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THE NEOPLATONISTS

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Plotinus

 

THE SIX ENNEADS

(Written ca. 250 A.D. )

Translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page

 

The First Ennead

 

First Tractate

 
THE ANIMATE AND THE MAN.
 
1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences
their seat?
 
Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from
both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct
form due to the blending.
 
And what applies to the affections applies also to whatsoever acts, physical or mental, spring from them.
 
We have, therefore, to examine discursive-reason and the ordinary mental action upon objects of sense, and
enquire whether these have the one seat with the affections and experiences, or perhaps sometimes the one
seat, sometimes another.
 
And we must consider also our acts of Intellection, their mode and their seat.
 
And this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in these matters, must be brought to light.
 
Firstly, what is the seat of Sense-Perception? This is the obvious beginning since the affections and
experiences either are sensations of some kind or at least never occur apart from sensation.
 
2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the Soul- that is whether a distinction is
to be made between Soul and Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind in itself]. *
* All matter shown in brackets is added by the translator for clearness' sake and, therefore, is not canonical.
S.M.
If such a distinction holds, then the Soul [in man] is some sort of a composite and at once we may agree that
it is a recipient and- if only reason allows- that all the affections and experiences really have their seat in the
Soul, and with the affections every state and mood, good and bad alike.
 
But if Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-Form
unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act
of its own which Reason manifests.
 
If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of the Soul as an immortal- if the immortal, the imperishable, must
be impassive, giving out something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except for what it receives
from the Existents prior to itself from which Existents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered.
 
Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there
place for courage: courage implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are satisfied by the filling or
voiding of the body, must be proper to something very different from the Soul, to that only which admits of
replenishment and voidance.
 
And how could the Soul lend itself to any admixture? An essential is not mixed. Or of the intrusion of
anything alien? If it did, it would be seeking the destruction of its own nature. Pain must be equally far from
it. And Grief- how or for what could it grieve? Whatever possesses Existence is supremely free, dwelling,
unchangeable, within its own peculiar nature. And can any increase bring joy, where nothing, not even
anything good, can accrue? What such an Existent is, it is unchangeably.
 
Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning; and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the
Soul: for sensation is a receiving- whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body- and reasoning and all
ordinary mental action deal with sensation.
 
The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the intellections- whether these are to be assigned
to the Soul- and as to Pure-Pleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary state.
 
3. We may treat of the Soul as in the body- whether it be set above it or actually within it- since the
association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.
 
Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must
share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is
working.
 
It may be objected that the Soul must however, have Sense-Perception since its use of its instrument must
acquaint it with the external conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. Thus, it will be argued,
the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring distress to the soul: hence the Soul may feel
sorrow and pain and every other affection that belongs to the body; and from this again will spring desire, the
Soul seeking the mending of its instrument.
 
But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from body to Soul? Body may communicate qualities
or conditions to another body: but- body to Soul? Something happens to A; does that make it happen to B?
As long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct entities; if the Soul uses the body it is
separate from it.
 
But apart from the philosophical separation how does Soul stand to body?
 
Clearly there is a combination. And for this several modes are possible. There might be a complete
coalescence: Soul might be interwoven through the body: or it might be an Ideal-Form detached or an
Ideal-Form in governing contact like a pilot: or there might be part of the Soul detached and another part in
contact, the disjoined part being the agent or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument or thing
used.
 
In this last case it will be the double task of philosophy to direct this lower Soul towards the higher, the agent,
and except in so far as the conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from the instrument, the
body, so that it need not forever have its Act upon or through this inferior.
 
4. Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a coalescence.
Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of
being as made participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How can
a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such as Sense-Perception?
 
No: the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming
by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the body.
And fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is the body's doom to fail of its joys and to perish.
 
Then again we should have to examine how such a coalescence could be conceived: we might find it
impossible: perhaps all this is like announcing the coalescence of things utterly incongruous in kind, let us
say of a line and whiteness.
 
Next for the suggestion that the Soul is interwoven through the body: such a relation would not give woof
and warp community of sensation: the interwoven element might very well suffer no change: the permeating
soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body- as light goes always free of all it floods- and
all the more so, since, precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the entire frame.
 
Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul would not be subjected to the body's affections and experiences:
it would be present rather as Ideal-Form in Matter.
 
Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if- the first possibility- the Soul is an
essence, a self-existent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more decidedly be
the Using-Principle [and therefore unaffected].
 
Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like axe-form on iron: here, no doubt, the form is all important but it is
still the axe, the complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the iron thus modified: on
this analogy, therefore, we are even more strictly compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination
to the body: their natural seat is the material member, the instrument, the potential recipient of life.
 
Compare the passage where we read* that "it is absurd to suppose that the Soul weaves"; equally absurd to
think of it as desiring, grieving. All this is rather in the province of something which we may call the
Animate.
* "We read" translates "he says" of the text, and always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name does not
appear in the translation except where it was written by Plotinus. S.M.
5. Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might be the Couplement of Soul and body:
it might be a third and different entity formed from both.
 
The Soul in turn- apart from the nature of the Animate- must be either impassive, merely causing
Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow, or sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical experiences
with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences: desire for example in the Animate may be something
quite distinct from the accompanying movement or state in the desiring faculty.
 
The body, the live-body as we know it, we will consider later.
Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this
Couplement?
 
It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a distress which reaches to a
Sensitive-Faculty which in turn merges into Soul. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation
unexplained.
 
Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement: some evil seems to have befallen the
man or his belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in the entire Animate. But
this account leaves still a question as to the source and seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul or to
the Couplement? Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling of grief: the
judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow: one may think oneself slighted and yet
not be angry; and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer
than before to any warrant for assigning these affections to the Couplement.
 
Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a Faculty-of-desire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and,
collectively, that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? Such a statement of the facts does not help
towards making the affections common to the Couplement; they might still be seated either in the Soul alone
or in the body alone. On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal passion, there must be a
heating of the blood and the bile, a well-defined state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse towards The
Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to the Soul alone.
 
Reason, then, does not permit us to assign all the affections to the Couplement.
 
