after having figured in another as
quality; its function is to bring in the something more after the Reality is
established, such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness, beauty, health, a
certain shape. On this last, however, it may be remarked that triangularity and
quadrangularity are not in themselves qualities, but there is quality when a
thing is triangular by having been brought to that shape; the quality is not
the triangularity but the patterning to it. The case is the same with the arts
and avocations.
Thus: Quality is a condition superadded to a
Reality whose existence does not depend upon it, whether this something more be
a later acquirement or an accompaniment from the first; it is something in
whose absence the Reality would still be complete. It will sometimes come and
go, sometimes be inextricably attached, so that there are two forms of Quality,
the moveable and the fixed.
3. The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being
is, clearly, to be classed not as a quality but as an activity the act of a
power which can make white; and similarly what we think of as qualities in the
Intellectual Realm should be known as activities; they are activities which to
our minds take the appearance of quality from the fact that, differing in
character among themselves, each of them is a particularity which, so to speak,
distinguishes those Realities from each other.
What, then, distinguishes Quality in the
Intellectual Realm from that here, if both are Acts?
The difference is that these
["Quality-Activities"] in the Supreme do not indicate the very nature
of the Reality [as do the corresponding Activities here] nor do they indicate
variations of substance or of [essential] character; they merely indicate what
we think of as Quality but in the Intellectual Realm must still be Activity.
In other words this thing, considered in its
aspect as possessing the characteristic property of Reality is by that alone
recognised as no mere Quality. But when our reason separates what is
distinctive in these ["Quality-Activities"] not in the sense of
abolishing them but rather as taking them to itself and making something new of
them this new something is Quality: reason has, so to speak, appropriated a
portion of Reality, that portion manifest to it on the surface.
By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant of
the specific nature of fire, may very well be no quality in fire but an
Idea-Form belonging to it, one of its activities, while being merely a Quality
in other things than fire: as it is manifested in any warm object, it is not a
mode of Reality but merely a trace, a shadow, an image, something that has gone
forth from its own Reality where it was an Act and in the warm object is a
quality.
All, then, that is accident and not Act; all
but what is Idea-form of the Reality; all that merely confers pattern; all this
is Quality: qualities are characteristics and modes other than those
constituting the substratum of a thing.
But the Archetypes of all such qualities, the
foundation in which they exist primarily, these are Activities of the Intellectual
Beings.
And; one and the same thing cannot be both
Quality and non-quality: the thing void of Real-Existence is Quality; but the
thing accompanying Reality is either Form or Activity: there is no longer
self-identity when, from having its being in itself, anything comes to be in
something else with a fall from its standing as Form and Activity.
Finally, anything which is never Form but
always accidental to something else is Quality unmixed and nothing more.
Seventh tractate.
On complete transfusion.
1. Some enquiry must be made into what is known as the complete transfusion of material substances.
Is it possible that fluid be blended with fluid
in such a way that each penetrate the other through and through? or a
difference of no importance if any such penetration occurs that one of them
pass completely through the other?
Those that admit only contact need not detain
us. They are dealing with mixture, not with the coalescence which makes the
total a thing of like parts, each minutest particle being composed of all the
combined elements.
But there are those who, admitting coalescence,
confine it to the qualities: to them the material substances of two bodies are
in contact merely, but in this contact of the matter they find footing for the
qualities of each.
Their view is plausible because it rejects the
notion of total admixture and because it recognizes that the masses of the
mixing bodies must be whittled away if there is to be mixture without any gap,
if, that is to say, each substance must be divided within itself through and
through for complete interpenetration with the other. Their theory is confirmed
by the cases in which two mixed substances occupy a greater space than either
singly, especially a space equal to the conjoined extent of each: for, as they
point out, in an absolute interpenetration the infusion of the one into the
other would leave the occupied space exactly what it was before and, where the
space occupied is not increased by the juxtaposition, they explain that some
expulsion of air has made room for the incoming substance. They ask further,
how a minor quantity of one substance can be spread out so as to interpenetrate
a major quantity of another. In fact they have a multitude of arguments.
Those, on the other hand, that accept
"complete transfusion," might object that it does not require the
reduction of the mixed things to fragments, a certain cleavage being
sufficient: thus, for instance, sweat does not split up the body or even pierce
holes in it. And if it is answered that this may well be a special decree of
Nature to allow of the sweat exuding, there is the case of those manufactured
articles, slender but without puncture, in which we can see a liquid wetting
them through and through so that it runs down from the upper to the under
surface. How can this fact be explained, since both the liquid and the solid
are bodily substances? Interpenetration without disintegration is difficult to
conceive, and if there is such mutual disintegration the two must obviously
destroy each other.
When they urge that often there is a mixing
without augmentation their adversaries can counter at once with the exit of
air.
When there is an increase in the space
occupied, nothing refutes the explanation however unsatisfying that this is
a necessary consequence of two bodies bringing to a common stock their
magnitude equally with their other attributes: size is as permanent as any
other property; and, exactly as from the blending of qualities there results a
new form of thing, the combination of the two, so we find a new magnitude; the
blending gives us a magnitude representing each of the two. But at this point
the others will answer, "If you mean that substance lies side by side with
substance and mass with mass, each carrying its quantum of magnitude, you are
at one with us: if there were complete transfusion, one substance sinking its
original magnitude in the other, we would have no longer the case of two lines
joined end to end by their terminal points and thus producing an increased extension;
we would have line superimposed upon line with, therefore, no increase."
