A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

 

2. Metaphysics.

 

Apart from a unifying principle, nothing could exist. All would be formless and indeterminate, and so would have properly no being. A principle of unity has already been recognized in the soul. It is not absent in natural things, but here it is at a lower stage; body having less unity than soul because its parts are locally separate. In soul, however, we cannot rest as the highest term. Particular souls, by reason of what they have in common, can only be understood as derived from a general soul, which is their cause but is not identical with all or any of them. Again, the general soul falls short of complete unity by being the principle of life and motion to the world, which is other than itself. What it points to as a higher unifying principle is absolutely stable intellect, thinking itself and not the world, but containing as identical with its own nature the eternal ideas of all the forms, general and particular, that become explicit in the things of time and space. Even intellect has still a certain duality, because, though intelligence and the intelligible are the same, that which thinks distinguishes itself from the object of thought. Beyond thought and the being which, while identical with it, is distinguishable in apprehension, is the absolute unity that is simply identical with itself. This is other than all being and is the cause of it. It is the good to which all things aspire; for to particular things the greatest unification attainable is the greatest good; and neither the goodness and unity they possess, nor their aspiration after a higher degree of it, can be explained without positing the absolute One and the absolute Good as their source and end.

By the path of which this is a slight indication, Plotinus ascends to the summit of his metaphysics. The proof that the first principle has really been attained, must be sought partly in the demonstration of the process by which the whole system of things is derived from it, partly in individual experience. This last, being incommunicable—though not to be had without due preparation—belongs to the mystical side of the doctrine. Of the philosophical doctrine itself, the method is not mystical. The theory of "emanation" on which it depends is in reality no more than a very systematic expression of the principle common to Plato and Aristotle, that the lower is to be explained by the higher.

The accepted term, "emanation," is derived from one of the metaphors by which Plotinus illustrates the production of each order of being from the next above. He compares the cause of all to an overflowing spring which by its excess gives rise to that which comes after it. This similarly produces the next, and so forth, till at length in matter pure indetermination is reached. The metaphorical character of this representation, however, is carefully insisted on. There is no diremption of the higher principle. God and mind do not disperse themselves in individual souls and in natural things, though these are nowhere cut off from their causes. There is a continual process from first to last, of which the law is the same throughout. Each producing cause remains wholly in its proper seat, while that which is produced takes an inferior stations. The One produces universal Mind, or Intellect that is one with the Intelligible. Intellect produces the Soul of the Whole. This produces all other existences, but without itself lapsing. Nothing within the series of the three intelligible principles can be said to lapse in production; the term being applicable only to the descent of the individual soul. The order throughout, both for the intelligible causes and for the visible universe, is a logical order of causation, not an order in time. All the producing causes and their effects in every grade always existed and always will exist. The production by the higher causes has the undeviating character of natural necessity, and is not by voluntary choice and discursive reason, which are secondary resultants within the world of particulars.

This philosophical meaning Plotinus makes clear again and again. His metaphors are intended simply as more or less inadequate illustrations. One that comes nearer to his thought than that of the overflowing spring, is the metaphor of illumination by a central source of light; for according to his own theory light is an incorporeal energy projected without loss. Since, however, it is still an energy set going from a body, he admits that even this comparison has some inexactitude. In this mode of expression, Mind is the eternal "irradiation" of the One. As Mind looks back to the One, Soul looks back to Mind; and this looking back is identical with the process of generation.

Plotinus himself traces the idea of this causal series to Plato, for whom, he says, the Demiurgus is Intellect, which is produced by the Good beyond mind and being, and in its turn produces Soul. This historical derivation, as we have seen, was accepted by Porphyry. Plotinus goes on to interpret earlier philosophers from the same point of view. He recognizes, however, that the distinctions between the One in its different senses drawn by the Platonic Parmenides were not made with that exactitude by Parmenides himself. Aristotle, he says, coming later, makes the primal reality separable indeed and intelligible, but deprives it of the first rank by the assertion that it thinks itself. To think itself belongs to Mind, but not to the One.

As in the nature of things there are three principles, so also with us. For there is reality in this world of ours, and not a mere semblance. The virtue and knowledge here are not simply images of archetypes yonder in the intelligible world. If indeed we take the world here not as meaning simply the visible aspect of things, but as including also the soul and what it contains, everything is "here" that is "there."

