THE ENNEADS, Plotinus, "Matter"

If time and matter are both outside of the essence of God, being what some philosophers, claim to be as illusions for the benefit of illusions; then nothing exists, nothing is, but God: nothing exists but God which we can but know only inferentially. But working the inference faithfully, I quote Plotinus: "The reason, then, of the immutability of Matter is that the entrant principle neither possesses nor is possessed by it. Consider. as an example, the mode in which an opinion or representation is present in the mind: there is no admixture; the notion that came goes in time, still integrally itself alone, taking nothing with it, leaving nothing after it, because it has not blended with the mind; there is New International Version For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others--and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." 'outside' in the sense of contact broken, and the distinction between base and entrant is patent not to the senses but to the reason.... "Matter --feebler far than the Soul for any exercise of power, and possessing no phase of Authentic-Existents, not even in possession of its own falsity--lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter void as it is; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but it cannot announce its own presence. Penetrating thought may arrive at, discriminating it from Authentic -Existents; then it is discerned as something abandoned by all that really is, by even the dimmest semblants of being, as a thing dragged towards every shape and property and appearing to follow--yet in fact not even following." P. 207, "The impassivity of the Unembodied," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)