This Intellectual-Principle, if the term is to convey the truth, must be understood to be not a principle merely potential and not one maturing from unintelligence to intelligence- that would simply send us seeking, once more, a necessary prior- but a principle which is intelligence in actuality and in eternity. Now a principle whose wisdom is not borrowed must derive from itself any intellection it may make; and anything it may possess within itself it can hold only from itself: it follows that, intellective by its own resource and upon its own content, it is itself the very things on which its intellection acts. For supposing its essence to be separable from its intellection and the objects of its intellection to be not itself, then its essence would be unintellectual; and it would be intellectual not actually but potentially. The intellection and its object must then be inseparable- however the habit induced by our conditions may tempt us to distinguish, There too, the thinker from the thought. What then is its characteristic Act and what the intellection which makes knower and known here identical? Clearly, as authentic Intellection, it has authentic intellection of the authentically existent, and establishes their existence. Therefore it is the Authentic Beings. Consider: It must perceive them either somewhere else or within itself as its very self: the somewhere else is impossible- where could that be?- they are therefore itself and the content of itself. Its objects certainly cannot be the things of sense, as people think; no First could be of the sense-known order; for in things of sense the Idea is but an image of the authentic, and every Idea thus derivative and exiled traces back to that original and is no more than an image of it. Further, if the Intellectual-Principle is to be the maker of this All, it cannot make by looking outside itself to what does not yet exist. The Authentic Beings must, then, exist before this All, no copies made on a model but themselves archetypes, primals, and the essence of the Intellectual-Principle. We may be told that Reason-Principles suffice : but then these, clearly, must be eternal; and if eternal, if immune, then they must exist in an Intellectual-Principle such as we have indicated, a principle earlier than condition, than nature, than soul, than anything whose existence is potential for contingent]. The Intellectual-Principle, therefore, is itself the authentic existences, not a knower knowing them in some sphere foreign to it. The Authentic Beings, thus, exist neither before nor after it: it is the primal legislator to Being or, rather, is itself the law of Being. Thus it is true that "Intellectual and Being are identical"; in the immaterial the knowledge of the thing is the thing. And this is the meaning of the dictum "I sought myself," namely as one of the Beings: it also bears on reminiscence. For none of the Beings is outside the Intellectual-Principle or in space; they remain for ever in themselves, accepting no change, no decay, and by that are the authentically existent. Things that arise and fall away draw on real being as something to borrow from; they are not of the real; the true being is that on which they draw. It is by participation that the sense-known has the being we ascribe to it; the underlying nature has taken its shape from elsewhere; thus bronze and wood are shaped into what we see by means of an image introduced by sculpture or carpentry; the craft permeates the materials while remaining integrally apart from the material and containing in itself the reality of statue or couch. And it is so, of course, with all corporeal things. This universe, characteristically participant in images, shows how the image differs from the authentic beings: against the variability of the one order, there stands the unchanging quality of the other, self-situate, not needing space because having no magnitude, holding an existent intellective and self-sufficing. The body-kind seeks its endurance in another kind; the Intellectual-Principle, sustaining by its marvellous Being, the things which of themselves must fall, does not itself need to look for a staying ground.

For Intellect existeth not without the Intelligible; apart from it, it subsisteth not.

Farther still, to the former that which is highest and that which is incomprehensible pertain, and also that which is better than all measure, and is...

Those Natures are both Intellectual and Intelligible, which, themselves possessing Intellection, are the objects of Intelligence to others.

In this Consideration you may find what I understand by a Principle. For a Principle is nothing else but a new Birth, a new Life: Besides, there is...

Leaving, therefore, these particulars, you wish in the next place that I would unfold to you “ What the Egyptians conceive the first cause to be;...

By Intellect he containeth the Intelligibles, and introduceth Sense into the Worlds.

And this third Principle is the second's proper own, not separate, but one Essence in it, [and with it,] all over, and yet there is a Birth between th...

As, then, Knowledge (episthmh) is an intellectual state, from which results the act of knowing, and becomes apprehension irrefragable by reason; so...

And it is requisite, that it should not first investigate the principles of itself, but the common principles of all beings. For wisdom so subsists wi...

And the knowledge pre-existing of each object of investigation is sometimes merely of the essence, while its functions are unknown (as of stones, and ...

Hereupon you are to know, that the Matrix in the second Principle (which yet has its Original and eternal Root in the first Principle) is but merely...

By Intellect He containeth the Intelligibles and introduceth the Soul into the Worlds.

Now if you consider what preserves all thus, and whence it is, then you find the eternal Birth that has no Beginning, and you find the Original of the...

Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself,...

And with respect to such things as become known by a reasoning process, we shall leave no one of these without a perfect demonstration. But in all thi...

For through him ( the Delimiter ) knowledge of it ( the Invisible Spirit ) became available, since he ( the Delimiter ) is the one who knows what it (...

For every Creature looks but into its Mother that is fixed [or predominant] in it. The material Creature sees a material Substance, but an immaterial ...

But all Intellect understandeth the Deity, for Intellect existeth not without the Intelligible, neither apart from Intellect doth the Intelligible sub...

The deep Gate of Life.

3. “Man was generated and constituted, for the purpose of contemplating the reason of the whole of nature, and in order that, being himself the work...