Enneads III.9: Fragments About the Soul, the Intelligence, and the Good
Third Ennead, Book Nine
1. Plato says, "The intelligence sees the ideas comprised within the existing animal." He adds, "The demiurge conceived that this produced animal was to comprise beings similar and equally numerous to those that the intelligence sees in the existing animal." Does Plato mean that the ideas are anterior to intelligence, and that they already exist when intelligence thinks them? We shall first have to examine whether the animal is identical with intelligence, or is something different. Now that which observes is intelligence; so the Animal himself should then be called, not intelligence, but the intelligible. Shall we therefrom conclude that the things contemplated by intelligence are outside of it? If so, intelligence possesses only images, instead of the realities themselves--that is, if we admit that the realities exist up there; for, according to Plato, the veritable reality is up there within the essence, in which everything exists in itself.
(This consequence is not necessary). Doubtless Intelligence and the intelligible are different; they are nevertheless not separated. Nothing hinders us from saying that both form but one, and that they are separated only by thought; for essence is one, but it is partly that which is thought, and partly that which thinks. When Plato says that intelligence sees the ideas, he means that it contemplates the ideas, not in another principle, but in itself, because it possesses the intelligible within itself. The intelligible may also be the intelligence, but intelligence in the state of repose, of unity, of calm, while Intelligence, which perceives this Intelligence which has remained within itself, is the actuality born therefrom, and which contemplates it. By contemplating the intelligible, intelligence is assimilated thereto and is its intelligence, because Intelligence thinks the intelligible it itself becomes intelligible by becoming assimilated thereto, and on the other hand also something thought.
It is (intelligence), therefore, which conceived the design in producing in the universe the four kinds of living beings (or elements), which it beholds up there. Mysteriously, however, Plato here seems to present the conceiving-principle as different from the other two principles, while others think that these three principles, the animal itself (the universal Soul), Intelligence and the conceiving principle form but a single thing. Shall we here, as elsewhere, admit that opinions differ, and that everybody conceives the three principles in his own manner?