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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: 69 pages - You are on Page 6
3. For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the transmission of impressions of any kind made upon the air, we have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the stars and their very shapes.
No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the darkness and come to us in linked progression; if the fire thus rayed out its own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In the blackest night, when the very stars are hidden and show no gleam of their light, we can see the fire of the beacon-stations and of maritime signal-towers.
Now if, in defiance of all that the senses tell us, we are to believe that in these examples the fire [as light] traverses the air, then, in so far as anything is visible, it must be that dimmed reproduction in the air, not the fire itself. But if an object can be seen on the other side of some intervening darkness, much more would it be visible with nothing intervening.
We may hold one thing certain: the impossibility of vision without an intervening substance does not depend upon that absence in itself: the sole reason is that, with the absence, there would be an end to the sympathy reigning in the living whole and relating the parts to each other in an existent unity.
Perception of every kind seems to depend on the fact that our universe is a whole sympathetic to itself: that it is so, appears from the universal participation in power from member to member, and especially in remote power.
Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/plotinus/enneads-4b.asp?pg=6
