"Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may cooperate; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe: all living things of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and molded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentiality present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul's power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good.
"Yet, with all this, Matter is continually overruled towards the better ; so that out of the total of things--modified by the Soul on one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as in the Reason-Principles--there is, in the end, a Unity."
P.89-90, "Are the Stars the Causes," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)
Saturday, March 18, 2017
THE ENNEADS: "STARS AS CAUSES"
"Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may cooperate; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe: all living things of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and molded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentiality present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul's power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good.
"Yet, with all this, Matter is continually overruled towards the better ; so that out of the total of things--modified by the Soul on one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as in the Reason-Principles--there is, in the end, a Unity."
P.89-90, "Are the Stars the Causes," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)