But a lesser quantity permeates the entire
extent of a larger; the smallest is sunk in the greatest; transfusion is
exhibited unmistakably. In certain cases it is possible to pretend that there
is no total penetration but there are manifest examples leaving no room for the
pretence. In what they say of the spreading out of masses they cannot be
thought very plausible; the extension would have to be considerable indeed in
the case of a very small quantity [to be in true mixture with a very large
mass]; for they do not suggest any such extension by change as that of water
into air.
2. This, however, raises a problem deserving
investigation in itself: what has happened when a definite magnitude of water
becomes air, and how do we explain the increase of volume? But for the present
we must be content with the matter thus far discussed out of all the varied
controversy accumulated on either side.
It remains for us to make out on our own
account the true explanation of the phenomenon of mixing, without regard to the
agreement or disagreement of that theory with any of the current opinions
mentioned.
When water runs through wool or when
papyrus-pulp gives up its moisture why is not the moist content expressed to
the very last drop or even, without question of outflow, how can we possibly
think that in a mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is
contact and that only the qualities are fused? The pulp is not merely in touch
with water outside it or even in its pores; it is wet through and through so
that every particle of its matter is drenched in that quality. Now if the
matter is soaked all through with the quality, then the water is everywhere in
the pulp.
"Not the water; the quality of the
water."
But then, where is the water? and [if only a
quality has entered] why is there a change of volume? The pulp has been
expanded by the addition: that is to say it has received magnitude from the
incoming substance but if it has received the magnitude, magnitude has been
added; and a magnitude added has not been absorbed; therefore the combined
matter must occupy two several places. And as the two mixing substances
communicate quality and receive matter in mutual give and take so they may give
and take magnitude. Indeed when a quality meets another quality it suffers some
change; it is mixed, and by that admixture it is no longer pure and therefore
no longer itself but a blunter thing, whereas magnitude joining magnitude
retains its full strength.
But let it be understood how we came to say
that body passing through and through another body must produce disintegration,
while we make qualities pervade their substances without producing
disintegration: the bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter, too, is
bodiless: it may, then, be supposed that as Matter pervades everything so the
bodiless qualities associated with it as long as they are few have the
power of penetration without disintegration. Anything solid would be stopped
either in virtue of the fact that a solid has the precise quality which forbids
it to penetrate or in that the mere coexistence of too many qualities in Matter
[constitutes density and so] produces the same inhibition.
If, then, what we call a dense body is so by
reason of the presence of many qualities, that plenitude of qualities will be
the cause [of the inhibition].
If on the other hand density is itself a
quality like what they call corporeity, then the cause will be that particular
quality.
This would mean that the qualities of two
substances do not bring about the mixing by merely being qualities but by being
apt to mixture; nor does Matter refuse to enter into a mixing as Matter but as
being associated with a quality repugnant to mixture; and this all the more
since it has no magnitude of its own but only does not reject magnitude.
3. We have thus covered our main ground, but
since corporeity has been mentioned, we must consider its nature: is it the
conjunction of all the qualities or is it an Idea, or Reason-Principle, whose
presence in Matter constitutes a body?
Now if body is the compound, the thing made up
of all the required qualities plus Matter, then corporeity is nothing more than
their conjunction.
And if it is a Reason-Principle, one whose
incoming constitutes the body, then clearly this Principle contains embraced
within itself all the qualities. If this Reason-Principle is to be no mere
principle of definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason
constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must encircle
Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body: thus the body will
be Matter associated with an indwelling Reason-Principle which will be in
itself immaterial, pure Idea, even though irremoveably attached to the body. It
is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man treated elsewhere
which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual
Principle.
Eighth tractate.
Why distant objects appear small.
1. Seen from a distance, objects appear reduced and close together, however far apart they be: within easy range, their sizes and the distances that separate them are observed correctly.
Distant objects show in this reduction because
they must be drawn together for vision and the light must be concentrated to
suit the size of the pupil; besides, as we are placed farther and farther away
from the material mass under observation, it is more and more the bare form
that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude as of all other quality.
Or it may be that we appreciate the magnitude
of an object by observing the salience and recession of its several parts, so
that to perceive its true size we must have it close at hand.
Or again, it may be that magnitude is known
incidentally [as a deduction] from the observation of colour. With an object at
hand we know how much space is covered by the colour; at a distance, only that
something is coloured, for the parts, quantitatively distinct among themselves,
do not give us the precise knowledge of that quantity, the colours themselves
reaching us only in a blurred impression.
What wonder, then, if size be like sound
reduced when the form reaches us but faintly for in sound the hearing is
concerned only about the form; magnitude is not discerned except incidentally.
Well, in hearing magnitude is known
incidentally; but how? Touch conveys a direct impression of a visible object;
what gives us the same direct impression of an object of hearing?
The magnitude of a sound is known not by actual
quantity but by degree of impact, by intensity and this in no indirect
knowledge; the ear appreciates a certain degree of force, exactly as the palate
perceives by no indirect knowledge, a certain degree of sweetness. But the true
magnitude of a sound is its extension; this the hearing may define to itself
incidentally by deduction from the degree of intensity but not to the point of
precision. The intensity is merely the definite effect at a particular spot;
the magnitude is a matter of totality, the sum of space occupied.
Still the colours seen from a distance are
faint; but they are not small as the masses are.