In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly be the Man that desires, and yet, on the other hand, there must be
desire in the Desiring-Faculty as well. How can this be? Are we to suppose that, when the man originates the
desire, the Desiring-Faculty moves to the order? How could the Man have come to desire at all unless
through a prior activity in the Desiring-Faculty? Then it is the Desiring-Faculty that takes the lead? Yet how,
unless the body be first in the appropriate condition?
 
6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law that when any powers are contained by a recipient, every
action or state expressive of them must be the action or state of that recipient, they themselves remaining
unaffected as merely furnishing efficiency.
 
But if this were so, then, since the Animate is the recipient of the Causing-Principle [i.e., the Soul] which
brings life to the Couplement, this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences and expressive
activities of the life being vested in the recipient, the Animate.
 
But this would mean that life itself belongs not to the Soul but to the Couplement; or at least the life of the
Couplement would not be the life of the Soul; Sense-Perception would belong not to the Sensitive-Faculty
but to the container of the faculty.
 
But if sensation is a movement traversing the body and culminating in Soul, how the soul lack sensation?
The very presence of the Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul.
 
Once again, where is Sense-Perception seated?
In the Couplement.
Yet how can the Couplement have sensation independently of action in the Sensitive-Faculty, the Soul left
out of count and the Soul-Faculty?
 
7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's presence.
 
This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the
body.
 
No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it
forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other
experiences found to belong to the Animate.
 
But the "We"? How have We Sense-Perception?
By the fact that We are not separate from the Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler
elements go to make up the entire many-sided nature of Man.
 
The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by
the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already
Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other [of that in the Soul] which is nearer to
Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms.
 
And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have
Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We:
before this there was only the "Ours"; but at this stage stands the WE [the authentic Human-Principle] loftily
presiding over the Animate.
 
There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be described as the Animate or Living-Being-
mingled in a lower phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from all that is kin
to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the
associate of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in that the use and act of reason
is a characteristic Act of the Soul.
 
8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul
which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself
[Divine-Mind].
 
This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either as common to all or as our own
immediate possession: or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible-
one, everywhere and always Its entire self- and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the
First-Soul [i.e. in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul].
 
Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the
Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one.
 
And how do we possess the Divinity?
In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in
order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul- we read- and
that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one
undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has
given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact
that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without
any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors.
 
The first of these images is Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the
successive images are to be recognized as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until
the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring- offspring efficient
in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering Soul which [has no direct action within matter but]
produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions.
 
9. That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does
or suffers; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement.
 
But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are
vested in it: for all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is evil.
 
When we have done evil it is because we have been worsted by our baser side- for a man is many- by desire
or rage or some evil image: the misnamed reasoning that takes up with the false, in reality fancy, has not
stayed for the judgement of the Reasoning-Principle: we have acted at the call of the less worthy, just as in
matters of the sense-sphere we sometimes see falsely because we credit only the lower perception, that of the
Couplement, without applying the tests of the Reasoning-Faculty.
 
The Intellectual-Principle has held aloof from the act and so is guiltless; or, as we may state it, all depends on
whether we ourselves have or have not put ourselves in touch with the Intellectual-Realm either in the
Intellectual-Principle or within ourselves; for it is possible at once to possess and not to use.
 
Thus we have marked off what belongs to the Couplement from what stands by itself: the one group has the
character of body and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its manifestation
belongs peculiarly to Soul: and the Understanding, as passing judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the
point of the vision of Ideal-Forms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (i.e, with
consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable Soul. For Understanding, the
true, is the Act of the Intellections: in many of its manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of the
outer to the inner.
 
Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as to itself and within itself: all the changes and all the turmoil we
experience are the issue of what is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as have said, the states and experiences of
this elusive "Couplement."
 
10. It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states
then the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the Soul.
 
But it has been observed that the Couplement, too- especially before our emancipation- is a member of this
total We, and in fact what the body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two distinct notions;
sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the
true man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the
Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which even in its dwelling here may be
kept apart. [This Soul constitutes the human being] for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul which
is a radiation [or emanation] from it withdraws also, drawn after it.
 
Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring not from contemplative wisdom but from custom or practical
discipline belong to the Couplement: to the Couplement, too, belong the vices; they are its repugnances,
desires, sympathies.
 
And Friendship?
This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower part, sometimes to the interior man.
 
11. In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and there is but little irradiation from the higher
principles of our being: but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us their action is
directed towards the Supreme; they work upon us only when they stand at the mid-point.
 
But does not the include that phase of our being which stands above the mid-point?
 
It does, but on condition that we lay hold of it: our entire nature is not ours at all times but only as we direct
the mid-point upwards or downwards, or lead some particular phase of our nature from potentiality or native
character into act.
 
And the animals, in what way or degree do they possess the Animate?
 
If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have sinned, then the Animating-Principle in its
separable phase does not enter directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they are aware only of
the image of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and of that only by being aware of the body organised and
determined by that image.
 
If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted for them by a radiation from the All-Soul.
 
12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is
above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world,
it passes from body to body.
 
We may take either view at will: they are easily reconciled.
When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and Essential-Soul one and the same: it is the simple
unbroken Unity.
 
By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that other, that phase of the Soul which
knows all the states and passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it falls under the
conditions of the entire living experience: this compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays
penalty.
 
It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as those others saw the sea-god Glaukos." "And,"
reading on, "if we mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all that has gathered about it,
must see into the philosophy of it, examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what
Existences it is what it is."
 
Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then,
must be not from this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at birth; or
rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other [lower] phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth has
been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul
other than that actually coming down in the declension.
 
Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it not certainly sin?
 
If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to
be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not there, the light could
cause no shadow.
 
And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets
the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing
that ceases to be: the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.
 
The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image separate existence; he puts the shade of
Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing in the two
realms at once, he gives us a twofold Hercules.
 
It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble
serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not the
Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while he has place above,
something of him remains below.
 
13. And the principle that reasons out these matters? Is it We or the Soul?
 
We, but by the Soul.
But how "by the Soul"? Does this mean that the Soul reasons by possession [by contact with the matters of
enquiry]?
 
No; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists without movement; or any movement that can be ascribed to it
must be utterly distinct from all corporal movement and be simply the Soul's own life.
 
And Intellection in us is twofold: since the Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we
have Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the Intellectual-Principle upon
us- for this Intellectual-Principle is part of us no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising.
 
