Among the most interesting of Plutarch’s religious writings
is one entitled On the Delays in the Divine Vengeance.
As might be expected from the name, it deals with a
problem closely akin to that which ages before had been
made the subject of such sublime imagery and such inconclusive
reasoning by the author of the Book of Job. What
troubled the Hebrew poet was the apparently undeserved
suffering of the just. What the Greek moralist feels himself
called on to explain is the apparent prosperity and impunity
of the wicked. He will not for a moment admit that crime
remains unavengeful; his object is to show why the retribution
does not follow directly on the deed. And, in order to
account for this, he adduces a number of very ingenious
reasons. By acting deliberately rather than in blind anger,
the gods wish to read us a useful lesson in patience and
forbearance. Sometimes their object is to give the sinner an
opportunity for repentance and amendment; or else they
may be holding him in reserve for the performance of some
beneficial work. At other times, their justice is delayed only
that it may be manifested by some signal and striking form of
retribution. In many cases, the final stroke has been preceded
by long years of secret torment; and even where no
suffering seems to be inflicted, the pangs of remorse may
furnish a sufficient expiation. Or again, vengeance may be
reserved for a future generation. Some persons hold that to
visit the sins of the fathers on the children is unjust, but in
this they are profoundly mistaken. Members of the same
family and citizens of the same state are connected as parts
of one organic whole; sharing in the benefits which accrue
from the good deeds of their predecessors, it is right that
they should also share in the responsibility for their crimes.
Moreover, the posterity of the wicked inherit a sinful disposition
which, as the gods can clearly foresee, would betray
itself in overt acts were they not cut off in their youth. And
it is equally an error to suppose that the original wrongdoers
remain unaffected by the retribution which befalls their
descendants. On the contrary, they witness it from the next
world, where it adds poignancy to their remorse, and entails
on them fresh penalties over and above those which they have
already been doomed to suffer.
Thus with Plutarch, as with his master Plato, a future
world is the grand court of appeal from the anomalies and
inequalities of this world; and, following the example of the
Gorgias and the Republic, he reserves to the last a terrible
picture of the torments held in store for those who have not
expiated their transgressions on earth, describing them as
they are supposed to have been witnessed by a human soul
temporarily separated from the body for the purpose of viewing
and reporting on this final manifestation of divine justice.
It would appear, however, from the narrative in question that
future punishments are not eternal. After a more or less
protracted period of expiation, the immortal soul is restored
to the upper world, under whatever embodiment seems most
appropriate to its former career. Among those whose turn
has arrived for entering on a new existence at the moment
when Plutarch’s visitor makes his descent to hell, is the soul
of Nero. The wicked Emperor has just been condemned to
assume the form of a viper, when a great light shines forth,
and from the midst of the light a voice is heard crying: ‘Let
him reappear under the guise of a song-bird haunting the
neighbourhood of marshes and meres; for he has already
paid the penalty of his guilt, and the gods owe him some
kindness for having liberated Greece, the best and most
beloved by them of all the nations that he ruled.’
It would seem from this singular and touching expression
of gratitude that the deathless idealism of Hellas found in
Nero’s gift of a nominal liberty ample compensation for the
very real and precious works of art of which she was despoiled
on the occasion of his visit to her shores. At first sight, that
visit looks like nothing better than a display of triumphant
buffoonery on the one side and of servile adulation on the
other. But, in reality, it was a turning-point in the history of
civilisation, the awakening to new glories of a race in whom
life had become, to all outward appearance, extinct. For
more than a whole century the seat of intellectual supremacy
had been established in Rome; and during the same period
Rome herself had turned to the West rather than to the East
for renovation and support. Caesar’s conquests were like the
revelation of a new world; and three times over, when the
two halves of the divided empire came into collision, the
champion who commanded the resources of that world had
won. Henceforth it was to her western provinces and to her
western frontiers that Rome looked for danger, for aggrandisement,
or for renown. In Horace’s time, men asked each other
what the warlike Cantabrians were planning; and the personal
presence of Augustus himself was needed before those unruly
Iberians could be subdued. His adopted sons earned their
first laurels at the expense of Alpine mountaineers. His
later years are filled with German campaigns; and the great
disaster of Varus must have riveted attention more closely
than any victory to what was passing between the Rhine and
the Elbe. Under Claudius, the conquest of Britain opened a
new source of interest in the West, and, like Germany before,
supplied a new title of triumph to the imperial family. Half
the literary talent in Rome, the two Senecas, Lucan, and at a
later period Martial and Quintilian, came from Spain, as also
did Trajan, whose youth fall in this period.
With Nero’s visit to Greece in 66 the reaction begins.
When, a few years later, the empire was disputed between
a general from Gaul and a general from Syria, it was the
candidate of the Eastern legions who prevailed; the revolt of
Judaea drew attention to Eastern affairs; and the great
campaigns of Trajan must have definitely turned the tide of
public interest in that direction, notwithstanding the far-sighted
protest of Tacitus. On more peaceful ground,
Hadrian’s Asiatic tours and his protracted residence in
Athens completed the work inaugurated by Nero. In his
reign, the intellectual centre of gravity is definitely transferred
to Greece; and Roman literature, after its last blaze of
splendour under Trajan, becomes extinct, or survives only
in forms borrowed from the sophistical rhetoric of the East.
Plutarch, who was twenty-one when Nero declared his
country free, was the first leader in the great Hellenist
revival, without, at the same time, entirely belonging to it.
He cared more for the matter than for the form of antiquity,
for the great deeds and greater thoughts of the past than for
the words in which they were related and explained. Hence,
by the awkwardness and heaviness of his style, he is more
akin to the writers of the Alexandrian period than to his
immediate successors. On the one side, he opens the era of
classical idealism; on the other, he closes that of encyclopaedic
erudition. The next generation bore much the same
relation to Plutarch that the first Sophists bore to Hecataeus
and Herodotus. Addressing themselves to popular audiences,
they were obliged to study perspicuity and elegance of expression,
at the risk, it is true, of verbosity and platitude.