True; but there is the common fact of
diminution. There is colour with its diminution, faintness; there is magnitude
with its diminution, smallness; and magnitude follows colour diminishing stage
by stage with it.
But, the phenomenon is more easily explained by
the example of things of wide variety. Take mountains dotted with houses, woods
and other land-marks; the observation of each detail gives us the means of
calculating, by the single objects noted, the total extent covered: but, where
no such detail of form reaches us, our vision, which deals with detail, has not
the means towards the knowledge of the whole by measurement of any one clearly
discerned magnitude. This applies even to objects of vision close at hand:
where there is variety and the eye sweeps over all at one glance so that the
forms are not all caught, the total appears the less in proportion to the detail
which has escaped the eye; observe each single point and then you can estimate
the volume precisely. Again, magnitudes of one colour and unbroken form trick
the sense of quantity: the vision can no longer estimate by the particular; it
slips away, not finding the stand-by of the difference between part and part.
It was the detail that prevented a near object
deceiving our sense of magnitude: in the case of the distant object, because
the eye does not pass stage by stage through the stretch of intervening space
so as to note its forms, therefore it cannot report the magnitude of that
space.
2. The explanation by lesser angle of vision
has been elsewhere dismissed; one point, however, we may urge here.
Those attributing the reduced appearance to the
lesser angle occupied allow by their very theory that the unoccupied portion of
the eye still sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of
vision, if only air-space.
Now consider some very large object of vision,
that mountain for example. No part of the eye is unoccupied; the mountain
adequately fills it so that it can take in nothing beyond, for the mountain as
seen either corresponds exactly to the eye-space or stretches away out of range
to right and to left. How does the explanation by lesser angle of vision hold
good in this case, where the object still appears smaller, far, than it is and
yet occupies the eye entire?
Or look up to the sky and no hesitation can
remain. Of course we cannot take in the entire hemisphere at one glance; the
eye directed to it could not cover so vast an expanse. But suppose the
possibility: the entire eye, then, embraces the hemisphere entire; but the
expanse of the heavens is far greater than it appears; how can its appearing
far less than it is be explained by a lessening of the angle of vision?
Ninth tractate.
Against those that affirm the
creator of the kosmos and the kosmos itself to be evil: [generally quoted as
"Against the gnostics"].
1. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal for the secondary can never be simplex that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity.
Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we
know as The One. just as the goodness of The Good is essential and not the
outgrowth of some prior substance so the Unity of The One is its essential.
Therefore:
When we speak of The One and when we speak of
The Good we must recognize an Identical Nature; we must affirm that they are
the same not, it is true, as venturing any predication with regard to that
[unknowable] Hypostasis but simply as indicating it to ourselves in the best
terms we find.
Even in calling it "The First" we
mean no more than to express that it is the most absolutely simplex: it is the
Self-Sufficing only in the sense that it is not of that compound nature which
would make it dependent upon any constituent; it is "the
Self-Contained" because everything contained in something alien must also
exist by that alien.
Deriving, then, from nothing alien, entering
into nothing alien, in no way a made-up thing, there can be nothing above it.
We need not, then, go seeking any other
Principles; this the One and the Good is our First; next to it follows the
Intellectual Principle, the Primal Thinker; and upon this follows Soul. Such is
the order in nature. The Intellectual Realm allows no more than these and no
fewer.
Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold
the identity of either Intellectual-Principle and Soul or of
Intellectual-Principle and The First; but we have abundantly shown that these
are distinct.
It remains for us to consider whether there are
more than these Three.
Now what other [Divine] Kinds could there be?
No Principles of the universe could be found at once simpler and more
transcendent than this whose existence we have affirmed and described.
They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of
the Principle in Act by a Principle in Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such
a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of
immaterial beings whose existence is in Act even in lower forms no such
division can be made and we cannot conceive a duality in the
Intellectual-Principle, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under
what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual Principle as contrasted
with its movement or utterance? What would the quiescence of the one phase be
as against the energy of the others?
No: the Intellectual-Principle is continuously
itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement towards it or
within it we are in the realm of the Souls operation: such act is a
Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an
Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle to stand
between the two.
Nor are we warranted in affirming a plurality
of Intellectual Principles on the ground that there is one that knows and
thinks and another knowing that it knows and thinks. For whatever distinction
be possible in the Divine between its Intellectual Act and its Consciousness of
that Act, still all must be one projection not unaware of its own operation: it
would be absurd to imagine any such unconsciousness in the Authentic
Intelligence; the knowing principle must be one and the selfsame with that
which knows of the knowing.
The contrary supposition would give us two
beings, one that merely knows, and another separate being that knows of the act
of knowing.
If we are answered that the distinction is
merely a process of our thought, then, at once, the theory of a plurality in
the Divine Hypostasis is abandoned: further, the question is opened whether our
thought can entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as not to
know that it knows a limitation which would be charged as imbecility even in
ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force are always master of our
emotions and mental processes.
No: The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks
itself; the object of the thought is nothing external: Thinker and Thought are
one; therefore in its thinking and knowing it possesses itself, observes itself
and sees itself not as something unconscious but as knowing: in this Primal
Knowing it must include, as one and the same Act, the knowledge of the knowing;
and even the logical distinction mentioned above cannot be made in the case of
the Divine; the very eternity of its self-thinking precludes any such
separation between that intellective act and the consciousness of the act.
