Part 3 (1/2)

And how to answer that last question was the abysmal proble for which it wearied itself out, generation after generation, till tired equally of seeking and of speaking, it fairly lay down and died In proportion as it refused to acknowledge a coraded mass, it deserted its first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual world is identical with the ht, love, justice; it tried to find new definitions for the spiritual; it conceived it to be identical with the intellectual That did not satisfy its heart It had to repeople the spiritual world, which it had ehosts; to reinvent the old daeies and polytheisms--from thence to descend into lower depths, of which ill speak hereafter

But in the meanwhile we must look at another quarrel which arose between the tin schools of Alexandria The Neoplatonists said that there is a divine element in man The Christian philosophers assented fervently, and raised the old disagreeable question: ”Is it in every man? In the publicans and harlots as well as in the philosophers? We say that it is” And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to assent to a doctrine, equally contrary to outward appearance, and galling to Pharisaic pride; and enters into a hundred honest self- puzzles and self-contradictions, which see, No It is in the philosopher, who is ready by nature, as Plotinus has it, and as it were furnished ings, and not needing to sever himself from matter like the rest, but disposed already to ascend to that which is above And in a degree too, it is in the ”lover,” who, according to Plotinus, has a certain innate recollection of beauty, and hovers round it, and desires it, wherever he sees it Him you may raise to the apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to separate beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered and divided And it is even in the third class, the lowest of who passively affected by beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the sentimentalist, in short, as we should call him nowadays

But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is anything divine in thes which I have yet examined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in proportion as he is conscious of its existence in hi two conceptions of the Divine in man First, is it a part of him, if it is dependent for its existence on his consciousness of it?

Or is it, as Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the Christians held, soos or Word speaking to his reason and conscience? With this question Plotinus grapples, earnestly, shrewdly, fairly If you wish to see how he does it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead, especially if you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book, Taylor's faithful though crabbed translation

Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory He enters into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul Whether it is one or est perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, ”Time and space are no Gods” He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet, after he has wrestled with the two titans, through page after page, and apparently conquered theain unawares into the battle- field, the moment his back is turned He denies that the one Reason has parts--it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet he cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by saying that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest, receives asRitter has worked out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions which I suspect to be inseparable fro for the spiritual in a region where it does not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our ohereby we express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as nearer the co that that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the coment, a free responsibility and desert?

And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daeos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man, that one Reason, that one Divine Ele was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this direction, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which yawned between s after which he yearned, by reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheisy borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and partly fro chain of persons, doard froel of each , that by self-culture and self-restraint he could rise above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and become the pupil of a God, and finally a God hireat Father of Neoplatonis All accounts of hithy oracle, declared hily, and pleasant in all his conversation” He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a faithful steward of uardian of s and orphans, a righteous and loving nostic eleh The body, with hi--why care about it?

He would have no portrait taken of his person: ”It was hued to carry a shadow about with hi a shadow made of that shadow” He refused animal food, abstained from baths, declined medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 AD

It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the weakness of his conceptions coh reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an infallible oracle, with a ”He says,” as if there were but one he in the universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down His dialectic is far superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who coreat hich e of his school is not an inquiry, but a justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theurgies and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind which the world has ever seen; that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an inverted pyras and bones of the dead world Soh descriptions, that I speak of Iamblichus and Proclus

Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell back on theurgy and h more hopeless, school of Porphyry Not that Porphyry, too, with all his dislike of ar superstitions--a dislike intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the coion for the common herd-- did not believe a fact or thich looks to us, nowadays, somewhat unphilosophical Fro to crush Plotinus by ainst himself, that all his li summoned in the temple of Isis his familiar spirit, a God, and not a h however to one Anebos, an Egyptian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular notions of the Gods, as beings subject to huic, asthem to favour man The answer of Abamnon, Anebos, Iamblichus, or whoever the real author may have been, is worthy of perusal by every ht, not confined to that tie of the world's history, and in this as es full of eloquence, ht: but on the whole, it is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment; the attempt to suit the old superstition to the new one, by eclectically picking and choosing, and special pleading, on both sides; but the rent is only made worse There is no base superstition which Abamnon does not unconsciously justify And yet he is rapidly losing sight of the real eternal huerms of truth round which those superstitions clustered, and is really further from truth and reason than old Homer or Hesiod, because further from the simple, universal, everyday facts, and relations, and duties ofthethe most sacred objects which man can contemplate

It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonishtly, was meant to rule matter; it was to be freed from matter only for that very purpose No one could well deny that

