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PLOTINUS

them; but Nature may be supposed to be the ultimate source of motions and differences alike.

Motions may also be classed as natural, artificial and purposive: "natural" embracing growth and decay; "artificial" architecture and shipbuilding; "purposive" enquiry, learning, government, and, in general, all speech and action.

Again, with regard to growth, alteration and birth, the division may proceed from the natural and unnatural, or, speaking generally, from the characters of the moved objects.

27.

What view are we to take of that which is opposed to Motion, whether it be Stability or Rest? Are we to consider it as a distinct genus, or to refer it to one of the genera already established? We should, no doubt, be well advised to assign Stability to the Intellectual, and to look in the lower sphere for Rest alone.

First, then, we have to discover the precise nature of this Rest. If it presents itself as identical with Stability, we have no right to expect to find it in the sphere where nothing is stable and the apparently stable has merely a less strenuous motion.

Suppose the contrary: we decide that Rest is different from Stability, inasmuch as Stability belongs to the utterly immobile, Rest to the stationary which, though of a nature to move, does not move. Now, if Rest means coming to rest, it must be regarded as a motion which has not yet ceased but still continues; but if we suppose it to be incompatible with Motion, we have first to ask whether there is in the Sensible world anything without motion.

Yet nothing can experience every type of motion; certain motions must be ruled out in order that we may speak of the moving object as existing: may we not, then, say of that which has no locomotion and is at rest as far as pertains to that specific type of motion, simply that it does not move?

Rest, accordingly, is the negation of Motion: in other words, it has no generic status. It is in fact related only to one type of motion,