The absurdity becomes still more blatant if we
introduce yet a further distinction after that which affirms the knowledge of
the knowing, a third distinction affirming the knowing of the knowledge of the
knowing: yet there is no reason against carrying on the division for ever and
ever.
To increase the Primals by making the Supreme
Mind engender the Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a
distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to
deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the
Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then would possess
not the Reason-Principle but an image of it: the Soul could not know the
Intellectual-Principle; it could have no intellection.
2. Therefore we must affirm no more than these
three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their
nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the
same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature
allows, of the Father.
And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it
stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it
is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle
ground. It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its
entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic
Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul
with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.
The Souls disaster falls upon it when it
ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty the appropriate dwelling-place of that
Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part thence to pour forth
into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There
that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not
redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its
contemplation of the things above it.
For the measure of its absorption in that
vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this
contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating
always.
3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing,
the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light
is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that
each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive
body within range.
Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope:
given powers that have no limitation and are never cut off from the Authentic
Existences, how imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them?
It is of the essence of things that each gives
of its being to another: without this communication, The Good would not be
Good, nor the Intellectual-Principle an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul
itself be what it is: the law is, "some life after the Primal Life, a
second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal;
divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary."
In other words, things commonly described as
generated have never known a beginning: all has been and will be. Nor can
anything disappear unless where a later form is possible: without such a future
there can be no dissolution.
If we are told that there is always Matter as a
possible term, we ask why then should not Matter itself come to nothingness. If
we are told it may, then we ask why it should ever have been generated. If the
answer comes that it had its necessary place as the ultimate of the series, we
return that the necessity still holds.
With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the
Divine Beings are not everywhere but in some bounded place, walled off, so to
speak; if that is not possible, Matter itself must receive the Divine light
[and so cannot be annihilated].
4. To those who assert that creation is the
work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such
disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling,
they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place? If
from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing: if at some one
moment, why not before that?
We assert its creative act to be a proof not of
decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consist only in its
forgetting the Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create? Whence does it
create but from the things it knew in the Divine? If it creates from the memory
of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in some dim intermediate
state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline: any inclination would be
towards its Prior, in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all
remained, what other desire could it have than to retrace the way?
What could it have been planning to gain by
world-creating? Glory? That would be absurd a motive borrowed from the
sculptors of our earth.
Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not
by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power
how explain the making of this universe?
And when will it destroy the work? If it
repents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, then
it will never repent: it must be already accustomed to the world, must be
growing more tender towards it with the passing of time.
Can it be waiting for certain souls still here?
Long since would these have ceased returning for such re-birth, having known in
former life the evils of this sphere; long since would they have foreborne to
come.
Nor may we grant that this world is of unhappy
origin because there are many jarring things in it. Such a judgement would rate
it too high, treating it as the same with the Intelligible Realm and not merely
its reflection.
And yet what reflection of that world could
be conceived more beautiful than this of ours? What fire could be a nobler
reflection of the fire there than the fire we know here? Or what other earth
than this could have been modelled after that earth? And what globe more
minutely perfect than this, or more admirably ordered in its course could have
been conceived in the image of the self-centred circling of the World of
Intelligibles? And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere, if it is to be more
splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be.
5. Still more unreasonably:
There are men, bound to human bodies and
subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty
that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny
that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to
disorder, to change; they deny that it is any wiser than we, the late born,
hindered by so many cheats on the way towards truth.
Their own soul, the soul of the least of
mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars
within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though
these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls yet they are not blind
to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens,
since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our
earth. We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy
place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is to die.
Equally unreasonable is their introduction of
that other Soul which they piece together from the elements.
How could any form or degree of life come about
by a blend of the elements? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold
or an intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.
Besides, how could such a soul be a bond
holding the four elements together when it is a later thing and rises from
them? And this element soul is described as possessing consciousness and will
and the rest what can we think?
Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt
for this creation and this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for
them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth is the
Reason-Form [the Logos] of our world. Why should they desire to live in the
archetype of a world abhorrent to them?
Then again, what is the origin of that pattern
world? It would appear, from the theory, that the Maker had already declined
towards the things of this sphere before that pattern came into being.
Now let us suppose the Maker craving to
construct such an Intermediate World though what motive could He have? in
addition to the Intellectual world which He eternally possesses. If He made the
mid-world first, what end was it to serve?
To be a dwelling-place for Souls?
How then did they ever fall from it? It exists
in vain.
If He made it later than this world
abstracting the formal-idea of this world and leaving the Matter out the
Souls that have come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced
enough to keep them from entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls
exhibit the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is there distinctive in the
teaching?
6. And, what are we to think of the new forms
of being they introduce their "Exiles" and "Impressions"
and "Repentings"?
If all comes to states of the Soul
"Repentance" when it has undergone a change of purpose;
"Impressions" when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but
their simulacra there is nothing here but a jargon invented to make a case
for their school: all this terminology is piled up only to conceal their debt
to the ancient Greek philosophy which taught, clearly and without bombast, the
ascent from the cave and the gradual advance of souls to a truer and truer
vision.
For, in sum, a part of their doctrine comes
from Plato; all the novelties through which they seek to establish a philosophy
of their own have been picked up outside of the truth.
From Plato come their punishments, their rivers
of the underworld and the changing from body to body; as for the plurality they
assert in the Intellectual Realm the Authentic Existent, the
Intellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul all this is taken
over from the Timaeus, where we read:
"As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind
beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved
should be contained in this All."
Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one
Mind passively including within itself all that has being, another mind, a
distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe though
often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Principle
and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato.
They are in fact quite outside of the truth in
their identification of the Creator.
In every way they misrepresent Platos theory
as to the method of creation as in many other respects they dishonour his
teaching: they, we are to understand, have penetrated the Intellectual Nature,
while Plato and all those other illustrious teachers have failed.
They hope to get the credit of minute and exact
identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences; but in
reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the
Sense-Kind: their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible
in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis which is
all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing
that is good except only for the first Nature and to recognize Soul as the
third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity
of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they
should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and
honour all that noble system an immortal soul, an Intellectual and
Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Souls need of emancipation from all
intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the
world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all
emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt: where they differ, they
are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their
own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks: where they have a divergent
theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their
own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the
controverted opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and
not hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace
men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past.
As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the
Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted
by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity: it is easy also to
identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with
incongruous novelties how for example, where they must set up a contradictory
doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruction, how they cavil
at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with
body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the
Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to
partial be beings.
7. That this world has neither beginning nor
end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel
teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the
body is no gain to a Soul.
But to treat the human Soul as a fair
presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and
blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered
city.
We must recognize how different is the
governance exercised by the All-Soul; the relation is not the same: it is not
in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been
overlooked that the We [the human Soul] lies under fetter; and this in a second
limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons
all that it grasps.
But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond
to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower
things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is
directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no
encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to
itself. It is the general fact that an inset [as the Body], necessarily shares
the conditions of its containing principle [as the Soul], and does not
communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life:
thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its
proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be
quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire itself were
annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme,
but only to the plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed
to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned.
The constitution of the All is very different
from that of the single, separate forms of life: there, the established rule
commanding to permanence is sovereign; here things are like deserters kept to
their own place and duty by a double bond; there is no outlet from the All, and
therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to bounds: all
remains where from the beginning the Souls nature appointed.
The natural movement within the plan will be
injurious to anything whose natural tendency it opposes: one group will sweep
bravely onward with the great total to which it is adapted; the others, not
able to comply with the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral is moving
to its concerted plan; midway in the march, a tortoise is intercepted; unable
to get away from the choral line it is trampled under foot; but if it could
only range itself within the greater movement it too would suffer nothing.
8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos,
is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. The question, also,
implies a beginning in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act
of a changeful Being who turns from this to that.
Those that so think must be instructed if
they would but bear with correction in the nature of the Supernals, and
brought to desist from that blasphemy of majestic powers which comes so easily
to them, where all should be reverent scruple.
Even in the administration of the Universe
there is no ground for such attack, for it affords manifest proof of the
greatness of the Intellectual Kind.
This All that has emerged into life is no
amorphous structure like those lesser forms within it which are born night
and day out of the lavishness of its vitality the Universe is a life
organized, effective, complex, all-comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable
wisdom. How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear image, beautifully
formed, of the Intellectual Divinities? No doubt it is copy, not original; but
that is its very nature; it cannot be at once symbol and reality. But to say
that it is an inadequate copy is false; nothing has been left out which a
beautiful representation within the physical order could include.
Such a reproduction there must necessarily be
though not by deliberation and contrivance for the Intellectual could not be
the last of things, but must have a double Act, one within itself and one
outgoing; there must, then, be something later than the Divine; for only the
thing with which all power ends fails to pass downwards something of itself. In
the Supreme there flourishes a marvellous vigour, and therefore it produces.
Since there is no Universe nobler than this, is
it not clear what this must be? A representation carrying down the features of
the Intellectual Realm is necessary; there is no other Kosmos than this;
therefore this is such a representation.
This earth of ours is full of varied life-forms
and of immortal beings; to the very heavens it is crowded. And the stars, those
of the upper and the under spheres, moving in their ordered path,
fellow-travellers with the universe, how can they be less than gods? Surely
they must be morally good: what could prevent them? All that occasions vice here
below is unknown there evil of body, perturbed and perturbing.
Knowledge, too; in their unbroken peace, what
hinders them from the intellectual grasp of the God-Head and the Intellectual
Gods? What can be imagined to give us a wisdom higher than belongs to the
Supernals? Could anyone, not fallen to utter folly, bear with such an idea?
Admitting that human Souls have descended under
constraint of the All-Soul, are we to think the constrained the nobler? Among
Souls, what commands must be higher than what obeys. And if the coming was
unconstrained, why find fault with a world you have chosen and can quit if you
dislike it?
And further, if the order of this Universe is
such that we are able, within it, to practise wisdom and to live our earthly
course by the Supernal, does not that prove it a dependency of the Divine?
9. Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities of
that order, are made ground of complaint. But this is to ignore that the Sage
demands no equality in such matters: he cannot think that to own many things is
to be richer or that the powerful have the better of the simple; he leaves all
such preoccupations to another kind of man. He has learned that life on earth
has two distinct forms, the way of the Sage and the way of the mass, the Sage
intent upon the sublimest, upon the realm above, while those of the more
strictly human type fall, again, under two classes, the one reminiscent of
virtue and therefore not without touch with good, the other mere populace,
serving to provide necessaries to the better sort.
But what of murder? What of the feebleness that
brings men under slavery to the passions?