The philosopher, as he rose and beca to Plotinus, a God, or at least approached toward the Gods, must partake of some mysterious and transcendental power No one could well deny that conclusion, granting the premiss But of what power? What had he to show as the result of his inti? The Christian Schools, who held that the spiritual is the hteousness, and love, and peace in a Holy Spirit That is the likeness of GodIn proportion as a man has theher, and he needs no more Platonists had said--No, that is only virtue; and virtue is theabove that; so more than anyabove nature; portents and wonders So they set to work to perform wonders; and succeeded, I suppose, more or less For now one enters into a whole fairyland of those very pheno us so nowadays-- ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the effect ofcall mesmerism They are all there, these one seekers for wisdom It makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that their difficulties were the sa new under the sun Of course, a great deal of it all was ”iination” But the question then, as now is, what is this wonder-working iination?--unless the word be used as a , which really, in many cases, is hardly fair We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for attributing these strange phenoht to know better doing the sa now; and others, who more wisely believe theive reasons for thenore them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena which can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to soain These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought theyptian priests, the Babylonian and Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and reduced it to an art It was by sleeping in the temples of the deities, after due mesmeric manipulations, that cures were even then effected

Surely the old priests were the people to whoo for information

The old philosophers of Greece were venerable How much more those of the East, in comparison hom the Greeks were children? Besides, if these daeht it not be possible to behold the erant adytis templisque relictis Di quibus imperium steterat

The old priests used to ain And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally on ht act on spirit

After all, were matter and spirit so absolutely different? Was not spirit so essence, so froross and dense? This was the point to which they went down rapidly enough; the point to which all philosophies, I firht that the spiritualto rade it to ical and abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless phanto reality tothe subject with the object, as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the school will try toconceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of as, or heat, or electricity, or force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the accidents of brute matter, and a part of that nature which is born to die

The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus The unfortunate Hypatia, who is the e between his to our tie of her doctrine by that of her instructors and her pupils Proclus was taught by the olden chain of the Platonic succession descended from her to him His throne, however, was at Athens, not at Alexandria After the murder of the maiden philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece But Proclus is so essentially the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass hi to M Cousin, as I am credibly informed, he is the Greek philosopher; the flower and crown of all its schools; in whom, says the learned Frenchular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iaions in his mind, and paid them such equal reverence, that he was, as it were, the priest of the whole universe!”

I have not the honour of knowing much of M Cousin's works I never came across them but on one s at second hand an anachronism which one would have conceived palpable to any reader of the original authorities This is all I know of hi these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in Mr Thos men orshi+p, in their extreme need!”

Other moderns, however, have expressed their ads may be found in hi and useful to those who consider philosophic s of brilliant apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or coherence: but of the method of Plato or Aristotle, anyin him He seems to my simplicity to be at once the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of declaimers He can rave syinality and earnestness He can develop an inverted pyray, like Father Newe of huyptian as well as Greek; but only scraps from their mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and conscience as little as they do the logical faculties His Greek Gods and heroes, even his Alcibiades and Socrates, are ”ideas;” that is, symbols of certain notions or qualities: their flesh and bones, their heart and brain, have been distilled away, till nothing is left but a word, a notion, whichsystem He, too, is a commentator and a deducer; all has been discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more Those who followed him seem to have commented on his comments With him Neoplatonism properly ends Is its last utterance a culmination or a fall? Have the titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, ”exhibiting,” as Gibbon says of them, ”a deplorable instance of the senility of the hue for yourselves: but first contrive to finish everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to any hu Life is short, and Art--at least the art of obtaining practical guidance fro

And yet--if Proclus and his school becareat root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them We must not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine teaching, because he had be-syste was like Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus; and it too caood in hih at him as I have done; I could only hate him There are moments when he rises above his theories; moments when he recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of Homer, ales of his which his modern admirers prize most, I cannot tell I should fancy not: nevertheless I will read you one of them

He is about to commence his discourses on the Parenerally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to hiround of a mere e priori theoriser--and yet of which Proclus is reported to have said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timents were preserved, he did not care whether every other book on earth were destroyed But how does he couidekindled in ht of truth, to direct s which are, and to open the doors ofdirected , to withdraw me from the various for about things which do not exist, by that purest intellectual exercise about the things which do exist, whereby alone the eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus; and that the Noetic Gods will give to me the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the pohich leads up to this, and that the rulers of the Universe above the heaven will iy unshaken by material notions and eiven as their doelic choirs a true ood daemons the fulness of the inspiration which corand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of ether a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato'sspeculations, which he declares to us hi such topics, but which he (ie his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the uide in our speculations, and the hierophant of these divine words; who, as I think, caood to the souls that are here, in place of idols, sacrifices, and the whole mystery of purification, a leader of salvation to the men who are now and who shall be hereafter And may the whole band of those who are above us be propitious; andbefore us that light which, proceeding frouide us to the docuan Greek prayer, I believe, which we have on record; the death-wail of the old world--not without a touch of ether admire the style; it is inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, with a considerable consciousness that he was saying the right thing and in the very finest way: but still it is a prayer A cry for light--by no means, certainly, like that noble one in Tennyson's ”In Memoriam:”

So runs ht; An infant crying for the light; And with no language but a cry