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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
Plotinus Resources OnLine and in Print
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» Contents of this Ennead
II: 42 pages - You are on Page 36
No: even though the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Object are distinct, they are not apart except for just that distinction.
Nothing in the statement cited is inconsistent with the conception that these two constitute one substance — though, in a unity, admitting that distinction, of the intellectual act [as against passivity], without which there can be no question of an Intellectual-Principle and an Intellectual Object: what is meant is not that the contemplatory Being possesses its vision as in some other principle, but that it contains the Intellectual Realm within itself.
The Intelligible Object is the Intellectual-Principle itself in its repose, unity, immobility: the Intellectual-Principle, contemplator of that object — of the Intellectual-Principle thus in repose is an active manifestation of the same Being, an Act which contemplates its unmoved phase and, as thus contemplating, stands as Intellectual-Principle to that of which it has the intellection: it is Intellectual-Principle in virtue of having that intellection, and at the same time is Intellectual Object, by assimilation.
This, then, is the Being which planned to create in the lower Universe what it saw existing in the Supreme, the four orders of living beings.
No doubt the passage: [of the Timaeus] seems to imply tacitly that this planning Principle is distinct from the other two: but the three — the Essentially-Living, the Intellectual-Principle and this planning Principle will, to others, be manifestly one: the truth is that, by a common accident, a particular trend of thought has occasioned the discrimination.
Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/plotinus/enneads-3b.asp?pg=36