The order of first, second and third in the intelligible principles is not spatial. In the intelligible order, body may be said to be in soul, soul in mind, and mind in the Ones. By such expressions is to be understood a relation of dependence, not the being in a place in the sense of locality. If any one objects that place can mean nothing but boundary or interval of space, let him dismiss the word and apply his understanding to the thing signified. The incorporeal and unextended in which extended body participates is not to be thought of as a point; for mass, which includes an infinity of points, participates in it. Nor yet must we think of it as stretched out over the whole of the mass; but of the whole extended mass as participating in that which is itself without spatial intervals. This is the general relation of the visible to the intelligible world. As non-spatial dependence and implication, we have found that it runs through the intelligible causes themselves

In what relates to the difference between the extended and the unextended, the character of intelligible being is already perfectly determinate not only in soul, but in soul as the principle of organic life. For that principle transcends the opposition between small and great. If it is to be called small as having no extension of its own, it may equally be called great as being adequate to the animation of the whole body with which it is connected, while this is growing in bulk. The soul is all in the germ; yet in a manner it contains the full-grown plant or animal. In itself it undergoes no change of dimensions. Though the principle of growth, it does not grow; nor, when it causes motion, is it moved in the motion which it causes.

The primal One from which all things are is everywhere and nowhere. As being the cause of all things, it is everywhere. As being other than all things, it is nowhere. If it were only "everywhere," and not also "nowhere," it would be all things. No predicate of being can be properly applied to it. To call it the cause is to predicate something, not of it but of ourselves, who have something from it while it remains in itself. This is not the "one" that the soul attains by abstracting from magnitude and multitude till it arrives at the point and the arithmetical unit. It is greatest of all, not by magnitude but by potency; in such a manner that it is also by potency that which is without magnitude. It is to be regarded as infinite, not because of the impossibility of measuring or counting it, but because of the impossibility of comprehending its powers. It is perfectly self-sufficing; there is no good that it should seek to acquire by volition. It is good not in relation to itself, but to that which participates in it. And indeed that which imparts good is not properly to be called "good," but "the Good" above all other goods. "That alone neither knows, nor has what it does not know; but being One present to itself it needs not thought of itself." Yet in a sense it is all beings because all arc from it; and it generates the thought that is one with being. As it is the Good above all goods, so, though without shape or form, it possesses beauty above beauty. The love of it is infinite; and the power or vision by which mind thinks it is intellectual love.

Any inconsistency there might appear to be in making assertions about the One is avoided by the position that nothing—not even that it "is" any more than that it is "good"—is to be affirmed of it as a predicate. The names applied to it are meant only to indicate its unique reality. The question is then raised, whether this reality is best indicated by names that signify freedom, or chance, or necessity. Before we can know whether an expression signifying freedom may be applied in any sense to the gods and to God, we must know in what sense it is applicable to ourselves. If we refer that which is in our power to will, and place this in right reason, we may—by stretching the terms a little—reach the conclusion that an unimpeded theoretic activity such as we ascribe in its perfection to the gods who live according to mind, is properly called free. The objection that to be free in this sense is to be "enslaved to one's own nature" is dismissed with the remark that that only is enslaved which, being withheld by something else, has it not in its power to go towards the goods. The view that seems implied in the objection, namely, that freedom consists in action contrary to the nature of the agent, is an absurdity. But to the supreme principle, from which all things have being and power of their own, how can the term be applied in any sense? The audacious thought might be started that it "happens to be" as it is, and is not master of what it is, but is what it is, not from itself; and so, that it has no freedom, since its doing or not doing what it has been necessitated to do or not to do, is not in its own power. To this the reply is, that we cannot say that the primal cause is by chance, or that it is not master of its origin; because it has not come to be. The whole difficulty seems to arise from our positing space as a kind of chaos, and then introducing the principle into our imaginary space; whereupon we inquire whence and how it came there. We get rid of the difficulty by assigning to the One no place, but simply the being as it is,—and this because we are bound so to express ourselves by necessity of speech. Thus, if we are to speak of it at all, we must say that it is lord of itself and free. Yet it must be allowed that there is here a certain impropriety, for to be lord of itself belongs properly to the essence identical with thought, and the One is before this essence. With a similar impropriety, its will and its essence may be said to be the same. Each particular being, striving after its good, wills that more than to be what it is, and then most thinks that it is, when it participates in the good. It wills even itself, so far only as it has the good. Carry this over to the Good which is the principle of all particular goods, and its will to be what it is, is seen to be inseparable from its being what it is. In this mode of speech, accordingly,—having to choose between ascribing to it on the one hand will and creative activity in relation to itself, on the other hand a contingent relation which is the name of unreason,—we must say, not that it is "what it happened to be," but that it is "what it willed to be." We might say also that it is of necessity what it is, and could not be otherwise; but the more exact statement is, not that it is thus because it could not be otherwise, but because the best is thus. It is not taken hold of by necessity, but is itself the necessity and law of other things. It is love, and the object of love, and love of itself. That which as it were desires and that which is desired are one. When we, observing some such nature in ourselves, rise to this and become this alone, what should we say but that we are more than free and more than in our own power? By analogy with mind, it may be called operation and energy. Its energy and as it were waking are eternal. Reason and mind are derived from the principle as a circle from its centers. To allow that it could not make itself other than it did, in the sense that it can produce only good and not evil, is not to limit its freedom and absolute power. The power of choice between opposites belongs to a want of power to persevere in what is bests. The One and Good alone is in truth free; and must be thought and spoken of, though in reality beyond speech and thought, as creating itself by its own energy before all being'.