Such men were Dion Chrysostom, Herôdes Atticus, Maximus
Tyrius, and Aristeides. But the old models were
imitated with more success by writers who lived more entirely
in the past. Arrian reproduced the graceful simplicity
of Xenophon in his narrative of the campaigns of Alexander
and his reports of the lectures of Epictêtus. Lucian composed
dialogues ranking with the greatest masterpieces of
lighter Attic literature. The felicity of his style and his
complete emancipation from superstition may probably be
traced to the same source—a diligent study of the ancient
classics. It is certain that neither as a writer nor as a critic
does he represent the average educated taste of his own
times. So far from giving polytheism its deathblow, as he
was formerly imagined to have done, he only protested unavailingly
against its restoration.
Not only oratory and literature, but philosophy and science
were cultivated with renewed vigour. The line between
philosophy and sophisticism was not, indeed, very distinctly
drawn. Epictêtus severely censures the moral teachers of his
time for ornamenting their lectures with claptrap rhetoric
about the battle of Thermopylae or flowery descriptions of
Pan and the Nymphs.406 And the professed declaimers similarly
drew on a store of philosophical commonplaces. This sort of
popular treatment led to the cultivation of ethics and theology
in preference to logic and metaphysics, and to an eclectic
blending of the chief systems with one another. A severer
method was inculcated in the schools of Athens, especially
after the endowment of their professors by Marcus Aurelius;
but, in practice, this came to mean what it means in modern
universities, the substitution of philology for independent
enquiry. The question was not so much what is true as what
did Plato or Aristotle really think. Alexandrian science
showed something of the same learned and traditional character
in the works of Ptolemy; but the great name of Galen
marks a real progress in physiology, as well as a return to the
principles of Hippocrates.
Thus, so far as was possible in such altered circumstances,
did the Renaissance of the second century reproduce the
intellectual environment from which Plato’s philosophy had
sprung. In literature, there was the same attention to words
rather than to things; sometimes taking the form of exact
scholarship, after the manner of Prodicus; sometimes of loose
and superficial declamation, after the manner of Gorgias.
There was the naturalism of Hippias, elaborated into a system
by the Stoics, and practised as a life by the new Cynics.
There was the hedonism of Aristippus, inculcated under a
diluted form by the Epicureans. There was the old Ionian
materialism, professed by Stoics and Epicureans alike. There
was the scepticism of Protagoras, revived by Aenesidêmus
and his followers. There was the mathematical mysticism of
the Pythagoreans, flourishing in Egypt instead of in southern
Italy. There was the purer geometry of the Alexandrian
Museum, corresponding to the school of Cyrênê. On all
sides, there was a mass of vague moral preaching, without any
attempt to exhibit the moral truths which we empirically
know as part of a comprehensive metaphysical philosophy.
And, lastly, there was an immense undefined religious movement,
ranging from theologies which taught the spirituality of
God and of the human soul, down to the most irrational and
abject superstition. We saw in the last chapter how, corresponding
to this environment, there was a revived Platonism,
that Platonism was in fact the fashionable philosophy of that
age, just as it afterwards became the fashionable philosophy
of another Renaissance thirteen centuries later. But it was a
Platonism with the backbone of the system taken out. Plato’s
thoughts all centred in a carefully considered scheme for the
moral and political regeneration of society. Now, with the
destruction of Greek independence, and the absorption everywhere
of free city-states into a vast military empire, it might
seem as if the realisation of such a scheme had become
altogether impracticable. The Republic was, indeed, at that
moment realising itself under a form adapted to the altered
exigencies of the time; but no Platonist could as yet recognise
in the Christian Church even an approximate fulfilment of his
master’s dream. Failing any practical issue, there remained
the speculative side of Plato’s teaching. His writings did not
embody a complete system, but they offered the materials
whence a system could be framed. Here the choice lay
between two possible lines of construction; and each had, in
fact, been already attempted by his own immediate disciples.
One was the Pythagorean method of the Old Academy, what
Aristotle contemptuously called the conversion of philosophy
into mathematics. We saw in the last chapter how the revived
Platonism of the first and second centuries entered once more
on the same perilous path, a path which led farther and
farther away from the true principles of Greek thought, and
of Plato himself when his intellect stood at its highest point of
splendour. Neo-Pythagorean mysticism meant an unreconciled
dualism of spirit and matter; and as the ultimate consequence
of that dualism, it meant the substitution of magical
incantations and ceremonial observances for the study of
reason and virtue. Moreover, it readily allied itself with
Oriental beliefs, which meant a negation of natural law that
the Greeks could hardly tolerate, and, under the form of Gnostic
pessimism, a belief in the inherent depravity of Nature that
they could not tolerate at all.
The other alternative was to combine the dialectical idealism
of Plato with the cosmology of early Greek thought,
interpreting the two worlds of spirit and Nature as gradations
of a single series and manifestations of a single principle.
This was what Aristotle had attempted to do, but had not done
so thoroughly as to satisfy the moral wants of his own age, or
the religious wants of the age when a revived Platonism was
seeking to organise itself into a system which should be the reconciliation
of reason and faith. Yet the better sort of Platonists
felt that this work could not be accomplished without the
assistance of Aristotle, whose essential agreement with their
master, as against Stoicism, they fully recognised. Their
mistake was to assume that this agreement extended to every
point of his teaching. Taken in this sense, their attempted
harmonies were speedily demolished by scholars whose professional
familiarity with the original sources showed them
how strongly Aristotle himself had insisted on the differences
which separated him from the Academy and its founder.407 To
identify the two great spiritualist philosophers being impossible,
it remained to show how they could be combined. The
solution of such a problem demanded more genius than was
likely to be developed in the schools of Athens. An intenser
intellectual life prevailed in Alexandria, where the materials
of erudition were more abundantly supplied, and where contact
with the Oriental religions gave Hellenism a fuller consciousness
of its distinction from and superiority to every other form of
speculative activity. And here, accordingly, the fundamental
idea of Neo-Platonism was conceived.
