but on the other hand there is the knowledge handling the intellectual objects and this is the authentic knowledge; it enters the reasoning soul from the Intellectual-Principle and has no dealing with anything in sense.Being true knowledge it actually is everything of which it takes cognisance; it carries as its own content the intellectual act and the intellectual object since it carries the Intellectual-Principle which actually is the primals and is always self-present and is in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquiring or traversing the remote- for all such experience belongs to soul- but always self-gathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern creating things by the act of knowing them.
Not by its thinking God does God come to be; not by its thinking Movement does Movement arise.Hence it is an error to call the Ideas intellections in the sense that, upon an intellectual act in this Principle, one such Idea or another is made to exist or exists.No:
the object of this intellection must exist before the intellective act [must be the very content not the creation of the Intellectual-Principle].How else could that Principle come to know it: certainly not [as an external] by luck or by haphazard search.
8.If, then, the Intellection is an act upon the inner content [of a perfect unity], that content is at once the Idea [as object:
eidos] and the Idea itself [as concept: idea].
What, then, is that content?
An Intellectual-Principle and an Intellective Essence, no concept distinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle, each actually being that Principle.The Intellectual-Principle entire is the total of the Ideas, and each of them is the [entire]
Intellectual-Principle in a special form.Thus a science entire is the total of the relevant considerations each of which, again, is a member of the entire science, a member not distinct in space yet having its individual efficacy in a total.
This Intellectual-Principle, therefore, is a unity while by that possession of itself it is, tranquilly, the eternal abundance.
If the Intellectual-Principle were envisaged as preceding Being, it would at once become a principle whose expression, its intellectual Act, achieves and engenders the Beings: but, since we are compelled to think of existence as preceding that which knows it, we can but think that the Beings are the actual content of the knowing principle and that the very act, the intellection, is inherent to the Beings, as fire stands equipped from the beginning with fire-act; in this conception, the Beings contain the Intellectual-Principle as one and the same with themselves, as their own activity.Thus, Being is itself an activity: there is one activity, then, in both or, rather, both are one thing.
Being, therefore, and the Intellectual-Principle are one Nature:
the Beings, and the Act of that which is, and the Intellectual-Principle thus constituted, all are one: and the resultant Intellections are the Idea of Being and its shape and its act.
It is our separating habit that sets the one order before the other: for there is a separating intellect, of another order than the true, distinct from the intellect, inseparable and unseparating, which is Being and the universe of things.
9.What, then, is the content- inevitably separated by our minds- of this one Intellectual-Principle? For there is no resource but to represent the items in accessible form just as we study the various articles constituting one science.
This universe is a living thing capable of including every form of life; but its Being and its modes are derived from elsewhere; that source is traced back to the Intellectual-Principle: it follows that the all-embracing archetype is in the Intellectual-Principle, which, therefore, must be an intellectual Kosmos, that indicated by Plato in the phrase "The living existent."Given the Reason-Principle [the outgoing divine Idea] of a certain living thing and the Matter to harbour this seed-principle, the living thing must come into being: in the same way once there exists- an intellective Nature, all powerful, and with nothing to check it- since nothing intervenes between it and that which is of a nature to receive it- inevitably the higher imprints form and the lower accepts, it.The recipient holds the Idea in division, here man, there sun, while in the giver all remains in unity.
10.All, then, that is present in the sense realm as Idea comes from the Supreme.But what is not present as Idea, does not.Thus of things conflicting with nature, none is There: the inartistic is not contained in the arts; lameness is not in the seed; for a lame leg is either inborn through some thwarting of the Reason-principle or is a marring of the achieved form by accident.To that Intellectual Kosmos belong qualities, accordant with Nature, and quantities; number and mass; origins and conditions; all actions and experiences not against nature; movement and repose, both the universals and the particulars: but There time is replaced by eternity and space by its intellectual equivalent, mutual inclusiveness.
In that Intellectual Kosmos, where all is one total, every entity that can be singled out is an intellective essence and a participant in life: thus, identity and difference, movement and rest with the object resting or moving, essence and quality, all have essential existence.For every real being must be in actuality not merely in potentiality and therefore the nature of each essence is inherent in it.
