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

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.

666/700 (page 572)

$a promptitude, and converging sympathy ; from which disposition it is requisite to be purified. This, however, will be effected by admitting necessary 'pleasures, and the sensations of them, merely as remedies, or as a liberation from pain, in order that [the rational parC\ may not be impeded \in its energies.] Pain also must be taken away. But if this is not possible, it must be mildly diminished. And it will be diminished, if the soul is not copassive with it. Anger, likewise, must as much as possible be taken away ; and must by no means be premeditated. But if it cannot be entirely removed, deliberate choice must not be mingled with it, but the unpremeditated motion must be the impulse of the irrational part. That however which is unpremeditated is imbecile and small. All fear, likewise, must be expelled. For he who requires this purification, will fear nothing. Here, however, if it should take place, it will be unpremeditated. Anger therefore and fear must be used for the purpose of admonition. But the desire of every thing base must be exterminated. Such a one also, so far as he is a cathartic philosopher, will not desire meats and drinks. Neither must there be the unpremedi¬ tated in natural venereal connexions; but if this should take place, it must only be as far as to that precipitate imagination which energizes in sleep. In short, the intel¬ lectual soul itself of the purified man, must be liberated from all these [corporeal propensities.] He must like¬ wise endeavour that what is moved to the irrational nature$