nce exclusive of
all process, and that if we do so we cut off all hope of showing how
the world has issued from the Absolute. It is just the same with
Plotinus. There is in his system the absolute contradiction that the
One is regarded, on the one hand, as source of the world, and on the
other as so exalted above the world that all relationship to the world
is impossible. We come, therefore, to a complete deadlock at this
point. We can get no further. We can find no way to pass from God to
the world. We are involved in a hopeless, logical contradiction. But
Plotinus was a mystic, and logical absurdities do not trouble mystics.
Being unable to explain how the world can possibly arise out of the
vacuum of the One, he has recourse, in the oriental style, to poetry
and metaphors. God, by reason of His super-perfection, "overflows"
Himself, and this overflow becomes the world. He "sends forth a beam"
from Himself. As flame emits light, as snow cold, so do all lower
beings issue from the One. Thus, without solving the difficulty,
Plotinus deftly smothers it in flowery phrases, and quietly passes on
his way.

The first emanation from the One is called the Nous. This Nous is
thought, mind, reason. We have seen that Plato regarded the Absolute
itself as thought. For Plotinus, however, thought is derivative. The
One is beyond thought, and thought issues forth from the One {375} as
first emanation. The Nous is not discursive thought, however. It is
not in time. It is immediate apprehension, or intuition. Its object is
twofold. Firstly, it thinks the One, though its thought thereof is
necessarily inadequate. Secondly, it thinks itself. It is the thought
of thought, like Aristotle's God. It corresponds to Plato's world of
Ideas. The Ideas of all things exist in the Nous, and not only the
Ideas of classes, but of every individual thing.

From the Nous, as second emanation, proceeds the world-soul. This is,
in Erdmann's phrase, a sort of faded-out copy of the Nous, and it is
outside time, incorporeal, and indivisible. It works rationally, but
yet is not conscious. It has a two-fold aspect, inclining upwards to
the Nous on the one hand, and downwards to the world of nature on the
other. It produces out of itself the individual souls which inhabit
the world.

The idea of emanation is essentially a poetical metaphor, and not a
rational concept. It is conceived poetically by Plotinus as resembling
light which radiates from a bright ce