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  "work": {
    "slug": "ennead-5",
    "name": "Ennead V — On the Intellectual-Principle"
  },
  "parents": [
    {
      "slug": "plotinus-enneads",
      "name": "Enneads",
      "url": "/sources/plotinus-enneads/"
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  "chapter": {
    "num": 2,
    "slug": "2-the-origin-and-order-of-the-beings",
    "title": "V.2 — The Origin and Order of the Beings Following on the First",
    "of": 9,
    "words": 915,
    "text": "## SECOND TRACTATE\n\n\n#### SECOND TRACTATE.\n\nTHE ORIGIN AND ORDER OF THE BEINGS.\n\nFOLLOWING ON THE FIRST.\n\n\n## Section 1\n\n\n##### Section 1\n\n1. The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all\nthings is not all things; all things are its possession-\nrunning back,\nso to speak, to it- or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be.\n\nBut a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no\ndiversity, not even duality?\n\nIt is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all\nthings are from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the\nsource must be no Being but Being's generator, in what is to be\nthought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing,\npossessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our\nmetaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new:\nthis product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and\nhas become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle.\n\nThat station towards the one [the fact that something exists in\npresence of the One] establishes Being; that vision directed upon\nthe One establishes the Intellectual-Principle; standing towards the\nOne to the end of vision, it is simultaneously\nIntellectual-Principle and Being; and, attaining resemblance\nin virtue\nof this vision, it repeats the act of the One in pouring forth a\nvast power.\n\nThis second outflow is a Form or Idea representing the Divine\nIntellect as the Divine Intellect represented its own prior, The One.\n\nThis active power sprung from essence [from the\nIntellectual-Principle considered as Being] is Soul.\n\nSoul arises as the idea and act of the motionless\nIntellectual-Principle- which itself sprang from its own motionless\nprior- but the soul's operation is not similarly motionless;\nits image\nis generated from its movement. It takes fulness by looking to its\nsource; but it generates its image by adopting another, a downward,\nmovement.\n\nThis image of Soul is Sense and Nature, the vegetal principle.\n\nNothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the\nhuman Soul appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal\norder: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is\nwithin its province; but it is not present entire; when it\nhas reached\nthe vegetal order it is there in the sense that having moved thus\nfar downwards it produces- by its outgoing and its tendency towards\nthe less good- another hypostasis or form of being just as its prior\n(the loftier phase of the Soul) is produced from the\nIntellectual-Principle which yet remains in untroubled\nself-possession.\n\n\n## Section 2\n\n\n##### Section 2\n\n2. To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an\noutgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat\nwhile its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the other\nhand every being is in identity with its prior as long as it holds\nthat contact.\n\nIn the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is\none phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to\nthat extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of sensation\nhas been dominant and brought it there; in soul entering man, the\nmovement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part or has\ncome from the Intellectual-Principle in the sense that the soul,\npossessing that principle as immanent to its being, has an inborn\ndesire of intellectual activity and of movement in general.\n\nBut, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots\nor topmost\nboughs are lopped from some growing thing, where goes the soul that\nwas present in them? Simply, whence it came: soul never knew spatial\nseparation and therefore is always within the source. If you cut the\nroot to pieces, or burn it, where is the life that was present\nthere? In the soul, which never went outside of itself.\n\nNo doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in\nsomething if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still somewhere;\nit is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means merely\nthat it is\nnot crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power reascends, it is\nwithin the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn can be only in the\nsoul-power prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the\nIntellectual-Principle. Of course nothing here must be understood\nspatially: Soul never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again,\nis distinguished from soul as being still more free.\n\nSoul thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that\ncharacteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere.\n\nIf the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly\nachieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has\ncentred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. All in that\nmid-region\nis Intellectual-Principle not wholly itself- nothing else because\nderiving thence [and therefore of that name and rank], yet not that\nbecause the Intellectual-Principle in giving it forth is not merged\ninto it.\n\nThere exists, thus, a life, as it were, of huge\nextension, a total\nin which each several part differs from its next, all making a\nself-continuous whole under a law of discrimination by which the\nvarious forms of things arise with no effacement of any prior in its\nsecondary.\n\nBut does this Soul-phase in the vegetal order, produce nothing?\n\nIt engenders precisely the Kind in which it is thus present:\nhow, is a question to be handled from another starting-point.",
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}