is yet infected with any sordid concern, and not thoroughly
refined, while it is on the stretch to behold this most shining
spectacle, it will be immediately darkened and incapable of intuition,
though someone should declare the spectacle present, which it might
be otherwise able to discern. For, it is here necessary that the
perceiver and the thing perceived should be similar to each other
before true vision can exist. Thus the sensitive eye can never be able
to survey, the orb of the sun, unless strongly endued with solar fire,
and participating largely off the vivid ray. Everyone therefore must
become divine, and of godlike beauty, before he can gaze upon a
god and the beautiful itself. Thus proceeding in the right way of
beauty he will first ascend into the region of intellect, contemplating
every fair species, the beauty of which he will perceive to be no
other than ideas themselves; for all things are beautiful by the
supervening irradiations of these, because they are the offspring and
essence of intellect. But that which is superior to these is no other
than the fountain of good, everywhere widely diffusing around the
streams of beauty, and hence in discourse called the beautiful itself
because beauty is its immediate offspring. But if you accurately
distinguish the intelligible objects you will call the beautiful the
receptacle of ideas; but the good itself, which is superior, the
fountain and principle of the beautiful; or, you may place the first
beautiful and the good in the same principle, independent of the
beauty which there subsists.[12]

NOTES

1 Pope's Homer's _Odyssey,_ Book xiii., ver. 37.

2 _Odyssey,_ Book xiii., ver. 223.

3 _Odyssey,_ Book vii., ver. 303.

4 It is necessary to inform the Platonical reader, that the Beautiful,
in the present discourse, is considered according to its most general
acceptation, as the same with the Good: though, according to a more
accurate distinction, as Plotinus himself informs us, the Good is
considered as the fountain and principle of the Beautiful. I think it
likewise proper to observe, that as I have endeavoured, by my
paraphrase, to render as much as possible the obscure parts evident,
and to expand those sentences which are so very much contracted in
the original, I shall be sparing of notes; for my design is not to
accommodate the sublimest truths to the meanest understandings (as
this would be a contemptible and useless prostitution), but to