Is it any wonder that there should be failing
and error, not in the highest, the intellectual, Principle but in Souls that
are like undeveloped children? And is not life justified even so if it is a
training ground with its victors and its vanquished?
You are wronged; need that trouble an immortal?
You are put to death; you have attained your desire. And from the moment your
citizenship of the world becomes irksome you are not bound to it.
Our adversaries do not deny that even here
there is a system of law and penalty: and surely we cannot in justice blame a
dominion which awards to every one his due, where virtue has its honour, and
vice comes to its fitting shame, in which there are not merely representations
of the gods, but the gods themselves, watchers from above, and as we read
easily rebutting human reproaches, since they lead all things in order from a
beginning to an end, allotting to each human being, as life follows life, a
fortune shaped to all that has preceded the destiny which, to those that do
not penetrate it, becomes the matter of boorish insolence upon things divine.
A mans one task is to strive towards making
himself perfect though not in the idea really fatal to perfection that to
be perfect is possible to himself alone.
We must recognize that other men have attained
the heights of goodness; we must admit the goodness of the celestial spirits,
and above all of the gods those whose presence is here but their
contemplation in the Supreme, and loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the
most blessed Soul. Rising still higher, we hymn the divinities of the
Intellectual Sphere, and, above all these, the mighty King of that dominion, whose
majesty is made patent in the very multitude of the gods.
It is not by crushing the divine unto a unity
but by displaying its exuberance as the Supreme himself has displayed it
that we show knowledge of the might of God, who, abidingly what He is, yet
creates that multitude, all dependent on Him, existing by Him and from Him.
This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks to
Him the Universe as a whole and every God within it and tells of Him to
men, all alike revealing the plan and will of the Supreme.
These, in the nature of things, cannot be what
He is, but that does not justify you in contempt of them, in pushing yourself
forward as not inferior to them.
The more perfect the man, the more compliant he
is, even towards his fellows; we must temper our importance, not thrusting
insolently beyond what our nature warrants; we must allow other beings, also,
their place in the presence of the Godhead; we may not set ourselves alone next
after the First in a dream-flight which deprives us of our power of attaining
identity with the Godhead in the measure possible to the human Soul, that is to
say, to the point of likeness to which the Intellectual-Principle leads us; to
exalt ourselves above the Intellectual-Principle is to fall from it.
Yet imbeciles are found to accept such teaching
at the mere sound of the words "You, yourself, are to be nobler than all
else, nobler than men, nobler than even gods." Human audacity is very
great: a man once modest, restrained and simple hears, "You, yourself, are
the child of God; those men whom you used to venerate, those beings whose
worship they inherit from antiquity, none of these are His children; you
without lifting a hand are nobler than the very heavens"; others take up
the cry: the issue will be much as if in a crowd all equally ignorant of
figures, one man were told that he stands a thousand cubic feet; he will
naturally accept his thousand cubits even though the others present are said to
measure only five cubits; he will merely tell himself that the thousand indicates
a considerable figure.
Another point: God has care for you; how then
can He be indifferent to the entire Universe in which you exist?
We may be told that He is too much occupied to
look upon the Universe, and that it would not be right for Him to do so; yet,
when He looks down and upon these people, is He not looking outside Himself and
upon the Universe in which they exist? If He cannot look outside Himself so as
to survey the Kosmos, then neither does He look upon them.
But they have no need of Him?
The Universe has need of Him, and He knows its
ordering and its indwellers and how far they belong to it and how far to the
Supreme, and which of the men upon it are friends of God, mildly acquiescing
with the Kosmic dispensation when in the total course of things some pain must
be brought to them for we are to look not to the single will of any man but
to the universe entire, regarding every one according to worth but not stopping
for such things where all that may is hastening onward.
Not one only kind of being is bent upon this
quest, which brings bliss to whatsoever achieves, and earns for the others a
future destiny in accord with their power. No man, therefore, may flatter
himself that he alone is competent; a pretension is not a possession; many boast
though fully conscious of their lack and many imagine themselves to possess
what was never theirs and even to be alone in possessing what they alone of men
never had.
10. Under detailed investigation, many other
tenets of this school indeed we might say all could be corrected with an
abundance of proof. But I am withheld by regard for some of our own friends who
fell in with this doctrine before joining our circle and, strangely, still
cling to it.
The school, no doubt, is free-spoken enough
whether in the set purpose of giving its opinions a plausible colour of verity
or in honest belief but we are addressing here our own acquaintances, not
those people with whom we could make no way. We have spoken in the hope of
preventing our friends from being perturbed by a party which brings, not proof
how could it? but arbitrary, tyrannical assertion; another style of address
would be applicable to such as have the audacity to flout the noble and true
doctrines of the august teachers of antiquity.
That method we will not apply; anyone that has
fully grasped the preceding discussion will know how to meet every point in the
system.
Only one other tenet of theirs will be
mentioned before passing the matter; it is one which surpasses all the rest in
sheer folly, if that is the word.
They first maintain that the Soul and a certain
"Wisdom" [Sophia] declined and entered this lower sphere though they
leave us in doubt of whether the movement originated in Soul or in this Sophia
of theirs, or whether the two are the same to them then they tell us that the
other Souls came down in the descent and that these members of Sophia took to
themselves bodies, human bodies, for example.
Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which
was the occasion of descent to the others is declared not to have descended.
