MATTER

"Matter is not soul; it is not intellect, is not Life, is no Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle; it is no limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce? "It lives on the farther side of these categories and so has no title to the name of Being. It will be more plausibly called a non-being, and this is not in the sense that movement and station are Not-Being (i.e. as merely different from Being) but in the sense of veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence; it is a stationary but not in the sense of having position, it is itself invisible , eluding all effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based upon it, it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive; a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw--not even strong enough to withdraw , so absolute its lack of Being. "Its every utterance , therefore, is a lie; it pretends to be great and it is little, to be more and it is less; and the Existence with which it marks itself is no Existence, but a passing trick making trickery of all that seems to be present in it , phantasms within a phantasm; it is like a mirror showing things within itself when they are really elsewhere, filled in appearance but actually empty, containing nothing, pretending everything. Into it and out of it move mimicries of the Authentic Existents, images playing upon an image devoid of Form, visible against it by its very formlessness; they seem to modify it but in reality effect nothing, for they are ghostly and feeble, have no thrust and meet none Matter either; they pass through it leaving no cleavage, as through water; or they might be compared to shapes projected so as to make some appearance upon what we know only as Void." P.196-197, "The Impassivity of the Unembodied," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)