Plotinus is not only the greatest and most celebrated of the
Neo-Platonists, he is also the first respecting whose opinions
we have any authentic information, and therefore the one who
for all practical purposes must be regarded as the founder of
the school. What we know about his life is derived from a
biography written by his disciple Porphyry. This is a rather
foolish performance; but it possesses considerable interest,
both on account of the information which it was intended to
supply, and also as affording indirect evidence of the height
to which superstition had risen during the third century of our
era. Plotinus gave his friends to understand that he was born
in Egypt about 205 A.D.; but so reluctant was he to mention
any circumstance connected with his physical existence, that
his race and parentage always remained a mystery. He
showed somewhat more communicativeness in speaking of his
mental history, and used to relate in after-life that at the age
of twenty-eight he had felt strongly attracted to the study of
philosophy, but remained utterly dissatisfied with what the
most famous teachers of Alexandria had to tell him on the
subject. At last he found in Ammonius Saccas the ideal
sage for whom he had been seeking, and continued to attend
his lectures for eleven years. At the end of that period, he
joined an eastern expedition under the Emperor Gordian, for
the purpose of making himself acquainted with the wisdom of
the Persians and Indians, concerning which his curiosity
seems to have been excited by Ammonius. But his hopes of
further enlightenment in that quarter were not fulfilled. The
campaign terminated disastrously; the emperor himself fell
at the head of his troops in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus had
great difficulty in escaping with his life to Antioch. Soon
afterwards he settled in Rome, and remained there until near
the end of his life, when ill-health obliged him to retire to a
country seat in Campania, the property of a deceased friend,
Zêthus. Here the philosopher died, in the sixty-sixth year of
his age.
Plotinus seems to have begun his career as a public
teacher soon after taking up his residence in Rome. His
lectures at first assumed the form of conversations with his
private friends. Apparently by way of reviving the traditions
of Socrates and Plato, he encouraged them to take an active
part in the discussion: but either he did not possess the
authority of his great exemplars, or the rules of Greek dialogue
were not very strictly observed in Rome; for we learn from
the report of an eye-witness that interruptions were far too
frequent, and that a vast amount of nonsense was talked.408
Afterwards a more regular system of lecturing was established,
and papers were read aloud by those who had any observations
to offer, as in our own philosophical societies.
The new teacher gathered round him a distinguished
society, comprising not only professional philosophers, but also
physicians, rhetors, senators, and statesmen. Among the last-mentioned
class, Rogatianus, who filled the office of praetor,
showed the sincerity of his conversion by renouncing the
dignities of his position, surrendering his worldly possessions,
limiting himself to the barest necessaries of life, and allowing
himself to be dependent even for these on the hospitality of
his friends. Thanks to this asceticism, he recovered the use
of his hands and feet, which had before been completely
crippled with gout.409
The fascination exercised by Plotinus was not only
intellectual, but personal. Singularly affable, obliging, and
patient, he was always ready to answer the questions of his
friends, even laying aside his work in order to discuss the
difficulties which they brought to him for solution. His
lectures were given in Greek; and although this always remained
to him a foreign language, the pronunciation and
grammar of which he never completely mastered, his expressions
frequently won admiration by their felicity and force;
and the effect of his eloquence was still further heightened by
the glowing enthusiasm which irradiated his whole countenance,
naturally a very pleasing one, during the delivery of
the more impressive passages.410
As might be expected, the circle of admirers which surrounded
Plotinus included several women, beginning with his
hostess Gemina and her daughter. He also stood high in the
favour of the Emperor Galienus and his consort Salonina; so
much so, indeed, that they were nearly persuaded to let him
try the experiment of restoring a ruined city in Campania,
and governing it according to Plato’s laws.411 Porphyry attributes
the failure of this project to the envy of the courtiers;
Hegel, with probably quite as much reason, to the sound
judgment of the imperial ministers.412
Our philosopher had, however, abundant opportunity for
showing on a more modest scale that he was not destitute of
practical ability. So high did his character stand, that many
persons of distinction, when they felt their end approaching,
brought their children to him to be taken care of, and
entrusted their property to his keeping. As a result of the
confidence thus reposed in him, his house was always filled
with young people of both sexes, to whose education and
material interests he paid the most scrupulous attention, observing
that as long as his wards did not make a profession
of philosophy, their estates and incomes ought to be preserved
unimpaired. It is also mentioned that, although frequently
chosen to arbitrate in disputes, he never made a single enemy
among the Roman citizens—a piece of good fortune which is
more than one could safely promise to anyone similarly circumstanced
in an Italian city at the present day.413
Plotinus possessed a remarkable power of reading the
characters and even the thoughts of those about him. It is
said, probably with some exaggeration, that he predicted the
future fate of all the boys placed under his care. Thus he
foretold that a certain Polemo, in whom he took particular
interest, would devote himself to love and die young; which
proved only too true, and may well have been anticipated by
a good observer without the exercise of any supernatural
prescience. As another instance of his penetration, we are
told that a valuable necklace having been stolen from a
widow named Chione, who lived in his house with her family,
the slaves were all led into the presence of Plotinus that
he might single out the thief. After a careful scrutiny, the
philosopher put his finger on the guilty individual. The man
at first protested his innocence, but was soon induced by
an application of the whip to confess, and, what was a much
more valuable verification of his accuser’s insight, to restore
the missing article. Porphyry himself could testify from
personal experience to his friend’s remarkable power of
penetration. Being once about to commit suicide, Plotinus
divined his intention, and told him that it proceeded, not from
a rational resolution, but from a fit of the blues, as a remedy
for which he prescribed change of scene, and this did in fact
have the desired effect.414
Previous to his forty-ninth year, Plotinus wrote nothing.
At that age he began to compose short essays on subjects
which suggested themselves in the course of his oral teaching.
During the next ten years, he produced twenty-one such
papers, some of them only a page or two in length. At the
end of that period, he made the acquaintance of his future
editor and biographer, Porphyry, a young student of Semitic
extraction, whose original name was Malchus. The two soon
became fast friends; and whatever speculative differences at
first divided them were quickly removed by an amicable
controversy between Porphyry and another disciple named
Amelius, which resulted in the unreserved adhesion of
the former to the doctrine of their common master.415 The
literary activity of Plotinus seems to have been powerfully
stimulated by association with the more methodical mind of
Porphyry. During the five years416 of their personal intercourse
he produced nineteen essays, amounting altogether to three
times the bulk of the former series. Eight shorter pieces
followed during the period of failing health which preceded
his death, Porphyry being at that time absent in Sicily,
whither he had retired when suffering from the fit of depression
already mentioned.
Porphyry observes that the first series of essays show the
immaturity of youth—a period which he extends to what is
generally considered the sufficiently ripe age of fifty-nine;—the
second series the full-grown power of manhood; and the
last the weakness of declining years. The truth is that his
method of criticism, at least in this instance, was to judge of
compositions as if their merit depended on their length, and
perhaps also with reference to the circumstance whether their
subject had or had not been previously talked over with
himself. In point of fact, the earlier pieces include some of
the very best things that Plotinus ever wrote; and, taking
them in the order of their composition, they form a connected
exposition of Neo-Platonic principles, to which nothing of
importance was ever added. This we shall attempt to show
in the most effectual manner possible by basing our own
account of Neo-Platonism on an analysis of their contents;
and we strongly recommend them to the attention of all
Greek scholars who wish to make themselves acquainted with
Plotinus at first hand, but have not leisure to wade through
the whole of his works. It may also be mentioned that the
last series of essays are distinguished by the popular character
of their subjects rather than by any evidence of failing powers,
one of them, that on Providence,417 being remarkable for the
vigour and eloquence of its style.
By cutting up some of the longer essays into parts, Porphyry
succeeded, much to his delight, in bringing the whole
number up to fifty-four, which is a product of the two perfect
numbers six and nine. He then divided them into six
volumes, each containing nine books—the famous Enneads of
Plotinus. His principle of arrangement was to bring together
the books in which similar subjects were discussed, placing
the easier disquisitions first. This disposition has been
adhered to by subsequent editors, with the single exception
of Kirchhoff, who has printed the works of Plotinus according
to the order in which they were written.418 Porphyry’s scrupulous
information has saved modern scholars an incalculable
amount of trouble, but has not, apparently, earned all the
gratitude it deserved, to judge by Zeller’s intimation that the
chronological order of the separate pieces cannot even now be
precisely determined.419 Unfortunately, what could have been
of priceless value in the case of Plato and Aristotle, is of
comparatively small value in the case of Plotinus. His
system must have been fully formed when he began to write,
and the dates in our possession give no clue to the manner in
which its leading principles were evolved.420
Such, so far as they can be ascertained, are the most
important facts in the life of Plotinus. Interwoven with these,
we find some legendary details which vividly illustrate the
superstition and credulity of the age. It is evident from his
childish talk about the numbers six and nine that Porphyry
was imbued with Pythagorean ideas. Accordingly, his whole
account of Plotinus is dominated by the wish to represent
that philosopher under the guise of a Pythagorean saint.
We have already alluded to the manner in which he exalts
his hero’s remarkable sagacity into a power of supernatural
prescience and divination. He also tells us, with the most
unsuspecting good faith, how a certain Alexandrian philosopher
whose jealousy had been excited by the success of his
illustrious countryman, endeavoured to draw down the malignant
influences of the stars on the head of Plotinus, but was
obliged to desist on finding that the attack recoiled on himself.421
On another occasion, an Egyptian priest, by way of
exhibiting his skill in magic, offered to conjure up the daemon
or guardian spirit of Plotinus. The latter readily consented,
and the Temple of Isis was chosen for the scene of the operations,
as, according to the Egyptian, no other spot sufficiently
pure for the purpose could be found in Rome. The incantations
were duly pronounced, when, much to the admiration of
those present, a god made his appearance instead of the
expected daemon. By what particular marks the divinity of
the apparition was determined, Porphyry omits to mention.
The philosopher was congratulated by his countryman on the
possession of such a distinguished patron, but the celestial
visitor vanished before any questions could be put to him.
This mishap was attributed to a friend ‘who, either from envy
or fear, choked the birds which had been given him to hold,’
and which seem to have played a very important part in the
incantation, though what it was, we do not find more particularly
specified.422
Another distinguished compliment was paid to Plotinus
after his death by no less an authority than the Pythian
Apollo, who at this period had fully recovered the use of his
voice. On being consulted respecting the fate of the philosopher’s
soul, the god replied by a flood of bombastic twaddle,
in which the glorified spirit of Plotinus is described as released
from the chain of human necessity and the surging uproar of
the body, swimming stoutly to the storm-beaten shore, and
mounting the heaven-illumined path, not unknown to him
even in life, that leads to the blissful abodes of the immortals.423
In view of such tendencies, one hardly knows how much
confidence is to be placed in Porphyry’s well-known picture
of his master as one who lived so entirely for spiritual interests
that he seemed ashamed of having a body at all. We
are told that, as a consequence of this feeling, he avoided the
subject of his past life, refused to let his portrait be painted,
neglected the care of his health, and rigorously abstained from
animal food, even when it was prescribed for him under the
form of medicine.424 All this may be true, but it is not very
consistent with the special doctrines of Plotinus as recorded
in his writings, nor should it be allowed to influence our
interpretation of them. In his personal character and conduct
he may have allowed himself to be carried away by the
prevalent asceticism and superstition of the age; in his
philosophy he is guided by the healthier traditions of Plato
and Aristotle, and stands in declared opposition to the mysticism
which was a negation of Nature and of life.
