A Contemplative Nature...

Were one to ask Nature why it produces, it might―if willing―thus reply:

“You should never have put the question.

Silently, as I am silent and little given to talk, you should have tried to understand.

Understand what?

That what comes to be is the object of my silent contemplation―its natural object. I am myself born of contemplation; mine is a contemplative nature.

The contemplative in me produces the object contemplated much as geometricians draw their figures while contemplating.

I do not draw.

But, contemplating, I drop from within me the lines constitutive of bodily forms. Within me I preserve traces of my source and of the principles that brought me into being.

They, too, were born of contemplation and without action on their own part gave me birth. But they are greater than I: they contemplated themselves and thus was I born.”


Plotinus..
Enneads, III. 8. 4.