Note 317 — FIRST ENNEAD, BOOK SEVEN. Of the First Good, and of the Other Goods.317

Bouillet observes that this book is only a feeble outline of some of the ideas developed in vi. 7, 8, and 9. The biographical significance of this might be as follows. As in the immediately preceding books Plotinos was harking back to Numenius's doctrines, he may have wished to reconcile the two divergent periods, the Porphyrian monism of vi. 7 and 8, with the earlier Amelian dualism of vi. 9. This was nothing derogatory to him; for it is well known that there was a difference between the eclectic monism of the young Plato of the Republic, and the more logical dualism of the older Plato of the Laws. This latter was represented by Numenius and Amelius; the former—combined with Aristotelian and Stoic elements—by Porphyry. Where Plato could not decide, why should we expect Plotinos to do so? And, as a matter of fact, the world also has never been able to decide, so long as it remained sincere, and did not deceive itself with sophistries, as did Hegel. Kant also had his "thing-in-itself"—indeed, he did little more than to develop the work of Plotinos.