To the question, why the One should create anything beyond itself, Plotinus answers that since all things, even those without life, impart of themselves what they can, the most perfect and the first good cannot remain in itself as envious, and the potency of all things as without powers. As that is the potency of all things. Mind, which it first generates, is all things actually. For knowledge of things in their immaterial essence is the things themselves. Mind knows its objects not, like perception, as external, but as one with itself. Still this unity, as has been said, involves the duality of thinking and being thought, and hence is not the highest, but the second in order, of the supramundane causes. Within its indivisible unity it contains the archetype of the whole visible world and of all that was or is or is to be existent in it. The relation of its Ideas to the whole of Mind resembles that of the propositions of a science to the sum of knowledge which consists of them. By this comparison, which frequently recurs, Plotinus seeks to convey the notion of a diversity in unity not expressed as local separation of parts. The archetype of the world being thus existent, the world in space is necessarily produced because its production is possible. We shall see this "possibility" more exactly formulated in the theory of matter. The general statement is this: that, since there is the "intelligential and all-potent nature" of mind, and nothing stands between that and the production of a world, there must be a formed world corresponding to the formative power. In that which is formed, the ideas are divided; in one part of space the idea of the sun takes shape, in another the idea of man. The archetype embraces all in its unity without spatial division.

Thus, while supramundane intellect contains all real being, it has also the productive power by which the essential forms of things are made manifest in apparent separation from itself and from one another. Differences, so far as they belong to the real being, or "form," of things here, are produced by preexistent forms in the ideal world. So far as they are merely local and temporal, they express only a necessary mode of manifestation of being, under the condition of appearing at a greater degree of remoteness from the primal cause. What then is the case with individuality? Does it consist merely in differences of position in space and time, the only true reality being the ideal form of the "kind"; or are there ideal forms of individuals? Plotinus concludes decisively for the latter alternative. There are as many formal differences as there are individuals, and all preexist in the intelligible world. What must be their mode of preexistence we know from the nature of Intellect as already set forth. All things there are together yet distinct. Universal mind contains all particular minds; and each particular mind expresses the whole in its own manner. As Plotinus says in one of those bursts of enthusiasm where his scientific doctrine passes into poetry: "They see themselves in others. For all things are transparent, and there is nothing dark or resisting, but every one is manifest to every one internally and all things are manifest; for light is manifest to light. For every one has all things in himself and again sees in another all things, so that all things are everywhere and all is all and each is all, and the splendor is infinite. For each of them is great, since the small also is great. And the sun there is all the stars, and again each and all are the sun. In each, one thing is preeminent above the rest, but it also shows forth all." The wisdom that is there is not put together from separate acts of knowledge, but is a single whole. It does not consist of many brought to one; rather it is resolved into multitude from unity. By way of illustration Plotinus adds that the Egyptian sages, whether they seized the truth by accurate knowledge or by some native insight, appear to have expressed the intuitive character of intellectual wisdom in making a picture the sign of each thing.

In the intelligible world identical with intellect, as thus conceived, the time and space in which the visible world appears, though not "there" as such, preexist in their causes. So too, in the rational order, does perception, before organs of perception are formed. This must be so, Plotinus urges, because perception and its organs are not a product of deliberation, but are present for example in the preexistent idea of man, by an eternal necessity and law of perfection, their causes being involved in the perfection of mind. Not only man, but all animals, plants and elements preexist ideally in the intelligible world. For infinite variety is demanded in order that the whole, as one living being, may be perfect in all its parts and to the utmost degree. There, the things we call irrational preexist in their rational laws. Nor is the thing here anywhere really mindless. We call it so when it is without mind in act; but each part is all in potency, depending as it does on its ideal cause. In the order of ideal causes there is as it were a stream of living beings from a single spring; as if all sensible qualities were combined in one quality without losing their distinctions. The particular is not merely the one particular thing that it is called. Rational division of it always brings something new to light; so that, in this sense, each part of the whole is infinite. This infinity, whether of whole or part, is one of successive involution. The process of division is not that of bisection, but is like the unfolding of wrappings. The whole intelligible world may be presented to imagination as a living sphere figured over with every kind of living countenance.

