FORE:To explain how the Nous could be identical with a number of distinct ideas was a difficult problem. We shall have to show at a more advanced stage of our exposition how Plotinus endeavoured to solve it with the help of Platos Sophist. In the essay where his theory is first put forward, he cuts the knot by asserting that each idea virtually contains every other, while each in its actual and separate existence is, so to speak, an independent Nous. But correlation is not identity; and to say that each idea thinks itself is not to explain how the same subject can think, and in thinking be identical with all. The personal identity of the thinking subject still stands in unreconciled opposition to the multitude of thoughts which it entertains, whether successively or in a single intuition. Of two things one: either the unity of the Nous or the diversity of its ideas must be sacrificed. Plotinus evades the alternative by a kind of three-card trick. Sometimes his ideal unity is to be found under the notion of convergence to a common centre, sometimes under the notion of participation in a common property, sometimes under the notion of mutual equivalence.
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