Select works of Plotinus ... and extracts from the treatise of Synesius on providence / Translated from the Greek. With an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. By Thomas Taylor.

  • Plotinus
Date:
1817
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Select works of Plotinus ... and extracts from the treatise of Synesius on providence / Translated from the Greek. With an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. By Thomas Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    661/700 (page 567)
    being surveyed io the refraining from corporeal actions, and avoiding sympathies with the body. For these are the virtues of the soul elevating itself to true being. The political virtues, therefore, adorn the mortal man, and are the forerunners of purifications. For it is necessary that he who is adorned by these, should abstain from doing any thing precedaneously in conjunction with body. Flence in purifications, not to opine with body, but to energize alone, gives subsistence to prudence; which derives its perfection through energizing intellectually with purity. But not to be similarly passive with the body, constitutes temperance. Not to fear a departure from body as into something void, and nonentity, gives subsistence to fortitude. But when reason and intellect are the leaders, and there is no resistance [from the irra¬ tional part,] justice is produced. The disposition there¬ fore, according to the political virtues, is surveyed in the moderation of the passions; having for its end to live as man conformable to nature. But the disposition accord¬ ing to the theoretic virtues, is beheld in apathy the end of which is a similitude to God. “ Since, however, of purification one kind consists in purifying, but another pertains to those that are purified, 1 This philosophic apathy is not, as is stupidly supposed by most of the present day, insensibility, but a perfect subjugation of the passions to reason.