Plotinus ENNEADS - THE SECOND ENNEAD Complete

Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.

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THE SECOND ENNEAD:   1) ON THE KOSMOS OR ON THE HEAVENLY SYSTEM,   2) THE HEAVENLY CIRCUIT,   3) ARE THE STARS CAUSES?,   4) MATTER IN ITS TWO KINDS,   5) ON POTENTIALITY AND ACTUALITY,   6) QUALITY AND FORM-IDEA,   7) ON COMPLETE TRANSFUSION,   8) WHY DISTANT OBJECTS APPEAR SMALL,   9) AGAINST THOSE THAT AFFIRM THE CREATOR OF THE KOSMOS AND THE KOSMOS ITSELF TO BE EVIL - “AGAINST THE GNOSTICS”

126 pages - You are on Page 43

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.

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