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Updated: June 2, 2025
The truth which is next to this in dignity is that which proceeds from intelligibles, and illuminates the intellectual orders, and which an essence unfigured, uncolored, and without contact, first receives, where also the plain of truth is situated, as it is written in the Phaedrus.
These are so intimately bound up with the life of the body that they die with its death. The reason on the other hand, which has to do with immaterial ideas, or intelligibles as they called them, is eternal and is not the form of the body. It is a unitary immaterial substance and is not affected by the life or death of the body.
For the essence of intelligibles being indivisible, and in the same respect ever the same, is contracted into a little, and pure; but an essence divisible and running through bodies constitutes the sensible part. Now what is immaterial is limited; but body in respect of matter is infinite and unlimited, and it becomes sensible only when it is limited by partaking of the intelligible.
Hence, according to his doctrine, the highest truth is characterized by unity, and is the light proceeding from the good, which imparts purity, as he says in the Philebus, and union, as he says in the Republic, to intelligibles.
The acquired intellect gives these intelligibles to the soul through the possible intellect, and is intermediate between the latter and the Active Intellect, which is one of the separate Intelligences above soul. The Active Intellect watches over the rational animal that he may attain to the happiness which his nature permits.
However that may be, the deeper we go into the Spinozistic conception of the "inadequate," as related to the "adequate," the more we feel ourselves moving in the direction of Aristotelianism just as the Leibnizian monads, in proportion as they mark themselves out the more clearly, tend to approximate to the Intelligibles of Plotinus.
Though too it energizes from itself, and contains intelligibles in its essence, yet from its alliance to the discursive nature of soul, and its inclination to that which is divisible, it falls short of the perfection of an intellectual essence and energy profoundly indivisible and united, and the intelligibles which it contains degenerate from the transcendently fulged and self-luminous nature of first intelligibles.
For one is an ascent from sensibles to the first intelligibles; a second is an ascent through things demonstrated and subdemonstrated, to undemonstrated and immediate propositions; and a third proceeds from hypothesis to unhypothetical principles. Of the first of these species, Plato has given a most admirable specimen in the speech of Diotima in the Banquet.
But the soul, partaking of mind, reason, and harmony, was not only the work of God, but part of him not only made by him, but begot by him. The first stands for the genus of intelligibles, comprehending in the first subdivision the primitive forms, in the second the mathematics.
Aristotle, therefore, very properly compares the intelligibles of our intellect to colors, because these require the splendour of the sun, and denominates an intellect of this kind, intellect in capacity, both on account of its subordination to an essential intellect, and because it is from a separate intellect that it receives the full perfection of its nature.
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