Universal mind involves the essence of every form of reason, in one Reason as it were, great, perfect, embracing all. As the most exact reasoning would calculate the things of nature for the best, mind has all things in the rational laws that are before reasonings. Each thing being what it is separately, and again all things being in one together, the complex as it were and composition of all as they are in one is Mind. In the being that is mind, all things are together, not only undivided by position in space, but without reference to process in time. This characteristic of intellectual being may be called "eternity." Time belongs to Soul, as eternity to Mind. Soul is necessarily produced by Mind, as Mind by the primal One. Thus it is in contact at once with eternal being, and with the temporal things which it generates by the power it receives from its cause. Having its existence from supramundane intellect, it has reason in act so far as that intellect is contemplated by it. The Soul of the whole is perpetually in this relation to Mind; particular souls undergo alternation; though even of them there is ever something in the intelligible world. Soul has for its work, not only to think—for thus it would in no way differ from pure intellect—but to order and rule the things after it. These come to be, because production could not stop at intelligibles, the last of which is the rational soul, but must go on to the limit of all possible existences.

In the relation of the many souls to the one which includes all, Soul imitates Mind. It too is necessarily pluralized; and in the inherent distinctions of the particular souls their coming to birth under different sensible manifestations is already necessitated. The one soul is the same in all, as in each part of a system of knowledge the whole is potentially present. To soul, the higher intellect furnishes the reasons of all its operations. Knowledge in the rational soul, so far as it is of intelligibles, is each thing that it thinks, and has from within both the object of thought and the thinking, since mind is within. Plotinus fully recognizes the difficulty of the question: How, if Being and Mind and Soul are everywhere numerically one, and not merely of the same formal essence, can there yet be many beings and minds and souls? The answer, in the case of soul, as of mind and being, is that the one is many by intrinsic difference, not by local situation. The plurality of souls, as has been said, is in the rational order prior to their embodiment. In the Soul of the Whole, the many souls are present to one another without being alienated from themselves. They are not divided by spatial limits—just as the many portions of knowledge in each soul are not—and the one can contain in itself all. After this manner the nature of soul is infinite. The general soul can judge of the individualized affections in each without becoming conscious to itself in each that it has passed judgment in the rest also. Each of us is a whole for himself, yet all of us, in the reality that is all, are together one. Looking outward, we forget our unity. Turning back upon ourselves, either of our own accord or seized upon as the goddess seized the hair of Achilles, we behold ourselves and the whole as one with the God within.

The soul is the principle of life and motion to all things; motion being an image of life in things called lifeless. The heaven is one by the power of soul, and this world is divine through it. The soul of the whole orders the world in accordance with the general reasons of things, as animal bodies are fashioned into "microcosms" under the particular law of the organism. It creates not by deliberative intelligence, like human art, which is posterior and extrinsic. In the one soul are the rational laws of all explicit intelligence—"of gods and of all things." "Wherefore also the world has all."

Individual souls are the intrinsic laws of particular minds within the universal intellect, made more explicit. Not only the soul of the whole, but the soul of each, has all things in itself. Wherein they differ, is in energizing with different powers. Before descent and after reascent of the particular soul, each one's thoughts are manifest to another as in direct vision, without discourses. Why then does the soul descend and lose knowledge of its unity with the whole? For the choice is better to remain above. The answer is that the error lies in self-will. The soul desires to be its own, and so ventures forth to birth, and takes upon itself the ordering of a body which it appropriates, or rather, which appropriates it, so far as that is possible. Thus the soul, although it does not really belong to this body, yet energizes in relation to it, and in a manner becomes a partial soul in separation from the whole.

