The soul is a stranger among the things of sense, into which it has "come down." From the desire of Soul to create after the pattern of Spirit, "the whole world which we know arose and took its shapes." The universal soul is the creator and providence of the visible world, which is in it, rather than the soul being in the world. "There is nothing between soul and spirit except that spirit imparts and soul receives. But even the Matter of Spirit is beautiful and of spiritual form." "There is nothing Yonder that is not also Here." Plotinus therefore blames the half-Christian Gnostics, who despise the visible world and are blind to its beauties. Souls cannot be divided quantitatively; "all souls are one." In the spiritual world there is distinction without separa tion; individuality is preserved, but all spirits are transparent to each other. Even on earth there is a "faint sympathy" which connects all beings together, a pale reflection of the complete unity in plurality which prevails Yonder. The character of the soul depends on the sphere in which it voluntarily moves. If it chooses to live among the shadows of the true, it forfeits its birthright, and is "lost," so far as a divine being can be lost. There is a higher soul which never consents to sin, and remains in the eternal world. (Here the school was to differ. Later Neo platonists asked, "If the will sins, how can the soul be im peccable?") The soul neither comes into existence nor perishes; "nothing that possesses real being can ever perish." But souls that have lived unrighteously will be punished by being reincarnated in the bodies of lower animals; the soul will also be chastened by its daemon or guardian angel. It is not quite clear whether every soul must at last find deliverance from its chains. The world Yonder is the heaven of Neoplatonism. It is the realm of spiritual existence, in which the ultimate and eternal values—Truth, Good ness and Beauty—are fully realized and fully operative. It con sists in the unity of Nous, Noesis and Noeta, in which the whole nature of the Absolute is manifested. It is essentially a kingdom of values, but of values which are fully realized. It is eternal, not as existing through an infinite series of moments, but as belonging to the divine life, of which indestructibility is an attribute. The world reflects in its everlastingness the eternity of its archetype. There is no change or progress Yonder, since the perfect cannot receive augmentation; but there is unceasing life and movement, which on the lower side is manifested in per petual creativeness. The lower orders of being proceed from the higher in a constant stream, though the higher loses nothing in the process of creation. The lower is immanent in the higher, not the higher in the lower. Nothing that takes place in time can affect the essential nature of eternity.
The duality in unity of the spiritual world points to an absolute unity behind it. This unity, though the necessary culmination of the dialectic, is beyond knowledge and existence, and is revealed to experience only in the mystical trance. The "soul become spirit" cannot rest even in this state of blessedness; it is impelled by its inner nature to aspire still further, "always attaining and always striving upward." Plotinus is convinced that in the mystical state we have actually an experience of formless in tuition. This is, it is needless to say, the testimony of all the mystics, of every age, country and creed. The mystical ascent seems to those who pass through it to be a progressive stripping off of everything that is alien to the purest nature of the soul, which cannot enter into the Holy of Holies while any trace of earthliness still clings to it. Hence the constant reiteration of such symbols as nakedness, nothingness and darkness. Plotinus in the well-known sentence with which the Enneads as arranged by Porphyry end, defines it as "a flight of the alone to the Alone." He gives us several eloquent descriptions of the mystical trance, drawn evidently from intimate personal experience; but like other mystics he knows that it is impossible to utter the ineffable, and repeats cautions like "The vision is for him who will see it"; "he who has seen it knows what I say." It is part of the fundamental sanity of Plotinus that he always speaks of the vision of the One as an exceedingly rare experience.
It is the consummation of a life-long quest of the highest, to be earned only by intense contemplation and unceasing self-dis cipline. He says nothing of supernatural favours granted for their encouragement to young aspirants. Nor are there any traces of those attempts to force the pace which in many mystics pro duce the terrible reactions which are described as the dark night of the soul. This sense of dereliction, which fills so large a place in the records of the mysticism of the cloister, may have some connection with a deeper sense of guilt and sinfulness than the Neoplatonists ever felt; but it is partly the effect of nervous overstrain and of severe mortification of the body, which Plato nism has never encouraged. Plotinus, as we have seen, lived the active and sociable life of a professor among his pupils; his habits were austerely simple, but neither he nor his disciples tortured themselves like Heinrich Suso and many other Catholic saints. The combination of healthy asceticism with humanism is the hall-mark of Platonists in all times.
The ethical scheme of Plotinus falls, like everything else in his philosophy, under three heads—purification, enlightenment and unification. The "political virtues," which include all the conduct expected of a good citizen, are the preliminary but in dispensable prelude to the course. It was not to be expected that any writer in the 3rd century of our era should show much interest in what we call social questions, which occupied the attention of Plato and Aristotle. The special task of philosophy in that dis tracted age was to isolate religion in its purity, detaching it from all that was local and temporal, and bringing to light its inner most essence. To have done this is an achievement of permanent value, and we must not blame Plotinus for his apparent indiffer ence to the misfortunes which were threatening his country. But, like all the ancients, he does not sufficiently emphasize our need of our fellow-men to develop the best in human nature. The bravest of the Greeks could never renounce the hope of making himself invulnerable.
Neoplatonism culminates in Plotinus. Of his successors, Proclus alone was a thinker of the first rank, and in Proclus the system is intellectualized and scholasticized. The later history of this type of religious thought and practice is mainly within Christianity. As a philosophy, it was restated with acumen by Scotus, Erigena and Meister Eckhart ; but many of the post-Kantians are deeply indebted to Plotinus, and Troeltsch is probably right in thinking that even in the future Christian philosophy must continue to be largely Plotinian. The Church carried off this Hymettian honey to its hive just at the time when the intellectual formulation of the victorious creed was taking its permanent shape.
(W. R. I.) Enneads of Plotinus were first made known in the Latin translation of Marsilio Ficino (Florence, 1492) which was reprinted at Basle in 1580, with the Greek text of Petrus Perna. Later editions by Creuzer and Moser ("Didot" series, , A. Kirchhoff (1856), H. F. Muller (I878-8o), R. Volkmann (1883-84). There is an English translation of selected portions by Thomas Taylor, re-edited in Bohn's Philosophical Library (1895, with introduction and bibliography by G. R. S. Mead). Translation of the whole (except Ennead vi., not yet published (in 1928) by S. Mackenna.
On Plotinus generally see article in Suidas; Eunapius, Vitae sophis tarum; and above all the Vita Plotini by his pupil Porphyry. Among modern works, see the treatises on the school of Alexandria by J. F. Simon, i. (1845), and R. Vacherot (1846) ; A. Richter, Ueher Leben and Geistesentwicklung des Plotin (Halle, 1864-67) ; T. Whittaker, The Neoplatonists (19o1) ; A. Drews, Plotin and der Untergang der antiken Weltanschauung (1907) ; E. Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1904), ii. 210-157 ; W. R. Inge, The Philo sophy of Plotinus (2 vols., 1918; 3rd ed. revised, 1928) ; F. Heinemann, Plotin (1921). A detailed account of Plotinus's philosophical system and an estimate of its importance will be found in the article NE0 PLATONISM, the works above referred to, and the histories of philo sophy. For his list of categories, see CATEGORIES ; also LoGos; MYSTI CISM ; MAGIC.