Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 3: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four PeriodsPlotinus
Philosophy
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 3: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods
Plotinus
Plotinus
10. (11). To accomplish this we shall have to return to the nature
which, as we pointed out above, was essential to eternity; that
immutable life, wholly realized all at once, infinite and perfect,
subsisting in, and referring to unity. Time was not yet, or at least,
it did not yet exist for the intelligible entities. Only, it was yet
to be born of them,[458] because (as was the world), time, by both its
reason and nature, was posterior to the (intelligible entities[459]).
Are we trying to understand how time issued from among intelligible
entities while these were resting within themselves? Here it would be
useless to call upon the Muses, for they did not yet exist. Still this
might perhaps not be useless; for (in a certain sense, that time had
already begun, then, so far as they existed within the sense-world)
they existed already. In any case, the birth of time will be plain
enough if we consider it only as it is born and manifested. Thus much
can be said about it.
TIME AROSE AS MEASUREMENT OF THE ACTIVITY OF THE UNIVERSAL SOUL.
Before priority and posteriority, time, which did not yet exist,
brooded within existence itself. But an active nature (the universal
Soul), which desired to be mistress of herself, to possess herself, and
ceaselessly to add to the present, entered into motion, as did time,
along with (the Soul). We achieve a representation of the time that
is the image of eternity, by the length that we must go through with
to reach what follows, and is posterior, towards one moment, and then
towards another.[460]
LIKE TIME, SPACE IS THE RESULT OF THE PROCESSION OF THE UNIVERSAL SOUL.
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