How far Plotinus was indebted to Ammonius Saccas for
his speculative ideas is another question with respect to
which the Pythagoreanising tendencies of his biographer may
possibly have contributed to the diffusion of a serious misconception.
What Porphyry tells us is this. Before leaving
Alexandria, Plotinus had bound himself by a mutual agreement
with two of his fellow-pupils, Herennius and Origines
(not the Christian Father, but a pagan philosopher of the same
age and name), to keep secret what they had learned by
listening to the lectures of Ammonius. Herennius, however,
soon broke the compact, and Origines followed his example.
Plotinus then considered that the engagement was at an end,
and used the results of his studies under Ammonius as the
basis of his conversational lectures in Rome, the substance of
which, we are left to suppose, was subsequently embodied in
his published writings. But, as Zeller has pointed out, this
whole story bears a suspicious resemblance to what is related
of the early Pythagorean school. There also the doctrines
of the master were regarded by his disciples as a mystery
which they pledged themselves to keep secret, and were only
divulged through the infidelity of one among their number,
Philolaus. And the same critic proves by a careful examination
of what are known to have been the opinions of Origines
and Longinus, both fellow-pupils of Plotinus, that they
differed from him on some points of essential importance to
his system. We cannot, therefore, suppose that these points
were included in the teaching of their common master,
Ammonius.425 But if this be so, it follows that Plotinus was
the real founder of the Neo-Platonic school; and, in all cases,
his writings remain the great source whence our knowledge of
its first principles is derived.
In point of style, Plotinus is much the most difficult of
the ancient philosophers, and, in this respect, is only surpassed
by a very few of the moderns. Even Longinus, who was one
of the most intelligent critics then living, and who, besides,
had been educated in the same school with our philosopher,
could not make head or tail of his books when copies of
them were sent to him by Porphyry, and supposed, after the
manner of philologists, that the text must be corrupt, much
to the disgust of Porphyry, who assures us that its accuracy
was unimpeachable.426 Probably politeness prevented Longinus
from saying, what he must have seen at a glance, that Plotinus
was a total stranger to the art of literary composition. We
are told that he wrote as fast as if he were copying from a
book; but he had never mastered even the elements of the
Greek language; and the weakness of his eyesight prevented
him from reading over what he had written. The mistakes in
spelling and grammar Porphyry corrected, but it is evident
that he has made no alterations in the general style of the
Enneads; and this is nearly as bad as bad can be—disjointed,
elliptical, redundant, and awkward. Chapter follows
chapter and paragraph succeeds to paragraph without any
fixed principle of arrangement; the connexion of the
sentences is by no means clear; some sentences are almost
unintelligible from their extreme brevity, others from their
inordinate length and complexity. The unpractised hand of
a foreigner constantly reveals itself in the choice and collocation
of words and grammatical inflections. Predicates and
subjects are huddled together without any regard to the
harmonies of number and gender, so that even if false
concords do not occur, we are continually annoyed by the
suggestion of their presence.427
But even the most perfect mastery of Greek would not
have made Plotinus a successful writer. We are told that
before taking up the pen he had thoroughly thought out his
whole subject; but this is not the impression produced by a
perusal of the Enneads. On the contrary, he seems to be
thinking as he goes along, and to be continually beset by
difficulties which he has not foreseen. The frequent and
disorderly interruptions by which his lectures were at one
time disturbed seem to have made their way into his solitary
meditations, breaking or tangling the thread of systematic
exposition at every turn. Irrelevant questions are constantly
intruding themselves, to be met by equally irrelevant answers.
The first mode of expressing an idea is frequently withdrawn,
and another put in its place, which is, in most cases, the less
intelligible of the two; while, as a general rule, when we want
to know what a thing is, Plotinus informs us with indefatigable
prolixity what it is not.
Nevertheless, by dint of pertinacious repetition, the
founder of Neo-Platonism has succeeded in making the
main outlines, and to a great extent the details, of his
system so perfectly clear that probably no philosophy is
now better understood than his. In this respect, Plotinus
offers a remarkable contrast to the two great thinkers from
whom his ideas are principally derived. While Plato and
Aristotle construct each particular sentence with masterly
clearness, the general drift of their speculations is by no
means easy to ascertain; and, even now, critics take
diametrically opposite views of the interpretation which is
to be put on their teaching with regard to several most
important points. The expositors of Neo-Platonism, on the
contrary, show a rare unanimity in their accounts of its
constitutive principles. What they differ about is its origin
and its historical significance. And these are points on
which we too shall have to enter, since all the ancient
systems are interesting to us chiefly as historical phenomena,
and Neo-Platonism more so than any other. Plotinus
effected a vast revolution in speculative opinion, but he
effected it by seizing on the thoughts of others rather than
by any new thoughts or even new developments or applications
of his own.
Whether Plotinus was or was not the disciple of
Ammonius, it is beyond all doubt that he considered himself
the disciple of Plato. There are more than a hundred
references to that philosopher in the Enneads, against less
than thirty references to all the other ancient thinkers put
together;428 and, what is more remarkable, in only about half
of them is he mentioned by name. The reader is expected
to know that ‘he’ always means Plato. And it is an article
of faith with Plotinus that his master cannot be mistaken;
when the words of oracular wisdom seem to contradict one
another, there must be some way of harmonising them.
When they contradict what he teaches himself, the difficulty
must be removed by skilful interpretation; or, better still, it
must be discreetly ignored.429 On the other hand, when a
principle is palpably borrowed from Aristotle, not only is its
derivation unacknowledged, but we are given to understand
by implication that it belongs to the system which Aristotle
was at most pains to controvert.430
But numerous as are the obligations, whether real or
imaginary, of the Alexandrian to the Athenian teacher,
they range over a comparatively limited field. What most
interests a modern student in Platonism—its critical preparation,
its conversational dialectic, its personal episodes,
its moral enthusiasm, its political superstructure—had apparently
no interest for Plotinus as a writer. He goes
straight to the metaphysical core of the system, and occupies
himself with re-thinking it in its minutest details.