"It knew no decline," but merely illuminated the darkness in such a
way that an image of it was formed upon the Matter. Then, they shape an image
of that image somewhere below through the medium of Matter or of Materiality
or whatever else of many names they choose to give it in their frequent change
of terms, invented to darken their doctrine and so they bring into being what
they call the Creator or Demiurge, then this lower is severed from his Mother
[Sophia] and becomes the author of the Kosmos down to the latest of the
succession of images constituting it.
Such is the blasphemy of one of their writers.
11. Now, in the first place, if the Soul has
not actually come down but has illuminated the darkness, how can it truly be
said to have declined? The outflow from it of something in the nature of light
does not justify the assertion of its decline; for that, it must make an actual
movement towards the object lying in the lower realm and illuminate it by
contact.
If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its
own place and illuminates the lower without directing any act towards that end,
why should it alone be the illuminant? Why should not the Kosmos draw light
also from the yet greater powers contained in the total of existence?
Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a
Universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it, why do not that
illumination and the creating of the world take place simultaneously? Why must
the Soul wait till the representations of the plan be made actual?
Then again this Plan the "Far
Country" of their terminology brought into being, as they hold, by the
greater powers, could not have been the occasion of decline to the creators.
Further, how explain that under this
illumination the Matter of the Kosmos produces images of the order of Soul
instead of mere bodily-nature? An image of Soul could not demand darkness or
Matter, but wherever formed it would exhibit the character of the producing
element and remain in close union with it.
Next, is this image a real-being, or, as they
say, an Intellection?
If it is a reality, in what way does it differ
from its original? By being a distinct form of the Soul? But then, since the
original is the reasoning Soul, this secondary form must be the vegetative and
generative Soul; and then, what becomes of the theory that it is produced for
glorys sake, what becomes of the creation in arrogance and self-assertion? The
theory puts an end also to creation by representation and, still more
decidedly, to any thinking in the act; and what need is left for a creator
creating by way of Matter and Image?
If it is an Intellection, then we ask first
"What justifies the name?" and next, "How does anything come
into being unless the Soul give this Intellection creative power and how, after
all, can creative power reside in a created thing?" Are we to be told that
it is a question of a first Image followed by a second?
But this is quite arbitrary.
And why is fire the first creation?
12. And how does this image set to its task
immediately after it comes into being?
By memory of what it has seen?
But it was utterly non-existent, it could have
no vision, either it or the Mother they bestow upon it.
Another difficulty: These people come upon
earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable Souls; yet, by great stress and
strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and
when they do attain Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight
recollection of the Sphere they once knew: on the other hand, this Image, a
new-comer into being, is able, they tell us as also is its Mother to form
at least some dim representation of the celestial world. It is an Image,
stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the Supreme and
adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements serve the
purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire before anything else? What
made it judge fire a better first than some other object?
Again, if it created the fire of the Universe
by thinking of fire, why did it not make the Universe at a stroke by thinking
of the Universe? It must have conceived the product complete from the first;
the constituent elements would be embraced in that general conception.
The creation must have been in all respects
more according to the way of Nature than to that of the arts for the arts are
of later origin than Nature and the Universe, and even at the present stage the
partial things brought into being by the natural Kinds do not follow any such
order first fire, then the several other elements, then the various blends of
these on the contrary the living organism entire is encompassed and rounded
off within the uterine germ. Why should not the material of the Universe be
similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type in which earth, fire and the rest would be
included? We can only suppose that these people themselves, acting by their
more authentic Soul, would have produced the world by such a process, but that
the Creator had not wit to do so.
And yet to conceive the vast span of the
Heavens to be great in that degree to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac
and the circling path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this earth of
ours and all in such a way that reason can be given for the plan this could
never be the work of an Image; it tells of that Power [the All-Soul] next to
the very Highest Beings.
Against their will, they themselves admit this:
their "outshining upon the darkness," if the doctrine is sifted,
makes it impossible to deny the true origins of the Kosmos.
Why should this down-shining take place unless
such a process belonged to a universal law?
Either the process is in the order of Nature or
against that order. If it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place
from eternity; if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of
natural right exists in the Supreme also; evil antedates this world; the cause
of evil is not the world; on the contrary the Supreme is the evil to us;
instead of the Souls harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed
by the Soul.
In fine, the theory amounts to making the world
one of the Primals, and with it the Matter from which it emerges.
The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and
illuminated the already existent Darkness. Now whence came that Darkness?
If they tell us that the Soul created the
Darkness by its Decline, then, obviously, there was nowhere for the Soul to
decline to; the cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the very nature
of the Soul. The theory, therefore, refers the entire process to pre-existing
compulsions: the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings.
13. Those, then, that censure the constitution
of the Kosmos do not understand what they are doing or where this audacity
leads them. They do not understand that there is a successive order of Primals,
Secondaries, Tertiaries and so on continuously to the Ultimates; that nothing
is to be blamed for being inferior to the First; that we can but accept,
meekly, the constitution of the total, and make our best way towards the Primals,
withdrawing from the tragic spectacle, as they see it, of the Kosmic spheres
which in reality are all suave graciousness.
And what, after all, is there so terrible in
these Spheres with which it is sought to frighten people unaccustomed to
thinking, never trained in an instructive and coherent gnosis?
Even the fact that their material frame is of
fire does not make them dreadful; their Movements are in keeping with the All
and with the Earth: but what we must consider in them is the Soul, that on
which these people base their own title to honour.
