Plotinus: Enneads - AwardSpace

statement worthy of deliberation: some further enquiry must be
made, also, as to the necessity of any sequel to the First.
16. We have, of course, already seen that a secondary must
follow upon the First, and that this is a power immeasurably
fruitful; and we indicated that this truth is confirmed by the
entire order of things since there is nothing, not even in the
lowest ranks, void of the power of generating. We have now to
add that, since things engendered tend downwards and not
upwards and, especially, move towards multiplicity, the first
principle of all must be less a manifold than any.
That which engenders the world of sense cannot itself be a
sense­world; it must be the Intellect and the Intellectual world;
similarly, the prior which engenders the Intellectual­Principle
and the Intellectual world cannot be either, but must be
something of less multiplicity. The manifold does not rise from
the manifold: the intellectual multiplicity has its source in what
is not manifold; by the mere fact of being manifold, the thing is
not the first principle: we must look to something earlier.
All must be grouped under a unity which, as standing outside
of all multiplicity and outside of any ordinary simplicity, is the
veritably and essentially simplex.
Still, how can a Reason­Principle [the Intellectual],
characteristically a manifold, a total, derive from what is
obviously no Reason­Principle?
But how, failing such origin in the simplex, could we escape
[what cannot be accepted] the derivation of a Reason­Principle
from a Reason­Principle?
And how does the secondarily good [the imaged Good] derive
from The Good, the Absolute? What does it hold from the
Absolute Good to entitle it to the name?
Similarity to the prior is not enough, it does not help towards
goodness; we demand similarity only to an actually existent
Good: the goodness must depend upon derivation from a Prior
of such a nature that the similarity is desirable because that
Prior is good, just as the similarity would be undesirable if the
Prior were not good.
Does the similarity with the Prior consist, then, in a voluntary
resting upon it?
It is rather that, finding its condition satisfying, it seeks
nothing: the similarity depends upon the all­sufficiency of
what it possesses; its existence is agreeable because all is