Note 65 — SIXTH ENNEAD, BOOK SEVEN. How Ideas Multiplied, and the Good.65

Bouillet explains that in this book Plotinos summated all that Plato had to say of the Ideas and of their dependence on the Good, in the Timaeus, Philebus, Phaedrus, the Republic, the Banquet, and the Alcibiades; correcting this summary by the reflections of Aristotle, in Met. xii. But Plotinos advances beyond both Plato and Aristotle in going beyond Intelligence to the supreme Good. (See Sec. 37.) This treatise might well have been written at the instigation of Porphyry, who desired to understand Plotinos's views on this great subject.