 Technê, then, is even further down Plotinus’ list of concerns. He gives as examples of technai grammar, rhetoric, lyre playing, music, housebuilding, medicine, and farming (II. 3. 2. 10–15; IV. 4. 31. 15–20). The most important use of the nature of technê is to illustrate points about the coming to be of the universe. Plotinus holds that Nous gives rise to the rational principle (logos) which is responsible for the existence of our universe (III. 2. 2) although the rational principle does not create the universe because the universe neither comes into existence nor perishes (III. 2. 1). Still, Plotinus uses analogies with technê to explain the work of the rational principle. In the treatise on beauty, he says that beauty in the material world comes from shape or form and rational principle; insofar as matter is ordered by these it is beautiful. As an illustration of this point he cites the way technê can bestow beauty on a house and its parts (I. 6. 2). In justifying the presence of both good and evil in the universe, he cites the way a painter includes varying and contrasting elements in painting (III. 2. 11). In another very striking passage, Plotinus invokes the technai of dance, music, and drama to explain the way contrasting elements in the life of the universe are blended (III. 2. 16). Nevertheless, there are ways in which the activity of the rational principle is different from technê. The most important is that rational principle does not reason that the universe should exist; the creative power of rational principle is the power to make another thing without striving for its being made. This power is not acquired or learnt the way a technê is (III. 2. 2). In explaining the way nature works, Plotinus says that nature is productive because of its contemplation of realities in Nous. Its act of contemplation makes what it contemplates— as though the very act of contemplation were automatically productive (III. 8. 4). In a similar vein he says that the universe is an image of reality but does not exist by discursive thought (dianoia) nor by contrivance of craft (epitechnêsis) (II. 9. 8). Plotinus, then, is proposing the interesting notion that pure thought, while distinct from craft, can be productive in its own right.