Now this was just the part which had either not been
discussed at all, or had been very insufficiently discussed by
his predecessors. It would seem that the revival of Platonic
studies had followed an order somewhat similar to the order
in which Plato’s own ideas were evolved. The scepticism of
the Apologia had been taken up and worked out to its last
consequences by the New Academy. The theory of intuitive
knowledge, the ethical antithesis between reason and passion,
and the doctrine of immortality under its more popular form,
had been resumed by the Greek and Roman Eclectics.
Plutarch busied himself with the erotic philosophy of the
Phaedrus and the Symposium, as also did his successor,
Maximus Tyrius. In addition to this, he and the other
Platonists of the second century paid great attention to the
theology adumbrated in those dialogues, and in the earlier
books of the Republic. But meanwhile Neo-Pythagoreanism
had intervened to break the normal line of development, and,
under its influence, Plutarch passed at once to the mathematical
puzzles of the Timaeus. With Plato himself the
next step had been to found a state for the application of
his new principles; and such was the logic of his system,
that the whole stress of adverse circumstances could not
prevent the realisation of a similar scheme from being
mooted in the third century; while, as we have seen, something
more remotely analogous to it was at that very time
being carried out by the Christian Church. Plato’s own
disappointed hopes had found relief in the profoundest
metaphysical speculations; and now the time has come
when his labours in this direction were to engage the
attention hitherto absorbed by the more popular or literary
aspects of his teaching.
Now it was by this side of Platonism that Aristotle also
had been most deeply fascinated. While constantly criticising
the ideal theory, he had, in truth, accepted it under a modified
form. His universal classification is derived from the dialectic
method. His psychology and theology are constructed on
the spiritualistic basis of the Academy, and out of materials
which the founder of the Academy had supplied. It was
therefore natural that Plotinus should avail himself largely
of the Stagirite’s help in endeavouring to reproduce what a
tradition of six centuries had obscured or confused. To
reconcile the two Attic masters was, as we know, a common
school exercise. Learned commentators had, indeed, placed
their disagreement beyond all dispute. But there remained
the simpler course of bringing their common standpoint
into greater prominence, and combining their theories where
this seemed possible without too openly renouncing the
respect due to what almost all considered the superior
authority of Plato. To which of the two masters Neo-Platonism
really owed most is a question that must be
postponed until we have made ourselves acquainted with
the outlines of the system as they appear in the works of
Plotinus.
It has been already mentioned how large a place was
given to erotic questions by the literary Platonists of the
second century. Even in the school of Plotinus, Platonic
love continued to be discussed, sometimes with a freedom
which pained and disgusted the master beyond measure.431
His first essay was apparently suggested by a question put
to him in the course of some such debate.432 The subject is
beauty. In his treatment of it, we find our philosopher at
once rising superior to the indecorous frivolities of his
predecessors. Physical beauty he declares to be the ideal
element in objects, that which they have received from the
creative soul, and which the perceptive soul recognises as
akin to her own essence. Love is nothing but the excitement
and joy occasioned by this discovery. But to understand
the truer and higher forms of beauty, we must turn away
from sensible perceptions, and study it as manifested in wise
institutions, virtuous habits, and scientific theories. The
passionate enthusiasm excited by the contemplation of such
qualities as magnanimity, or justice, or wisdom, or valour can
only be explained by assuming that they reveal our inmost
nature, showing us what we were destined for, what we
originally were, and what we have ceased to be. For we
need only enumerate the vices which make a soul hideous—injustice,
sensuality, cowardice, and the like—to perceive that
they are foreign to her real nature, and are imposed on her
by contamination with the principle of all evil, which is
matter. To be brave means not to dread death, because
death is the separation of the soul from the body. Magnanimity
means the neglect of earthly interests. Wisdom
means the elevation of our thoughts to a higher world. The
soul that virtue has thus released becomes pure reason, and
reason is just what constitutes her intrinsic beauty. It is
also what alone really exists; without it all the rest of
Nature is nothing. Thus foul is opposed to fair, as evil to
good and false to true. Once more, as the soul is beautiful
by participation in reason, so reason in its turn depends on a
still higher principle, the absolute good to which all things
aspire, and from which they are derived—the one source of
life, of reason, and of existence. Behind all other loves is
the longing for this ultimate good; and in proportion to its
superiority over their objects is the intensity of the passion
which it inspires, the happiness which its attainment and
fruition must bestow. He who would behold this supreme
beauty must not seek for it in the fair forms of the external
world, for these are but the images and shadows of its glory.
It can only be seen with the inward eye, only found in the
recesses of our own soul. To comprehend the good we must
be good ourselves; or, what is the same thing, we must be
ourselves and nothing else. In this process of abstraction,
we first arrive at pure reason, and then we say that the ideas
of reason are what constitutes beauty. But beyond reason is
that highest good of which beauty is merely the outward
vesture, the source and principle from which beauty springs.
It is evident that what Plotinus says about beauty and
love was suggested by the well-known passages on the same
subject in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. His analysis of
aesthetic emotion has, however, a much more abstract and
metaphysical character than that of his great model. The
whole fiction of an antenatal existence is quietly let drop.
What the sight of sensible beauty awakens in a philosophic
soul is not the memory of an ideal beauty beheld in some
other world, but the consciousness of its own idealising
activity, the dominion which it exercises over unformed and
fluctuating matter. And, in all probability, Plato meant no
more than this—in fact he hints as much elsewhere,433—but he
was not able or did not choose to express himself with such
unmistakable clearness.