 

 Second Tractate

 
ON VIRTUE.
 
1. Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by necessary law," and it is the Soul's design to escape from Evil,
we must escape hence.
 
But what is this escape?
"In attaining Likeness to God," we read. And this is explained as "becoming just and holy, living by
wisdom," the entire nature grounded in Virtue.
 
But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply Likeness to some being that has Virtue? To what Divine
Being, then, would our Likeness be? To the Being- must we not think?- in Which, above all, such excellence
seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the Principle ruling within it, the Principle endowed
with a wisdom most wonderful. What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should
become Like to its ruler?
 
But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt whether even in this Divine-Being all the virtues find place-
Moral-Balance [Sophrosyne], for example; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since nothing is alien;
where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce the desire of possession.
 
If, indeed, that aspiration towards the Intelligible which is in our nature exists also in this Ruling-Power, then
need not look elsewhere for the source of order and of the virtues in ourselves.
 
But does this Power possess the Virtues?
We cannot expect to find There what are called the Civic Virtues, the Prudence which belongs to the
reasoning faculty; the Fortitude which conducts the emotional and passionate nature; the Sophrosyne which
consists in a certain pact, in a concord between the passionate faculty and the reason; or Rectitude which is
the due application of all the other virtues as each in turn should command or obey.
 
Is Likeness, then, attained, perhaps, not by these virtues of the social order but by those greater qualities
known by the same general name? And if so do the Civic Virtues give us no help at all?
 
It is against reason, utterly to deny Likeness by these while admitting it by the greater: tradition at least
recognizes certain men of the civic excellence as divine, and we must believe that these too had in some sort
attained Likeness: on both levels there is virtue for us, though not the same virtue.
 
Now, if it be admitted that Likeness is possible, though by a varying use of different virtues and though the
civic virtues do not suffice, there is no reason why we should not, by virtues peculiar to our state, attain
Likeness to a model in which virtue has no place.
 
But is that conceivable?
When warmth comes in to make anything warm, must there needs be something to warm the source of the
warmth?
 
If a fire is to warm something else, must there be a fire to warm that fire?
 
Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not
by an infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the argument would
make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an essential constituent of the Principle from which
the Soul attaining Likeness absorbs it.
 
Against the illustration drawn from the fire, it may be urged that the analogy would make that Principle
identical with virtue, whereas we hold it to be something higher.
 
The objection would be valid if what the soul takes in were one and the same with the source, but in fact
virtue is one thing, the source of virtue quite another. The material house is not identical with the house
conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness: the material house has distribution and order while the
pure idea is not constituted by any such elements; distribution, order, symmetry are not parts of an idea.
 
So with us: it is from the Supreme that we derive order and distribution and harmony, which are virtues in
this sphere: the Existences There, having no need of harmony, order or distribution, have nothing to do with
virtue; and, none the less, it is by our possession of virtue that we become like to Them.
 
Thus much to show that the principle that we attain Likeness by virtue in no way involves the existence of
virtue in the Supreme. But we have not merely to make a formal demonstration: we must persuade as well as
demonstrate.
 
2. First, then, let us examine those good qualities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek to establish
what is this thing which, as we possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Supreme possesses it, is in the
nature of an exemplar or archetype and is not virtue.
 
We must first distinguish two modes of Likeness.
There is the likeness demanding an identical nature in the objects which, further, must draw their likeness
from a common principle: and there is the case in which B resembles A, but A is a Primal, not concerned
about B and not said to resemble B. In this second case, likeness is understood in a distinct sense: we no
longer look for identity of nature, but, on the contrary, for divergence since the likeness has come about by
the mode of difference.
 
What, then, precisely is Virtue, collectively and in the particular? The clearer method will be to begin with the
particular, for so the common element by which all the forms hold the general name will readily appear.
 
The Civic Virtues, on which we have touched above, are a principle or order and beauty in us as long as we
remain passing our life here: they ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and to our entire
sensibility, and dispelling false judgement- and this by sheer efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the
bounds, by the fact that the measured is lifted outside of the sphere of the unmeasured and lawless.
 
And, further, these Civic Virtues- measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to
the Soul which is as Matter to their forming- are like to the measure reigning in the over-world, and they
carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and
wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of
Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness: the Soul nearer than the body,
therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the
delusion that in the Soul we see God entire.
 
This is the way in which men of the Civic Virtues attain Likeness.
 
3. We come now to that other mode of Likeness which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier virtues: discussing
this we shall penetrate more deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and be able to define the nature of the
higher kind whose existence we shall establish beyond doubt.
 
To Plato, unmistakably, there are two distinct orders of virtue, and the civic does not suffice for Likeness:
"Likeness to God," he says, "is a flight from this world's ways and things": in dealing with the qualities of
good citizenship he does not use the simple term Virtue but adds the distinguishing word civic: and
elsewhere he declares all the virtues without exception to be purifications.
 
But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness?
 
As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body's states and to think
the body's thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body's moods
and devoted itself to its own Act- the state of Intellection and Wisdom- never allowed the passions of the
body to affect it- the virtue of Sophrosyne- knew no fear at the parting from the body- the virtue of Fortitude-
and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled- in which state is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the
Soul, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the
Divine, too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom.
 
But would not this make virtue a state of the Divine also?
No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in
the Divine: of things in the Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all.
 
Then yet again, the one word Intellection covers two distinct Acts?
 
Rather there is primal Intellection and there is Intellection deriving from the Primal and of other scope.
 
As speech is the echo of the thought in the Soul, so thought in the Soul is an echo from elsewhere: that is to
say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a thought above itself
and is the interpreter of the higher sphere.
 
Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul: it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the
Transcendence.
 
4. We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the
forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does the mere
process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is
almost the Term?
 
To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien: but Goodness is something more.
 
If before the impurity entered there was Goodness, the Goodness suffices; but even so, not the act of
cleansing but the cleansed thing that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish what this
emergent is.
 
It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The Absolute Good cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with
Evil. We can think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and unable to
rest in the Authentic Good.
 
The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting
strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its own; the new
phase begins by a new orientation.
 
After the Purification, then, there is still this orientation to be made? No: by the purification the true alignment
stands accomplished.
 