And, yet, again, their material frames are
pre-eminent in vastness and beauty, as they cooperate in act and in influence
with the entire order of Nature, and can never cease to exist as long as the
Primals stand; they enter into the completion of the All of which they are
major Parts.
If men rank highly among other living Beings,
much more do these, whose office in the All is not to play the tyrant but to
serve towards beauty and order. The action attributed to them must be
understood as a foretelling of coming events, while the causing of all the
variety is due, in part to diverse destinies for there cannot be one lot for
the entire body of men in part to the birth moment, in part to wide
divergencies of place, in part to states of the Souls.
Once more, we have no right to ask that all men
shall be good, or to rush into censure because such universal virtue is not
possible: this would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the
Supreme and treating evil as a nearly negligible failure in wisdom as good
lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous fading out; it would be like
calling the Nature-Principle evil because it is not Sense-Perception and the
thing of sense evil for not being a Reason-Principle. If evil is no more than
that, we will be obliged to admit evil in the Supreme also, for there, too,
Soul is less exalted than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its
Superior.
14. In yet another way they infringe still more
gravely upon the inviolability of the Supreme.
In the sacred formulas they inscribe,
purporting to address the Supernal Beings not merely the Soul but even the
Transcendents they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations
in the idea that these Powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from
any of us who is in some degree trained to use the appropriate forms in the
appropriate way certain melodies, certain sounds, specially directed
breathings, sibilant cries, and all else to which is ascribed magic potency
upon the Supreme. Perhaps they would repudiate any such intention: still they
must explain how these things act upon the unembodied: they do not see that the
power they attribute to their own words is so much taken away from the majesty
of the divine.
They tell us they can free themselves of
diseases.
If they meant, by temperate living and an
appropriate regime, they would be right and in accordance with all sound
knowledge. But they assert diseases to be Spirit-Beings and boast of being able
to expel them by formula: this pretension may enhance their importance with the
crowd, gaping upon the powers of magicians; but they can never persuade the
intelligent that disease arises otherwise than from such causes as overstrain,
excess, deficiency, putrid decay; in a word, some variation whether from within
or from without.
The nature of illness is indicated by its very
cure. A motion, a medicine, the letting of blood, and the disease shifts down
and away; sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores the system: presumably
the Spiritual power gets hungry or is debilitated by the purge. Either this
Spirit makes a hasty exit or it remains within. If it stays, how does the
disease disappear, with the cause still present? If it quits the place, what has
driven it out? Has anything happened to it? Are we to suppose it throve on the
disease? In that case the disease existed as something distinct from the
Spirit-Power. Then again, if it steps in where no cause of sickness exists, why
should there be anything else but illness? If there must be such a cause, the
Spirit is unnecessary: that cause is sufficient to produce that fever. As for
the notion, that just when the cause presents itself, the watchful Spirit leaps
to incorporate itself with it, this is simply amusing.
But the manner and motive of their teaching
have been sufficiently exhibited; and this was the main purpose of the
discussion here upon their Spirit-Powers. I leave it to yourselves to read the
books and examine the rest of the doctrine: you will note all through how our
form of philosophy inculcates simplicity of character and honest thinking in
addition to all other good qualities, how it cultivates reverence and not
arrogant self-assertion, how its boldness is balanced by reason, by careful
proof, by cautious progression, by the utmost circumspection and you will
compare those other systems to one proceeding by this method. You will find
that the tenets of their school have been huddled together under a very
different plan: they do not deserve any further examination here.
15. There is, however, one matter which we must
on no account overlook the effect of these teachings upon the hearers led by
them into despising the world and all that is in it.
There are two theories as to the attainment of
the End of life. The one proposes pleasure, bodily pleasure, as the term; the
other pronounces for good and virtue, the desire of which comes from God and
moves, by ways to be studied elsewhere, towards God.
Epicurus denies a Providence and recommends
pleasure and its enjoyment, all that is left to us: but the doctrine under
discussion is still more wanton; it carps at Providence and the Lord of
Providence; it scorns every law known to us; immemorial virtue and all
restraint it makes into a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth;
it cuts at the root of all orderly living, and of the righteousness which,
innate in the moral sense, is made perfect by thought and by self-discipline:
all that would give us a noble human being is gone. What is left for them
except where the pupil by his own character betters the teaching comes to
pleasure, self-seeking, the grudge of any share with ones fellows, the pursuit
of advantage.
Their error is that they know nothing good
here: all they care for is something else to which they will at some future
time apply themselves: yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must
be the starting-point of the pursuit: arrived here from out of the divine
nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly correction. The
understanding of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning the delight of
the body, and those that have no part in well-doing can make no step towards
the Supernal.
This school, in fact, is convicted by its
neglect of all mention of virtue: any discussion of such matters is missing
utterly: we are not told what virtue is or under what different kinds it
appears; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it
that have come down to us from the ancients; we do not learn what constitutes
it or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For to say
"Look to God" is not helpful without some instruction as to what this
looking imports: it might very well be said that one can "look" and
still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave of impulse, repeating the word
God but held in the grip of every passion and making no effort to master any.
Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked with thought, occupying a Soul
makes God manifest: God on the lips, without a good conduct of life, is a word.
16. On the other hand, to despise this Sphere,
and the Gods within it or anything else that is lovely, is not the way to
goodness.
Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods;
and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other
respects not wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the very fact.
Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes an inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of the beloved; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but in the heavenly bodies there are So