Again, this preference for mythological imagery on the
part of the more original and poetical thinker seems to be
closely connected with a more vivid interest in the practical
duties of life. With Plotinus, the primal beauty or supreme
good is something that can be isolated from all other beauty
and goodness, something to be perceived and enjoyed in
absolute seclusion from one’s fellow-men. God is, indeed,
described as the source and cause of all other good. But
neither here nor elsewhere is there a hint that we should
strive to resemble him by becoming, in our turn, the cause of
good to others. Platonic love, on the contrary, first finds its
reality and truth in unremitting efforts for the enlightenment
and elevation of others, being related to the transmission of
spiritual life just as the love inspired by visible beauty is
related to the perpetuation and physical ennoblement of the
race.
This preference of pure abstract speculation to beneficent
action may be traced to the influence of Aristotle. Some of
the most enthusiastic expressions used by Plotinus in speaking
of his supreme principle seem to have been suggested by
the Metaphysics and the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics.
The self-thinking thought of the Stagirite does not, indeed,
take the highest rank with him. But it is retained in his
system, and is only relegated to a secondary place because,
for reasons which we shall explain hereafter, it does not
fulfil equally well with Plato’s Idea of Good, the condition
of absolute and indivisible unity, without which a first principle
could not be conceived by any Greek philosopher. But
this apparent return to the standpoint of the Republic really
involves a still wider departure from its animating spirit. In
other words, Plotinus differs from Aristotle as Aristotle himself
had differed from Plato; he shares the same speculative
tendency, and carries it to a greater extreme.
We have also to note that Plotinus arrives at his Absolute
by a method apparently very different from that pursued by
either of his teachers. Plato’s primal beauty is, on the face
of it, an abstraction and generalisation from all the scattered
and imperfect manifestations of beauty to be met with in our
objective experience. And Aristotle is led to his conception
of an eternal immaterial thought by two lines of analysis,
both starting from the phenomena of external Nature. The
problem of his Physics is to account for the perpetuity of
motion. The problem of his Metaphysics is to explain the
transformation of potential into actual existence. Plotinus,
on the other hand, is always bidding us look within. What
we admire in the objective world is but a reflex of ourselves.
Mind is the sole reality; and to grasp this reality under its
highest form, we must become like it. Thus the more we
isolate our own personality and self-identity from the other
interests and experiences of life, the more nearly do we
approach to consciousness of and coalescence with the supreme
identity wherein all things have their source.
But on looking at the matter a little more closely, we shall
find that Plotinus only set in a clearer light what had all
along been the leading motive of his predecessors. We have
already observed that Plato’s whole mythological machinery
is only a fanciful way of expressing that independent experience
which the mind derives from the study of its own
spontaneous activity. And the process of generalisation
described in the Symposium is really limited to moral phenomena.
Plato’s standpoint is less individualistic than that of
Plotinus in so far as it involves a continual reference to the
beliefs, experiences, and wants of other men; but it is equally
subjective, in the sense of interpreting all Nature by the
analogies of human life. There are even occasions when his
spiritualism goes the length of inculcating complete withdrawal
from the world of common life into an ideal sphere,
when he seems to identify evil with matter, when he reduces
all virtue to contempt for the interests of the body, in language
which his Alexandrian successor could adopt without
any modification of its obvious meaning.434
So also with Aristotle. As a naturalist, he is, indeed,
purely objective; but when he offers a general explanation
of the world, the subjective element introduced by Protagoras
and Socrates at once reappears. Simple absolute self-consciousness
is for him the highest good, the animating principle
of Nature, the most complete reality, and the only one that
would remain, were the element of nonentity to disappear from
this world. The utter misconception of dynamic phenomena
which marks his physics and astronomy can only be accounted
for by his desire to give life the priority over mechanical
motion, and reason the priority over life. Thus his metaphysical
method is essentially identical with the introspective
method recommended by Plotinus, and, if fully worked out,
might have led to the same results.
We cannot, then, agree with Zeller, when he groups the
Neo-Platonists together with the other post-Aristotelian
schools, on the ground that they are all alike distinguished
from Plato and Aristotle by the exclusive attention which
they pay to subjective and practical, as opposed to scientific
and theoretical interests. It seems to us that such distinctions
are out of relation to the historical order in which the
different systems of Greek philosophy were evolved. It is
not in the substance of their teaching, but in their diminished
power of original speculation, that the thinkers who came
after Aristotle offer the strongest contrast to their predecessors.
In so far as they are exclusively practical and subjective, they
follow the Humanists and Socrates. In so far as they combine
Socratic tendencies with physical studies, they imitate
the method of Plato and Aristotle. Their cosmopolitan
naturalism is inherited from the Cynics in the first instance,
more remotely from the physiocratic Sophists, and, perhaps,
in the last resort, from Heracleitus. Their religion is traceable
either to Pythagoras, to Socrates, or to Plato. Their
scepticism is only a little more developed than that of
Protagoras and the Cyrenaics. But if we seek for some one
principle held in common by all these later schools, and held
by none of the earlier schools, we shall seek for it in vain.
The imitative systems are separated from one another by the
same fundamental differences as those which divide the
original systems. Now, in both periods, the deepest of all
differences is that which divides the spiritualists from the
materialists. In both periods, also, it is materialism that
comes first. And in both, the transition from one doctrine to
the other is marked by the exclusive prominence given to
subjective, practical, sceptical, or theological interests in
philosophy; by the enthusiastic culture of rhetoric in general
education; and by a strong religious reaction in the upper
ranks of society.