The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment? No: it is what the alignment brings about within.
 
And this is...?
That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and
working within it, of the vision it has come to.
 
But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten?
 
What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it: to
dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the light.
 
Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures; and these it must bring into closer accord with
the verities they represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a possession of the Soul, this
is only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's sight is turned
towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not
determine action, is dead to us.
 
5. So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear.
Likeness to what Principle? Identity with what God?
 
The question is substantially this: how far does purification dispel the two orders of passion- anger, desire
and the like, with grief and its kin- and in what degree the disengagement from the body is possible.
 
Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own place.
 
It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it
will employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may combat, but, failing
the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check: the
suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep
the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and weak at that. The Soul has nothing to
dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as
it is purely monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even the food and drink necessary
for restoration will lie outside of the Soul's attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there
must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled
motion takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.
 
The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all
attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may
be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul's presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage
would profit by the neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never
venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.
 
There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand
in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own
weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord.
 
6. In all this there is no sin- there is only matter of discipline- but our concern is not merely to be sinless but
to be God.
 
As long as there is any such involuntary action, the nature is twofold, God and Demi-God, or rather God in
association with a nature of a lower power: when all the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled, a
Divine Being of those that follow upon The First.
 
For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the
essential man is There: entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning phase of his nature
and this he will lead up into likeness with his highest self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible
it shall never be inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course displeasing to its overlord.
 
What form, then, does virtue take in one so lofty?
It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and
as the immediate presence of the Intellectual-Principle itself.
 
And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in
the Soul; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul: this
gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not Virtue.
 
In the Supreme, then, what is it?
Its proper Act and Its Essence.
That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the
Supreme is not self-existent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the
source of what in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the
Supreme is self-standing, independent.
 
But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering of faculty, does it not always imply the existence of diverse parts?
 
No: There is a Rectitude of Diversity appropriate to what has parts, but there is another, not less Rectitude
than the former though it resides in a Unity. And the authentic Absolute-Rectitude is the Act of a Unity upon
itself, of a Unity in which there is no this and that and the other.
 
On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle:
its Restraint (Sophrosyne) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle; its Fortitude is its being
impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which
the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less
noble companion.
 
7. The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that existing in the over-world, that is among
their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle.
 
In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes Knowledge and Wisdom; self-concentration is Sophrosyne; Its
proper Act is Its Dutifulness; Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate within Itself is the equivalent of
Fortitude.
 
In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues
not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have similar
correspondences.
 
And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then the purification of the Soul must
produce all the virtues; if any are lacking, then not one of them is perfect.
 
And to possess the greater is potentially to possess the minor, though the minor need not carry the greater
with them.
 
Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the life of the Sage; but whether his possession of the minor
virtues be actual as well as potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to qualities higher
still, must be decided afresh in each several case.
 
Take, for example, Contemplative-Wisdom. If other guides of conduct must be called in to meet a given
need, can this virtue hold its ground even in mere potentiality?
 
And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in scope and province? Where, for example,
Sophrosyne would allow certain acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them off
altogether? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once Contemplative-Wisdom comes into action?
 
The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give: thus the man will learn to work with
this or that as every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in
turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work
for the final Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man- such as Civic Virtue
commends- but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.
 
For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to
produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme
Exemplar.
 

Third Tractate

 
ON DIALECTIC [THE UPWARD WAY].
 
1. What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us there where we must go?
 
The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed: we have established elsewhere, by many
considerations, that our journey is to the Good, to the Primal-Principle; and, indeed, the very reasoning which
discovered the Term was itself something like an initiation.
 
But what order of beings will attain the Term?
Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most things, those who at their first birth have entered
into the life-germ from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover, the metaphysician
taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the nature peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside
guidance.
 
But how lies the course? Is it alike for all, or is there a distinct method for each class of temperament?
 
For all there are two stages of the path, as they are making upwards or have already gained the upper sphere.
 
The first degree is the conversion from the lower life; the second- held by those that have already made their
way to the sphere of the Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint there but must still advance within the
realm- lasts until they reach the extreme hold of the place, the Term attained when the topmost peak of the
Intellectual realm is won.
 
But this highest degree must bide its time: let us first try to speak of the initial process of conversion.
 
We must begin by distinguishing the three types. Let us take the musician first and indicate his
temperamental equipment for the task.
 
The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat
slow to stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are sensitive to noise
so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies and
rhythms repels him; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.
 
This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm
and design in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent
which is the source of all these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he
must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished
him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one
shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in
him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths are we
will show later.
 
2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain- and then either come to a stand or pass
beyond- has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound
by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered
delight before some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty
everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms,
springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course
of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him- a first training this in the
loveliness of the immaterial- he must learn to recognise the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these
severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From
the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the
upward way.
 
3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not like those others, in need of
disengagement, stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a guide. He
must be shown, then, and instructed, a willing wayfarer by his very temperament, all but self-directed.
 
Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract
thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his
virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the
science.
 
4. But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three classes alike, what, in sum, is it?
 
It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature
and relation of things- what each is, how it differs from others, what common quality all have, to what Kind
each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many
Beings there are, and how many non-Beings to be distinguished from Beings.
 
Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-Good, and of the particulars that fall under each, and of what is
the Eternal and what the not Eternal- and of these, it must be understood, not by seeming-knowledge
["sense-knowledge"] but with authentic science.
 
All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual
Kosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures
the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms,
of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it establishes, in the light of
Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual
Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point from which it starts.
 
Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that sphere, it is no longer busy about many things: it
has arrived at Unity and it contemplates: it leaves to another science all that coil of premisses and conclusions
called the art of reasoning, much as it leaves the art of writing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it
considers necessary- to clear the ground- but it makes itself the judge, here as in everything else; where it
sees use, it uses; anything it finds superfluous, it leaves to whatever department of learning or practice may
turn that matter to account.
 
5. But whence does this science derive its own initial laws?
The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. What
else is necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached perfect
Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the purest [perfection] of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom." And,
being the noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with Authentic-Existence, The Highest
there is: as Contemplative-Wisdom [or true-knowing] it deals with Being, as Intellection with what
transcends Being.
 
