Proposition 3: The Nous of the Greeks

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 22 pages

Twenty-two pages *arranged as a reference list rather than an essay* — the Hellenic and Hellenistic thinkers are taken one at a time, in alphabetical order, each with a page number, which makes the file easy to consult for a single name.

The list runs from Anaxagoras — who put Nous at the head of his system and is therefore where any such discussion has to begin — through a general entry for the ancient Greeks, then Aristotle, Democritus and Diogenes Laërtius, and a combined entry for Irenaeus, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and others. Three thematic sections follow the survey and are where the file makes its own argument. The first holds that Logos and Dianoia are one and the same, which matters because the two words are used differently by different schools and are constantly confused. The second states the position that gives this file its place in the Third Proposition: man is semi-divine, the two aspects being of one reality — that is, the mind in man is not a faculty he developed but a share in something else. The third is a piece of editorial honesty worth noting: Manas a better word than Nous. Having spent twenty pages on what the Greeks meant, the file concludes that the Sanskrit term is the more precise one, because Nous carries too many different senses in Greek philosophy to be reliable. That is a fair conclusion to reach in public after making the case, and it tells a reader something about how this whole library uses its vocabulary.

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