Note 261 — SECOND ENNEAD, BOOK THREE. Whether Astrology is of any Value.198
Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie translation
Plotinos is here harking back to his very earliest writing, 1.6, where, before his monistic adventure with Porphyry, he had, under the Numenian influence of Amelius, constructed his system out of a combination of the doctrines of Plato (about the ideas), Aristotle (the distinctions of form and matter and of potentiality and actualization), and the Stoic (the "reasons," "seminal reasons," action and passions, and "hexis," or "habit," the inorganic informing principle). Of these, Numenius seems to have lacked the Aristotelian doctrines, although he left Plato's single triple-functioned soul for Aristotle's combination of souls of various degrees (fr. 53). Plotinos, therefore, seems to have distinguished in every object two elements, matter and form (ii. 4.1; ii. 5.2). Matter inheres potentially in all beings (ii. 5.3, 4) and therefore is non-being, ugliness, and evil (i. 6.6). Form is the actualization (K. Steinhart's Melemata Plotiniana, p. 31; ii. 5.2); that is, the essence and power (vi. 4.9), which are inseparable. Form alone possesses real existence, beauty and goodness. Form has four degrees: idea, reason, nature and habit; which degrees are the same as those of thought and life (Porphyry, Principles 12, 13, 14). The idea is distinguished into "idea" or intelligible Form, or "eidos," principle of human intellectual life. Reason is 1, divine (theios logos, i. 6, 2; the reason that comes from the universal Soul, iv. 3.10), 2, human (principle of the rational life, see Ficinus on ii. 6.2); 3, the seminal or generative reason (principle of the life of sensation, which imparts to the body the sense-form, "morphé," 3.12-end; Bouillet, i. 365). Now reasons reside in the soul (ii. 4.12), and are simultaneously essences and powers (vi. 4.9), and as powers produce the nature, and as essences, the habits. Now nature ("physis") is the principle of the vegetative life, and habit, "hexis," Numenius, fr. 55, see ii. 4.16, is the principle of unity of inorganic things.