What, then, is Philosophy?
Philosophy is the supremely precious.
Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?
It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic
does not consist of bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it were, Matter to it, or at
least it proceeds methodically towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of
the realities.
 
Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside
itself, something which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity presented to it,
it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions-
collections of words- but it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their
propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what
is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether
propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it
leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises.
 
6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialectic is its precious part: in its study of the laws of the universe,
Philosophy draws on Dialectic much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic, though, of course, the
alliance between Philosophy and Dialectic is closer.
 
And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic: by Dialectic it comes to contemplation, though it originates of
itself the moral state or rather the discipline from which the moral state develops.
 
Our reasoning faculties employ the data of Dialectic almost as their proper possession for they are mainly
concerned about Matter [whose place and worth Dialectic establishes].
 
And while the other virtues bring the reason to bear upon particular experiences and acts, the virtue of
Wisdom [i.e., the virtue peculiarly induced by Dialectic] is a certain super-reasoning much closer to the
Universal; for it deals with correspondence and sequence, the choice of time for action and inaction, the
adoption of this course, the rejection of that other: Wisdom and Dialectic have the task of presenting all
things as Universals and stripped of matter for treatment by the Understanding.
 
But can these inferior kinds of virtue exist without Dialectic and philosophy?
 
Yes- but imperfectly, inadequately.
And is it possible to be a Sage, Master in Dialectic, without these lower virtues?
 
It would not happen: the lower will spring either before or together with the higher. And it is likely that
everyone normally possesses the natural virtues from which, when Wisdom steps in, the perfected virtue
develops. After the natural virtues, then, Wisdom and, so the perfecting of the moral nature. Once the natural
virtues exist, both orders, the natural and the higher, ripen side by side to their final excellence: or as the one
advances it carries forward the other towards perfection.
 
But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in vision and in strength- and to both orders of virtue the essential
matter is from what principles we derive them.
 

Fourth Tractate

ON TRUE HAPPINESS.
 
1. Are we to make True Happiness one and the same thing with Welfare or Prosperity and therefore within
the reach of the other living beings as well as ourselves?
 
There is certainly no reason to deny well-being to any of them as long as their lot allows them to flourish
unhindered after their kind.
 
Whether we make Welfare consist in pleasant conditions of life, or in the accomplishment of some
appropriate task, by either account it may fall to them as to us. For certainly they may at once be pleasantly
placed and engaged about some function that lies in their nature: take for an instance such living beings as
have the gift of music; finding themselves well-off in other ways, they sing, too, as their nature is, and so
their day is pleasant to them.
 
And if, even, we set Happiness in some ultimate Term pursued by inborn tendency, then on this head, too,
we must allow it to animals from the moment of their attaining this Ultimate: the nature in them comes to a
halt, having fulfilled its vital course from a beginning to an end.
 
It may be a distasteful notion, this bringing-down of happiness so low as to the animal world- making it
over, as then we must, even to the vilest of them and not withholding it even from the plants, living they too
and having a life unfolding to a Term.
 
But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to deny that good of life to animals only because they do not appear
to man to be of great account. And as for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what we accord to the
other forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is true people might be found to declare prosperity possible
to the very plants: they have life, and life may bring good or evil; the plants may thrive or wither, bear or be
barren.
 
No: if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the good of life, it is impossible to deny the good of life to any order
of living things; if the Term be inner-peace, equally impossible; impossible, too, if the good of life be to live
in accordance with the purpose of nature.
 
2. Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground that they lack sensation are really denying it to all
living things.
 
By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state of well-being must be Good in itself quite
apart from the perception: to be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or without knowledge:
there is good in the appropriate state even though there be no recognition of its fitness or desirable quality- for
it must be in itself desirable.
 
This Good exists, then; is present: that in which it is present has well-being without more ado: what need
then to ask for sensation into the bargain?
 
Perhaps, however, the theory is that the good of any state consists not in the condition itself but in the
knowledge and perception of it.
 
But at this rate the Good is nothing but the mere sensation, the bare activity of the sentient life. And so it will
be possessed by all that feel, no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that two constituents are needed to make
up the Good, that there must be both feeling and a given state felt: but how can it be maintained that the
bringing together of two neutrals can produce the Good?
 
They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of Good and that such a condition constitutes
well-being on the discernment of that present good; but then they invite the question whether the well-being
comes by discerning the presence of the Good that is there, or whether there must further be the double
recognition that the state is agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes the Good.
 
If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon sensation but upon another, a higher
faculty; and well-being is vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one competent to discern that
pleasure is the Good.
 
Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure's
value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of Reason or of
Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason
abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order?
 
No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise
quality of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and setting their highest
in a more luminous phase of life.
 
Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but
on the life of Reason?
 
But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why precisely they make Reason an essential to the
happiness in a living being:
 
"When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal
needs of nature; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"
 
If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess happiness after
their kind, as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason becomes a servant;
there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is
virtue.
 
If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and not as supplying these human needs, you must
tell us what other services it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the perfect thing it is.
 
For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such planning and providing: its perfection will be
something quite different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be itself one of those first needs
of nature; it cannot even be a cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be
nobler than any and all of such things: otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so highly.
 
Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where
they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it
theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible.
 
What then is happiness? Let us try basing it upon Life.
 
3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that lives will be capable of happiness, and
those will be effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing is by nature
receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing it to the rational. If happiness were inherent in
the bare being-alive, the common ground in which the cause of happiness could always take root would be
simply life.
 
Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that
they are not really making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning faculty, round which they
centre happiness, is a property [not the subject of a property]: the subject, to them, must be the
Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the basis of the happiness: so that they are making
it consist not in life but in a particular kind of life- not, of course, a species formally opposite but, in
terminology, standing as an "earlier" to a "later" in the one Kind.
 
Now in common use this word "Life" embraces many forms which shade down from primal to secondary
and so on, all massed under the common term- life of plant and life of animal- each phase brighter or
dimmer than its next: and so it evidently must be with the Good-of-Life. And if thing is ever the image of
thing, so every Good must always be the image of a higher Good.
 
If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is
lacking of all that belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that lives fully.
 
