Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 4 / In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods

by Plotinus

THE ACTUALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE IS ETERNAL AND INDIVISIBLE.

32. (3, 5–7) There is a difference between intelligence and the intelligible, between sensation and that which can be sensed. The intelligible is united to intelligence as that which can be sensed is connected with sensation. But sensation cannot perceive itself.... As the intelligible is united to Intelligence, it is grasped by intelligence and not by sensation. But intelligence is intelligible for intelligence. Since then intelligence is intelligible for intelligence, intelligence is its own object. If intelligence be intelligible, but not "sensible," it is an intelligible object. Being intelligible by intelligence, but not by sensation, it will be intelligent. Intelligence, therefore, is simultaneously thinker and thought, all that thinks and all that is thought. Its operation, besides, is not that of an object that rubs and is rubbed: "It is not a subject in some one part of itself, and in some other, object of thought; it is simple, it is entirely intelligible for itself as a whole."[334] The whole of intelligence excludes any idea of unintelligence. It does not contain one part that thinks, while another would not think; for then, in so far as it would not think, "it would be unintelligent." It does not abandon one object to think of another; for it would cease to think the object it abandoned. If, therefore, intelligence do not successively pass from one object to another, it thinks simultaneously; it does not think first one (thought) and then another; it thinks everything as in the present, and as always....

If intelligence think everything as at present, if it know no past nor future, its thought is a simple actualization, which excludes every interval of time. It, therefore, contains everything together, in respect to time. Intelligence, therefore, thinks, all things according to unity, and in unity, without anything falling in in time or in space. If so, intelligence is not discursive, and is not (like the soul) in motion; it is an actualization, which is according to unity, and in unity, which shuns all chance development and every discursive operation.[335] If, in intelligence, manifoldness be reduced to unity, and if the intellectual actualization be indivisible, and fall not within time, we shall have to attribute to such a "being" eternal existence in unity. Now that happens to be "aeonial" or everlasting existence.[336] Therefore, eternity constitutes the very "being" (or nature) of intelligence. The other kind of intelligence, that does not think according to unity, and in unity, which falls into change, and into movement, which abandons one object to think another, which divides, and gives itself up to a discursive action, has time as "being" (or nature).

The distinction of past and future suits its action. When passing from one object to another, the soul changes thoughts; not indeed that the former perish, or that the latter suddenly issue from some other source; but the former, while seeming to have disappeared, remain in the soul; and the latter, while seeming to come from somewhere else, do not really do so, but are born from within the soul, which moves only from one object to another, and which successively directs her gaze from one to another part of what she possesses. She resembles a spring which, instead of flowing outside, flows back into itself in a circle. It is this (circular) movement of the soul that constitutes time, just as the permanence of intelligence in itself constitutes (aeonial) eternity. Intelligence is not separated from eternity, any more than the soul is from time. Intelligence and eternity form but a single hypostatic form of existence. That which moves simulates eternity by the indefinite perpetuity of its movement, and that which remains immovable, simulates time by seeming to multiply its continual present, in the measure that time passes. That is why some have believed that time manifested in rest as well as in movement, and that eternity was no more than the infinity of time. To each of these two (different things) the attributes of the other were mistakenly attributed. The reason of this is that anything that ever persists in an identical movement gives a good illustration of eternity by the continuousness of its movement; while that which persists in an identical actualization represents time by the permanence of its actualization. Besides, in sense-objects, duration differs according to each of them. There is a difference between the duration of the course of the sun, and that of the moon, as well as that of Venus, and so on. There is a difference between the solar year, and the year of each of these stars. Different, further, is the year that embraces all the other years, and which conforms to the movement of the soul, according to which the stars regulate their movements. As the movement of the soul differs from the movement of the stars, so also does its time differ from that of the stars; for the divisions of this latter kind of time correspond to the spaces travelled by each star, and by its successive passages in different places.