{"collection":"Classics","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/cla/plotenn/enn420.htm","path":"cla/plotenn/enn420.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/enn420.htm","text":"5. As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle, exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once for all stands linked a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy.\nBringing itself close to the divine Intellect, becoming, as it were, one with this, it seeks still further: What Being, now, has engendered this God, what is the Simplex preceding this multiple; what the cause at once of its existence and of its existing as a manifold; what the source of this Number, this Quantity?\nNumber, Quantity, is not primal: obviously before even duality, there must stand the unity.\nThe Dyad is a secondary; deriving from unity, it finds in unity the determinant needed by its native indetermination: once there is any determination, there is Number, in the sense, of course, of the real [the archetypal] Number. And the soul is such a number or quantity. For the Primals are not masses or magnitudes; all of that gross order is later, real only to the sense-thought; even in seed the effective reality is not the moist substance but the unseen- that is to say Number [as the determinant of individual being] and the Reason-Principle [of the product to be].\nThus by what we call the Number and the Dyad of that higher realm, we mean Reason Principles and the Intellectual-Principle: but while the Dyad is, as regards that sphere, undetermined- representing, as it were, the underly [or Matter] of The One- the later Number [or Quantity]- that which rises from the Dyad [Intellectual-Principle] and The One- is not Matter to the later existents but is their forming-Idea, for all of them take shape, so to speak, from the ideas rising within this. The determination of the Dyad is brought about partly from its object- The One- and partly from itself, as is the case with all vision in the act of sight: intellection [the Act of the Dyad] is vision occupied upon The One.","title":"The Enneads of Plotinus: THE FIFTH ENNEAD: FIRST TRACTATE: Section 5","type":"page"}