And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say, in the realm of
existents the Supreme Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest
plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought from without, a
life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.
 
For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best life? If anyone should answer, "The nature of
Good" [The Good, as a Divine Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near our thought, but we are not
seeking the Cause but the main constituent.
 
It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual
Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not
pure, not more truly life than they are its contrary: here let it be said succinctly that since all living things
proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle must be the first life and the
most complete.
 
4. If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must
be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.
 
But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The
matter may be stated thus:
 
It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason
and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life.
 
But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported into his nature?
 
No: there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which
we hold to constitute happiness.
 
But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent
of his entire nature?
 
We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere portion of their total being- in those, namely,
that have it potentially- there is, too, the man, already in possession of true felicity, who is this perfection
realized, who has passed over into actual identification with it. All else is now mere clothing about the man,
not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to himself by
any act of the will.
 
To the man in this state, what is the Good?
 
He himself by what he has and is.
 
And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but
manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode.
 
The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else.
 
What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly none of the less worthy things; and the Best he carries always
within him.
 
He that has such a life as this has all he needs in life.
 
Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies
outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a
subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not
needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he
gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.
 
Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his
household or at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too.
And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true
man, but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes
no part.
 
5. But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity?
 
What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about? Could either welfare or
happiness be present under such conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will
certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing "Miseries of Priam."
 
"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be
his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as
simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt,
take all bravely... until the body's appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through
the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that,
thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss
self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek
happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the
other, answering to its associate's distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is
nothing but to cut away the body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential
to happiness."
 
6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly
denied to anyone confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good, why turn away
from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of
which enter into happiness? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable
and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our
quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls
to the tenderest longings of the soul.
 
The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards freedom from this sphere: the reason which
disciplines away our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order; it merely
resents their interference; sometimes, even, it must seek them; essentially all the aspiration is not so much
away from evil as towards the Soul's own highest and noblest: this attained, all is won and there is rest- and
this is the veritably willed state of life.
 
There can be no such thing as "willing" the acquirement of necessaries, if Will is to be taken in its strict
sense, and not misapplied to the mere recognition of need.
 
It is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what we should have
willed; to have no occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste; but the things we seek
tell the story as soon as they are ours. For instance, health and freedom from pain; which of these has any
great charm? As long as we possess them, we set no store upon them.
 
Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to happiness, which when lacking is desired
because of the presence of an annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good.
 
Such things can never make part of our final object: our Term must be such that though these pleasanter
conditions be absent and their contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.
 
7. Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries repelled by the man established in happiness?
 
Here is our answer:
 
These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any particle towards the Sage's felicity: but they do
serve towards the integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his Being or
complicates the Term: it is not that the Sage can be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but simply that
he that holds the highest good desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time, something
which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take place by its side.
 
In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen,
there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or
falling from day to day; the death of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession.
No: a thousand mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave him still in the tranquil
possession of the Term.
 
But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty daily chances!
What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here,
and is bound now no longer to anything below?
 
If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter- kingdom and the rule over
cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork- how can
he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any
such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets
great store by wood and stones, or... Zeus... by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose
estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body.
 
But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice?
Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?
But if he go unburied?
Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always rot.
 
But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a
towering monument?
 
The littleness of it!
But if he falls into his enemies' hands, into prison?
There is always the way towards escape, if none towards well-being.
 
But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons and daughters dragged away to captivity?
 
What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong? Could he have quitted the world in the calm
conviction that nothing of all this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that it is possible
for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of
what may occur? In the knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease; so, too, when the evil has come
about.
 
He would reflect that the nature of this All is such as brings these things to pass and man must bow the head.
 
Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an advantage; and those that suffer have their freedom in
their hands: if they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real grievance, or they
stay against reason, when they should not, and then they have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of
his neighbours, however near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil: his state cannot hang upon the fortunes good
or bad of any other men.
 
8. As for violent personal sufferings, he will carry them off as well as he can; if they overpass his endurance
they will carry him off.
 
And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled
like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.
 
But what if he be put beyond himself? What if pain grow so intense and so torture him that the agony all but
kills? Well, when he is put to torture he will plan what is to be done: he retains his freedom of action.
 
Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently from the average man; neither ordinary
experiences nor pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold. To allow
them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul.
 
And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die before they
come: this is not concern for others' welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our imperfection:
we must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease to tremble over what perhaps may be.
 
Anyone that says that it is in human nature to grieve over misfortune to our household must learn that this is
not so with all, and that, precisely, it is virtue's use to raise the general level of nature towards the better and
finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is to set at nought what terrifies the common mind.
 
We cannot be indolent: this is an arena for the powerful combatant holding his ground against the blows of
fortune, and knowing that, sore though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing dreadful,
nursery terrors.
 
So, the Sage would have desired misfortune?
It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his
passionless and unshakeable soul.
 
9. But when he is out of himself, reason quenched by sickness or by magic arts?
 
If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why should he not
equally remain happy? No one rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep; no one counts up that time and
so denies that he has been happy all his life.
 
If they say that, failing consciousness, he is no longer the Sage, then they are no longer reasoning about the
Sage: but we do suppose a Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in the state of
felicity.
 
"Well, a Sage let him remain," they say, "still, having no sensation and not expressing his virtue in act, how
can he be happy?"
 
But a man unconscious of his health may be, none the less, healthy: a man may not be aware of his personal
attraction, but he remains handsome none the less: if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he be any the less
wise?
 
It may perhaps be urged that sensation and consciousness are essential to wisdom and that happiness is only
wisdom brought to act.
 
Now, this argument might have weight if prudence, wisdom, were something fetched in from outside: but
this is not so: wisdom is, in its essential nature, an Authentic-Existence, or rather is The Authentic-Existent-
and this Existent does not perish in one asleep or, to take the particular case presented to us, in the man out of
his mind: the Act of this Existent is continuous within him; and is a sleepless activity: the Sage, therefore,
even unconscious, is still the Sage in Act.
 
This activity is screened not from the man entire but merely from one part of him: we have here a parallel to
what happens in the activity of the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made known by the sensitive
faculty to the rest of the man: if our physical life really constituted the "We," its Act would be our Act: but, in
the fact, this physical life is not the "We"; the "We" is the activity of the Intellectual-Principle so that when
the Intellective is in Act we are in Act.
 
