e. Plotinic, are the latter ideas, for they are used in the same connection.[429] Also the myths of Poros, Penia and Koros, which are found elsewhere in similar relations.[430]
On the whole, therefore, the Plotinic authorship is much more strongly indicated than the Numenian.
The next treatment of matter in the Fourth Ennead, is semi-stoical.[431] The opposite aspects of the Universe appear again as "phronesis" and "phusis." We find here the Stoic doing and suffering, and[432] hypostasis. Nevertheless, the chief process illustrated is still the Platonic image reproduced less and less clearly in successively more degraded spheres of being. Plotinos seems to put himself out of the Numenian sphere of thought, referring to it in abstract historical manner, as belonging to the successors of Pythagoras and Pherecydes, who treated of matter as the element that distinguished objects in the intelligible world.
The last treatment of matter[433] seems to have reached the extreme distance of Numenianism. Instead of a dualism, with matter an original, positive principle, Plotinos closes his discussion by stating that perhaps form and matter may not come from the same origin, as there is some difference between them. He has just said that Being is common to both form and matter, as to quality, though not as to quantity. A little above this he insists that matter is not something original, as it is later than many earthly, and than all intelligible objects. As to the Numenian double name of the Divinity, Being and Essence, he had taken from Aristotelianism the conceptions of "energeia" and "dunamis," and added them as the supreme hypostasis, so as to form in theological dialect the triad he, following Numenius and Plato, had always asserted cosmologically (good, intellect, and soul): "The developed energy[434] assumes hypostasis, as if from a great, nay, as from the greatest hypostasis of all; and so it joins Essence and Being."
Reviewing these various treatments of matter we might call the first[435] Numenian; the next[436] Platonic (as most independent, and historically treated); the next[437] as Aristotelian; the Escorial Section as semi-Stoic;[438] as also another short notice.[439] The last treatment of matter, in vi. 3.7, is fully Stoic, in its denial of the evil of matter.
How then shall we explain these differences? Chiefly by studying the periods in which they are written, and which they therefore explain.
*****
When we try to study the periods in Plotinos's thought, as shown in his books, we are met with great difficulties, which are chiefly due to Porphyry. Exactly following the contemporary methods of the compilers of the Bible, he undiscerningly confused the writings of the various periods, so as to make up an anthology, grouped by six groups of nine books each, according to subjects, consisting first of ethical disquisitions; second, of physical questions; third, of cosmic considerations; fourth, of psychological discussions; fifth, of transcendental lucubrations; and sixth, of metaphysics and theology.[440] As the reader might guess from the oversymmetrical grouping, and this pretty classification, the apparent order is only illusory, as he may have concluded from the fact that the discussions of matter analyzed above are scattered throughout the whole range of this anthology. The result of this Procrustean arrangement was the same as with the Bible: a confusion of mosaic, out of which pretty nearly anything could be proved, and into which almost everything has been read. Compare the outlines of the doctrines of Plotinos by Ritter, Zeller, Ueberweg, Chaignet, Mead, Guthrie, and Drews, and it will be seen that there is very little agreement between them, while none of them allow for the difference between the various parts of the Enneads.
How fearful the confusion is, will best be realized from the following two tables, made up from the indications given in Porphyry's Life of Plotinos.
Porphyry gives three lists of the works of the various periods. Identifying these in the present Ennead arrangement, they are to be found as follows: