Enn. VI,9

                                          THE SIX ENNEADS

                                               250 AD

                                            by Plotinus

                           translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page

                        London, P.L. Warner, publisher to the Medici Society

                                            [1917-1930]

 

 ON THE GOOD, OR THE ONE.

 

     1. It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

     This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of

 all that are in any degree to be numbered among beings. What could

 exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to

 be what it is called: no army unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock,

 must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one

 ship; unity gone, neither remains thus even continuous magnitudes

 could not exist without an inherent unity; break them apart and

 their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity.

     Take plant and animal; the material form stands a unity; fallen

 from that into a litter of fragments, the things have lost their

 being; what was is no longer there; it is replaced by quite other

 things- as many others, precisely, as possess unity.

     Health, similarly, is the condition of a body acting as a

 co-ordinate unity. Beauty appears when limbs and features are

 controlled by this principle, unity. Moral excellence is of a soul

 acting as a concordant total, brought to unity.

     Come thus to soul- which brings all to unity, making, moulding,

 shaping, ranging to order- there is a temptation to say "Soul is the

 bestower of unity; soul therefore is the unity." But soul bestows

 other characteristics upon material things and yet remains distinct

 from its gift: shape, Ideal-Form and the rest are all distinct from

 the giving soul; so, clearly, with this gift of unity; soul to make

 things unities looks out upon the unity just as it makes man by

 looking upon Man, realizing in the man the unity belonging to Man.

     Anything that can be described as a unity is so in the precise

 degree in which it holds a characteristic being; the less or more

 the degree of the being, the less or more the unity. Soul, while

 distinct from unity's very self, is a thing of the greater unity in

 proportion as it is of the greater, the authentic, being. Absolute

 unity it is not: it is soul and one soul, the unity in some sense a

 concomitant; there are two things, soul and soul's unity as there is

 body with body's unity. The looser aggregates, such as a choir, are

 furthest from unity, the more compact are the nearer; soul is nearer

 yet but still a participant.

     Is soul to be identified with unity on the ground that unless it

 were one thing it could not be soul? No; unity is equally necessary to

 every other thing, yet unity stands distinct from them; body and unity

 are not identical; body, too; is still a participant.

     Besides, the soul, even the collective soul for all its absence of

 part, is a manifold: it has diverse powers- reasoning, desiring,

 perceiving- all held together by this chain of unity. Itself a

   unity, soul confers unity, but also accepts it.