10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with
things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the
sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there not be an immediate activity of the
Intellectual-Principle and of the soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception? For, if
Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical, this "Earlier-than-perception" must be a thing having Act.
 
Let us explain the conditions under which we become conscious of this Intellective-Act.
 
When the Intellect is in upward orientation that [lower part of it] which contains [or, corresponds to] the life
of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and
shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place the image appears but, though the
mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists; so in the case of
the Soul; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and
Intellectual-Principles these images appear. Then, side by side with the primal knowledge of the activity of
the Rational and the Intellectual-Principles, we have also as it were a sense-perception of their operation.
 
When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body,
Reason and the Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by imagination.
 
In sum we may safely gather that while the Intellective-Act may be attended by the Imaging Principle, it is
not to be confounded with it.
 
And even in our conscious life we can point to many noble activities, of mind and of hand alike, which at the
time in no way compel our consciousness. A reader will often be quite unconscious when he is most intent:
in a feat of courage there can be no sense either of the brave action or of the fact that all that is done conforms
to the rules of courage. And so in cases beyond number.
 
So that it would even seem that consciousness tends to blunt the activities upon which it is exercised, and that
in the degree in which these pass unobserved they are purer and have more effect, more vitality, and that,
consequently, the Sage arrived at this state has the truer fulness of life, life not spilled out in sensation but
gathered closely within itself.
 
11. We shall perhaps be told that in such a state the man is no longer alive: we answer that these people show
themselves equally unable to understand his inner life and his happiness.
 
If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them to keep in mind a living Sage and, under these terms, to
enquire whether the man is in happiness: they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether he has the
happy life; they must not take away man and then look for the happiness of a man: once they allow that the
Sage lives within, they must not seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the outer world for the
object of his desires. To consider the outer world to be a field to his desire, to fancy the Sage desiring any
good external, would be to deny Substantial-Existence to happiness; for the Sage would like to see all men
prosperous and no evil befalling anyone; but though it prove otherwise, he is still content.
 
If it be admitted that such a desire would be against reason, since evil cannot cease to be, there is no escape
from agreeing with us that the Sage's will is set always and only inward.
 
12. The pleasure demanded for the life cannot be in the enjoyments of the licentious or in any gratifications of
the body- there is no place for these, and they stifle happiness- nor in any violent emotions- what could so
move the Sage?- it can be only such pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise
from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and the
Sage is present to himself: his pleasure, his contentment, stands, immovable.
 
Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life ever untroubled: his state is fixedly happy and nothing whatever
of all that is known as evil can set it awry- given only that he is and remains a Sage.
 
If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleasure in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is
looking for.
 
13. The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining
always fine, and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular cases and
things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without searching and thinking, but the one greatest
principle is ever present to him, like a part of his being- most of all present, should he be even a victim in the
much-talked-of Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite all that has been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an
agreeable lodging; but what cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the torture; in the Sage there is something
else as well, The Self-Gathered which, as long as it holds itself by main force within itself, can never be
robbed of the vision of the All-Good.
 
14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and body: the proof is that man can be
disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods.
 
It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the living-body: happiness is the possession
of the good of life: it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul- and not of all the Soul at that: for it
certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the
body.
 
A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of temperament, these surely do not make
felicity; in the excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and forced
more and more within their power. There must be a sort of counter-pressure in the other direction, towards
the noblest: the body must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the
appearances.
 
Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the
entire human race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could
not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will
lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away
by inattention to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will
not wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such troubles should not come to him
of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will desire neither
pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire
will be to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to
meet it; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their
contraries destroy or lessen it.
 
When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the negative take away?
 
15. But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is supposed to be naturally welcome, while
the other meets only with the very reverse: do we assert that they have an equal happiness?
 
We do, if they are equally wise.
What though the one be favoured in body and in all else that does not help towards wisdom, still less
towards virtue, towards the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to?
The man commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself that he is more truly happy than the
man without them: the utmost profusion of such boons would not help even to make a flute-player.
 
We discuss the happy man after our own feebleness; we count alarming and grave what his felicity takes
lightly: he would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such things
and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch
him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue;
the man is some sort of a half-thing.
 
As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps
are elsewhere, the Sage will attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory child within
him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance
of severity.
 
This does not make the Sage unfriendly or harsh: it is to himself and in his own great concern that he is the
Sage: giving freely to his intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of friends by his very union with
the Intellectual-Principle.
 
16. Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental,
dreading accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether; they
offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy
to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of
happiness; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true
happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess
happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That.
 
He can care for no other Term than That: all else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not
in expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention to the differing
conditions surrounding him as he lives here or there.
 
He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of
another order, not prevented from abandoning the body, necessarily leaving it at nature's hour, he himself
always the master to decide in its regard.
 
Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul's satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the
Term's sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which he tends and
bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he will
change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will
let it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the
instrument was given him in the beginning: he has found it useful until now, many a time.

 

Fifth Tractate

 
HAPPINESS AND EXTENSION OF TIME.
 
1. Is it possible to think that Happiness increases with Time, Happiness which is always taken as a present
thing?
 
The memory of former felicity may surely be ruled out of count, for Happiness is not a thing of words, but a
definite condition which must be actually present like the very fact and act of life.
 
2. It may be objected that our will towards living and towards expressive activity is constant, and that each
attainment of such expression is an increase in Happiness.
 
But in the first place, by this reckoning every to-morrow's well-being will be greater than to-day's, every later
instalment successively larger that an earlier; at once time supplants moral excellence as the measure of
felicity.
 
Then again the Gods to-day must be happier than of old: and their bliss, too, is not perfect, will never be
perfect. Further, when the will attains what it was seeking, it attains something present: the quest is always
for something to be actually present until a standing felicity is definitely achieved. The will to life which is
will to Existence aims at something present, since Existence must be a stably present thing. Even when the
act of the will is directed towards the future, and the furthest future, its object is an actually present having
and being: there is no concern about what is passed or to come: the future state a man seeks is to be a now to
him; he does not care about the forever: he asks that an actual present be actually present.
 
