Plotinus: Enneads - AwardSpace

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
Reasoning­Life 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 Good­of­Life. 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.