But what is finally the explanation of this choice of the worse, and how is it compatible with the perfection of the mundane order? How is the position of the Phaedo, that the body is a prison, and the true aim of the soul release from it, reconcilable with the optimism of the Timaeus? The answer is that all—descent and reascent alike—has the necessity of a natural law. The optimism has reference to the whole order. Of this order, such as it must be in a world that is still good though below the intelligible and perfectly stable supramundane order, temporary descent, dissatisfaction with the consequences of the descent, and the effort to return, arc all conditions. Any expression that seems to imply arbitrariness at any point, is part of the mythological representation. Thus when in the Timaeus it is said that God "sows" the souls, this is mythical, just as when he is represented as haranguing them. Necessity and self-caused descent are not discordant. The soul does not go by its will to that which is worse; yet its course is its own. And it must expiate both the original error, and any evil that it may do actually. Of the first, the mere change of state is the punishment; to the second, further chastisement is assigned. The knowledge acquired below is a good, and the soul is not to be blamed overmuch if in its regulation of sensible nature it goes a little beyond what is safe for itself. On the other hand, a slight inclination at the beginning to the worse, if not immediately corrected, may produce a permanent disposition. Be the error light or grave, it comes under an undeviating law of justice. To the particular bodies fitted for them, the souls go neither by voluntary choice nor sent, but as by some natural process for which they are ready. The universal law under which the individual falls is not outside but within each. The notion that there may be in small things an clement of contingency which is no part of the order, is suggested but not accepted. The whole course of the soul through its series of bodily lives, and its release from the body when this is attained, are alike necessarily determined. The death of the soul, so far as the soul can die, is to sink to a stage below moral evil—which still contains a mixture of the opposite good—and to be wholly plunged in matters. Even thence it may still somehow emerge; though souls that have descended to the world of birth need not all make the full circle, but may return before reaching the lowest points.

Here we come to the metaphysical doctrine by which Plotinus explains the contrasts the visible world presents. Neither moral good nor evil is with him ultimate. Of virtues, even the highest, the cause is the Good, which in reality is above good. Of moral evil, so far as it is purely evil, the cause is that principle of absolute formlessness and indeterminateness called Matter. At the same time, matter is the receptive principle by which alone the present world could be at all. Evils accordingly are an inevitable constituent of a world that is subject in its parts to birth and change. And indeed without evil there can be no good in our sense of the term. Nor is there evil unmixed in the things of nature, any more than there is unformed matter. Whence then is this principle opposed to form and unity?

 

That Matter is an independently existing principle over against the One, Plotinus distinctly denies. Matter is the infinite in the sense of the indeterminate, and is generated from the infinity of power or of eternal existence that is an appanage of the One, which has not in itself indeterminateness, but creates it. To the term "infinite" in the sense of an actual extent or number that is immeasurable, or of a quantitative infinite, there is nothing to correspond. Matter, in itself indeterminate, is that of which the nature is to be a recipient of forms. Like intelligible being, it is incorporeal and unextended. Place, indeed, is posterior both to matter and bodies. By its absolute want of all form, that is, of all proper being, matter is at the opposite extreme to things intelligible, and is in its own nature ugly and evil. It receives, indeed, all determinations, but it cannot receive them indivisibly. One form in matter excludes another; so that they appear as separated by spatial intervals. The reason of this is precisely that matter has no determination of its own. The soul in taking up the forms of things perceptible, views them with their mass put away, because by its own form it is indivisible, and therefore cannot receive the extended as such. Since matter, on the contrary, has no form of its own by which to unite distinctions, the intrinsic differences of being must be represented in it by local separation. Yet, since the intelligible world is in a sense a "world," and is many as well as one, it too must have a kind of matter. This "intelligible matter" is the recipient of formal diversities in the world of being; as sensible matter is the recipient of the varied appearances in space. The matter of the intelligible world, differing in this respect from matter properly so-called, does not receive all forms indifferently; the same matter there having always the same form. The matter "here" is thus more truly "the indeterminate" than the matter "there"; which, in so far as it has more real being, is so much less truly "matter." Matter itself may best be called "not-being." As the indeterminate, it is only to be apprehended by a corresponding indeterminateness of the soul—a difficult state to maintain, for, as matter itself does not remain unformed in things, so the soul hastens to add some positive determination to the abstract formlessness reached by analysis. To be the subject and recipient ever ready for all forms, it must be indestructible and impassible, as it is incorporeal and unextended. It is like a mirror which represents all things so that they seem to be where they are not, and keeps no impression of any. The appearances of sense, themselves "invulnerable nothings," go through it as through water without dividing it. It has not even a falsehood of its own that it can say of things. In that it can take no permanent hold of any good, it may be called evil. Fleeing every attempt of perception to grasp it, it is equally receptive in appearance of the contraries which it is equally unable to retain.