3. Yes, but if the well-being has lasted a long time, if that present spectacle has been a longer time before the
eyes?
 
If in the greater length of time the man has seen more deeply, time has certainly done something for him, but
if all the process has brought him no further vision, then one glance would give all he has had.
 
4. Still the one life has known pleasure longer than the other?
But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in with Happiness- unless indeed by pleasure is meant the unhindered
Act [of the true man], in which case this pleasure is simply our "Happiness." And even pleasure, though it
exist continuously, has never anything but the present; its past is over and done with.
 
5. We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, that if one man has been happy from first to last, another
only at the last, and a third, beginning with happiness, has lost it, their shares are equal?
 
This is straying from the question: we were comparing the happy among themselves: now we are asked to
compare the not-happy at the time when they are out of happiness with those in actual possession of
happiness. If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of happiness against men without it
and their advantage is always by something in the present.
 
6. Well, but take the unhappy man: must not increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness? Do not
all troubles- long-lasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type- yield a greater sum of misery in the
longer time? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time why should not time equally augment
happiness when all is well?
 
In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase: for
example, in a lingering malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought lower
and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there
would be no trouble but that of the present moment: we cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness
except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state- in the sense that, the evil in the
sufferer's condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of
ill-being then is due to the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time.
 
It may be pointed out also that this greater length of time is not a thing existent at any given moment; and
surely a "more" is not to be made out by adding to something actually present something that has passed
away.
 
No: true happiness is not vague and fluid: it is an unchanging state.
 
If there is in this matter any increase besides that of mere time, it is in the sense that a greater happiness is the
reward of a higher virtue: this is not counting up to the credit of happiness the years of its continuance; it is
simply noting the high-water mark once for all attained.
 
7. But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in the past to make the total, why do we not
reckon so in the case of time itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the present and call the
total greater? Why not suppose a quantity of happiness equivalent to a quantity of time? This would be no
more than taking it lap by lap to correspond with time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as an
indivisible, measurable only by the content of a given instant.
 
There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to be: we are merely counting what is past and
finished, as we might count the dead: but to treat past happiness as actually existent and as outweighing
present happiness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must be an achieved and existent state, whereas any
time over and apart from the present is nonexistent: all progress of time means the extinction of all the time
that has been.
 
Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of eternity that seeks to break up in its fragmentary flight the
permanence of its exemplar. Thus whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what stands permanent in
eternity is annihilated- saved only in so far as in some degree it still belongs to eternity, but wholly destroyed
if it be unreservedly absorbed into time.
 
If Happiness demands the possession of the good of life, it clearly has to do with the life of
Authentic-Existence for that life is the Best. Now the life of Authentic-Existence is measurable not by time
but by eternity; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any magnitude but is the unchangeable, the
indivisible, is timeless Being.
 
We must not muddle together Being and Non-Being, time and eternity, not even everlasting time with the
eternal; we cannot make laps and stages of an absolute unity; all must be taken together, wheresoever and
howsoever we handle it; and it must be taken at that, not even as an undivided block of time but as the Life of
Eternity, a stretch not made up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time.
 
8. It may be urged that the actual presence of past experiences, kept present by Memory, gives the advantage
to the man of the longer felicity.
 
But, Memory of what sort of experiences?
Memory either of formerly attained wisdom and virtue- in which case we have a better man and the
argument from memory is given up- or memory of past pleasures, as if the man that has arrived at felicity
must roam far and wide in search of gratifications and is not contented by the bliss actually within him.
 
And what is there pleasant in the memory of pleasure? What is it to recall yesterday's excellent dinner? Still
more ridiculous, one of ten years ago. So, too, of last year's morality.
 
9. But is there not something to be said for the memory of the various forms of beauty?
 
That is the resource of a man whose life is without beauty in the present, so that, for lack of it now, he grasps
at the memory of what has been.
 
10. But, it may be said, length of time produces an abundance of good actions missed by the man whose
attainment of the happy state is recent- if indeed we can think at all of a state of happiness where good actions
have been few.
 
Now to make multiplicity, whether in time or in action, essential to Happiness is to put it together by
combining non-existents, represented by the past, with some one thing that actually is. This consideration it
was that led us at the very beginning to place Happiness in the actually existent and on that basis to launch
our enquiry as to whether the higher degree was determined by the longer time. It might be thought that the
Happiness of longer date must surpass the shorter by virtue of the greater number of acts it included.
 
But, to begin with, men quite outside of the active life may attain the state of felicity, and not in a less but in a
greater degree than men of affairs.
 
Secondly, the good does not derive from the act itself but from the inner disposition which prompts the noble
conduct: the wise and good man in his very action harvests the good not by what he does but by what he is.
 
A wicked man no less than a Sage may save the country, and the good of the act is for all alike, no matter
whose was the saving hand. The contentment of the Sage does not hang upon such actions and events: it is
his own inner habit that creates at once his felicity and whatever pleasure may accompany it.
 
To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul's
expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is
Happiness.
 

Sixth Tractate

 
BEAUTY.
 
1. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations
of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves
above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character,
in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our
argument will bring to light.
 
What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in
sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul?
 
Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and
another for the bodiless? Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be?
 
Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by
something communicated, while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue.
 
The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being
body and being beautiful.
 
What, then, is this something that shows itself in certain material forms? This is the natural beginning of our
enquiry.
 
What is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls them, lures them,
towards it, and fills them with joy at the sight? If we possess ourselves of this, we have at once a standpoint
for the wider survey.
 
Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides,
a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all
else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned.
 
But think what this means.
Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will
have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an
aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout.
 
All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by
symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And
lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair?
 
In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone
is delicious in itself.
 
Again since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt
that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?
 
Turn to what is attractive in methods of life or in the expression of thought; are we to call in symmetry here?
What symmetry is to be found in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental pursuit?
 
What symmetry can there be in points of abstract thought?
The symmetry of being accordant with each other? But there may be accordance or entire identity where there
is nothing but ugliness: the proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the most
perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness of will; the accordance is complete.
 
Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how
does symmetry enter here? The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the
symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the
coalescence of the soul's faculties or purposes?
 
Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary?
 
2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material
things.
 
Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the
soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.
 
But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it sh