INDIGENCE IS NECESSARILY EVIL.
Does matter continue to be evil when it happens to participate in the good? Yes, because it was formerly deprived of good, and did not possess it. That which lacks something, and obtains it, holds the middle between good and evil, if it be in the middle between the two. But that which possesses nothing, that which is in indigence, or rather that which is indigence itself, must necessarily be evil; for it is not indigence of wealth, but indigence of wisdom, of virtue, of beauty, of vigor, of shape, of form, of quality. How, indeed, could such a thing not be shapeless, absolutely ugly and evil?
THE RELATION OF BOTH KINDS OF MATTER TO ESSENCE.
In the intelligible world, matter is essence; for what is above it (the One), is considered as superior to essence. In the sense-world, on the contrary, essence is above matter; therefore matter is nonentity, and thereby is the only thing foreign to the beauty of essence.
[THIRD ENNEAD, BOOK NINE.]
Fragments About the Soul, the Intelligence, and the Good.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND THE EXISTING ANIMAL.
1. Plato says, "The intelligence sees the ideas comprised within the existing animal." He adds, "The demiurge conceived that this produced animal was to comprise beings similar and equally numerous to those that the intelligence sees in the existing animal." Does Plato mean that the ideas are anterior to intelligence, and that they already exist when intelligence thinks them? We shall first have to examine whether the animal is identical with intelligence, or is something different. Now that which observes is intelligence; so the Animal himself should then be called, not intelligence, but the intelligible. Shall we therefrom conclude that the things contemplated by intelligence are outside of it? If so, intelligence possesses only images, instead of the realities themselves—that is, if we admit that the realities exist up there; for, according to Plato, the veritable reality is up there within the essence, in which everything exists in itself.