Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 1: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four PeriodsPlotinus
Philosophy
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 1: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods
Plotinus
Plotinus
Qualities, therefore, are everything that, instead of being
actualizations and forms of beings, are only its accidents, and only
reveal its shapes. We will therefore call qualities the habituations
and the dispositions which are not essential to substances. The
archetypes (or models) of qualities are the actualizations of the
beings, which are the principles of these qualities. It is impossible
for the same thing at one time to be, and at another not to be a
quality. What can be separated from being is quality; what remains
united to being is being, form, and actualization. In fact, nothing can
be the same in itself, and in some other condition where it has ceased
to be form and an actualization. What, instead of being the form of a
being, is always its accident, is purely and exclusively a quality.
FIFTH ENNEAD, BOOK SEVEN.
Do Ideas of Individuals Exist?
TWO POSSIBLE HYPOTHESES OF IDEAS OF INDIVIDUALS.
1. Do ideas of individuals (as well as of classes of individuals),
exist? This means that if I, in company with some other man, were to
trace ourselves back to the intelligible world, we would there find
separate individual principles corresponding to each of us. (This might
imply either of two theories.) Either, if the individual named Socrates
be eternal, and if the soul of Socrates be Socrates himself, then the
soul of each individual is contained in the intelligible world. Or
if, on the contrary, the individual named Socrates be not eternal, if
the same soul can belong successively to several individuals, such as
Socrates or Pythagoras, then (as Alcinoous, e. g., and other Platonists
insist), each individual does not have his idea in the intelligible
world.
THE FIRST (NON-PLATONIC) HYPOTHESIS ALONE RIGHT.
If the particular soul of each man contains ("seminal) reasons" of
all the things she does, then each individual corresponds to his idea
in the intelligible world, for we admit that each soul contains as
many ("seminal) reasons" as the entire world. In this case, the soul
would contain not only the ("seminal) reasons" of men but also those
of all animals, the number of these reasons will be infinite, unless
(as the Stoics teach) the world does not re-commence the identical
series of existences in fixed periods; for the only means of limiting
the infinity of reasons, is that the same things should reproduce
themselves.
DIFFERENCE OF THINGS DEPEND ON THEIR SEMINAL REASONS.
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