Plotinus: The Enneads

Stephen MacKenna’s translation of The Enneads of Plotinus (1926), complete in all six Enneads, prefaced by Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus. Each tractate is a separate reading page below.

This text is divided into the following 55 parts (also listed in the sidebar):

• Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work
• First Ennead, First Tractate: The Animate and the Man
• First Ennead, Second Tractate: On Virtue
• First Ennead, Third Tractate: On Dialectic [The Upward Way]
• First Ennead, Fourth Tractate: On True Happiness
• First Ennead, Fifth Tractate: Happiness and Extension of Time
• First Ennead, Sixth Tractate: Beauty
• First Ennead, Seventh Tractate: On the Primal Good and Secondary Forms of Good [Otherwise, “On Happiness”]
• First Ennead, Eighth Tractate: On the Nature and Source of Evil
• First Ennead, Ninth Tractate: “THE REASONED DISMISSAL”. “You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth…” [taking something with it]. For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it; then it makes no departure; it simply finds itself free. But how does the body come to be separated?
• Second Ennead, First Tractate: On the Kosmos or on the Heavenly System
• Second Ennead, Second Tractate: The Heavenly Circuit
• Second Ennead, Third Tractate: Are the Stars Causes?
• Second Ennead, Fourth Tractate: Matter in its Two Kinds
• Second Ennead, Fifth Tractate: On Potentiality and Actuality
• Second Ennead, Sixth Tractate: Quality and Form-idea
• Second Ennead, Seventh Tractate: On Complete Transfusion
• Second Ennead, Eighth Tractate: Why Distant Objects Appear Small
• Second Ennead, Ninth Tractate: Against Those That Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to Be Evil: [Generally Quoted as “Against the Gnostics”]
• Third Ennead, First Tractate: Fate
• Third Ennead, Second Tractate: On Providence (1)
• Third Ennead, Third Tractate: On Providence (2)
• Third Ennead, Fourth Tractate: Our Tutelary Spirit
• Third Ennead, Fifth Tractate: On Love
• Third Ennead, Sixth Tractate: The Impassivity of the Unembodied
• Third Ennead, Seventh Tractate: Time and Eternity
• Third Ennead, Eighth Tractate: Nature Contemplation and the One
• Third Ennead, Ninth Tractate: Detached Considerations
• Fourth Ennead, First Tractate: On the Essence of the Soul (1)
• Fourth Ennead, Second Tractate: On the Essence of the Soul (2)
• Fourth Ennead, Third Tractate: Problems of the Soul (1)
• Fourth Ennead, Fourth Tractate: Problems of the Soul (2)
• Fourth Ennead, Fifth Tractate: Problems of the Soul (3). [Also Entitled “On Sight”]
• Fourth Ennead, Sixth Tractate: Perception and Memory
• Fourth Ennead, Seventh Tractate: The Immortality of the Soul
• Fourth Ennead, Eighth Tractate: The Soul’s Descent into Body
• Fourth Ennead, Ninth Tractate: Are All Souls One?
• Fifth Ennead, First Tractate: The Three Initial Hypostases
• Fifth Ennead, Second Tractate: The Origin and Order of the Beings. Following on the First
• Fifth Ennead, Third Tractate: The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent
• Fifth Ennead, Fourth Tractate: How the Secondaries Rise from the First: and on the One
• Fifth Ennead, Fifth Tractate: That the Intellectual Beings Are Not Outside the Intellectual-principle: and on the Nature of the Good
• Fifth Ennead, Sixth Tractate: That the Principle Transcending Being Has No Intellectual Act. What Being Has Intellection Primally and What Being Has It Secondarily
• Fifth Ennead, Seventh Tractate: Is There an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?
• Fifth Ennead, Eighth Tractate: On the Intellectual Beauty
• Fifth Ennead, Ninth Tractate: The Intellectual-principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic Existence
• Sixth Ennead, First Tractate: On the Kinds of Being- (1)
• Sixth Ennead, Second Tractate: On the Kinds of Being (2)
• Sixth Ennead, Third Tractate: On the Kinds of Being (3)
• Sixth Ennead, Fourth Tractate: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (1)
• Sixth Ennead, Fifth Tractate: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (2)
• Sixth Ennead, Sixth Tractate: On Numbers
• Sixth Ennead, Seventh Tractate: How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-forms Came into Being: and upon the Good
• Sixth Ennead, Eighth Tractate: On Free-will and the Will of the One
• Sixth Ennead, Ninth Tractate: On the Good, or the One

Source. https://sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/
Public-domain basis. Bucket A — public domain in the US and the UK/EU with no restrictive caveat, per _ledger.json / _PULL_PLAN_v2.md (classified from 00_MASTER_RESEARCH_INDEX.md).

---

THE SIX ENNEADS

250 AD

by Plotinus

translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page

London, P.L. Warner, publisher to the Medici Society

[1917-1930]