Thus we can quite agree with Zeller when he observes435
that Neo-Platonism only carried out a tendency towards
spiritualism which had been already manifesting itself among
the later Stoics, and had been still further developed by the
Neo-Pythagoreans. But what does this prove? Not what
Zeller contends for, which is that Neo-Platonism stands on
the same ground with the other post-Aristotelian systems, but
simply that a recurrence of the same intellectual conditions
was being followed by a recurrence of the same results. Now,
as before, materialism was proving its inadequacy to account
for the facts of mental experience. Now, as before, morality,
after being cut off from physical laws, was seeking a basis in
religious or metaphysical ideas. Now, as before, the study of
thoughts was succeeding to the study of words, and the
methods of popular persuasion were giving place to the
methods of dialectical demonstration. Of course, the age of
Plotinus was far inferior to the age of Plato in vitality, in
genius, and in general enlightenment, notwithstanding the
enormous extension which Roman conquest had given to the
superficial area of civilisation, as the difference between the
Enneads and the Dialogues would alone suffice to prove. But
this does not alter the fact that the general direction of their
movement proceeds in parallel lines.
In saying that the post-Aristotelian philosophers were not
original thinkers, we must guard against the supposition that
they contributed nothing of value to thought. On the contrary,
while not putting forward any new theories, they
generalised some of the principles borrowed from their
predecessors, worked out others in minute detail, and stated
the arguments on both sides of every controverted point with
superior dialectic precision. Thus, while materialism had
been assumed as self-evidently true by the pre-Socratic
schools, it was maintained by the Stoics and Epicureans on
what seemed to be grounds of experience and reason. And,
similarly, we find that Plotinus, having arrived at the consciousness
that spiritualism is the common ground on which
Plato and Aristotle stand, the connecting trait which most
completely distinguishes them from their successors, proceeds
in his second essay436 to argue the case against materialism
more powerfully than it had ever been argued before, and
with nearly as much effect as it has ever been argued since.
Our personality, says the Alexandrian philosopher, cannot
be a property of the body, for this is composed of parts, and
is in a state of perpetual flux. A man’s self, then, is his
soul; and the soul cannot be material, for the ultimate
elements of matter are inanimate, and it is inconceivable
that animation and reason should result from the aggregation
of particles which, taken singly, are destitute of both; while,
even were it possible, their disposition in a certain order
would argue the presence of an intelligence controlling them
from without. The Stoics themselves admit the force of
these considerations, when they attribute reason to the fiery
element or vital breath by which, according to them, all
things are shaped. They do, indeed, talk about a certain
elementary disposition as the principle of animation, but this
disposition is either identical with the matter possessing it, in
which case the difficulties already mentioned recur, or distinct
from it, in which case the animating principle still remains to
be accounted for.
Again, to suppose that the soul shares in the changes of
the body is incompatible with the self-identity which memory
reveals. To suppose that it is an extended substance is incompatible
with its simultaneous presence, as an indivisible
whole, at every point to which its activity reaches; as well
as with the circumstance that all our sensations, though
received through different organs, are referred to a common
centre of consciousness. If the sensorium is a fluid body it
will have no more power of retaining impressions than water;
while, if it is a solid, new impressions will either not
be received at all, or only when the old impressions are
effaced.
Passing from sensation to thought, it is admitted that
abstract conceptions are incorporeal: how, then, can they be
received and entertained by a corporeal substance? Or
what possible connexion can there be between different
arrangements of material particles and such notions as
temperance and justice? This is already a sufficiently near
approach to the language of modern philosophy. In another
essay, which according to the original arrangement stands
third, and must have been composed immediately after that
whence the foregoing arguments are transcribed, there is
more than an approach, there is complete coincidence.437 To
deduce mind from atoms is, says Plotinus, if we may so
speak, still more impossible than to deduce it from the
elementary bodies. Granting that the atoms have a natural
movement downwards, granting that they suffer a lateral
deflection and so impinge on one another, still this could do no
more than produce a disturbance in the bodies against which
they strike. But to what atomic movement can one attribute
psychic energies and affections? What sort of collision in
the vertical line of descent, or in the oblique line of deflection,
or in any direction you please, will account for the
appearance of a particular kind of reasoning or mental impulse
or thought, or how can it account for the existence of such
processes at all? Here, of course, Plotinus is alluding to the
Epicureans; but it is with the Stoic and other schools that
he is principally concerned, and we return to his attack on
their psychology.
The activities of the soul are thought, sensation, reasoning,
desire, attention, and so forth: the activities of body are heat,
cold, impact, and gravitation; if to these we add the characteristics
of mind, the latter will have no special properties by
which it can be known. And even in body we distinguish
between quantity and quality; the former, at most, being
corporeal, and the latter not corporeal at all. Here Plotinus
just touches the idealistic method of modern spiritualism, but
fails to follow it any further. He seems to have adopted
Aristotle’s natural realism as a sufficient theory of external
perception, and to have remained uninfluenced by Plato’s
distrust of sensible appearances.
After disposing of the Stoic materialism, according to
which the soul, though distinct from the body, is, equally
with it, an extended and resisting substance, our philosopher
proceeds to discuss the theories which make it a property or
function of the body. The Pythagorean notion of the soul
as a harmony of the body is met by a reproduction of the
well-known arguments used against it in Plato’s Phaedo.
Then comes the Aristotelian doctrine that the soul is the
entelechy—that is to say, the realised purpose and perfection—of
the physical organism to which it belongs. This is an
idea which Aristotle himself had failed to make very clear,
and the inadequacy of which he had virtually acknowledged
by ascribing a different origin to reason, although this is
counted as one of the psychic faculties. Plotinus, at any
rate, could not appreciate an explanation which, whatever
else it implied, certainly involved a considerable departure
from his own dualistic interpretation of the difference
between spirit and matter. He could not enter into
Aristotle’s view of the one as a lower and less concentrated
form of the other. The same arguments which had already
been employed against Stoicism are now turned against the
Peripatetic psychology. The soul as a principle, not only of
memory and desire, but even of nutrition, is declared to be
independent of and separable from the body. And, finally,
as a result of the whole controversy, its immortality is
affirmed. But how far this immortality involves the belief
in a prolongation of personal existence after death, is a point
which still remains uncertain. We shall return to the question
in dealing with the religious opinions of Plotinus.
Closely connected with the materialism of the Stoics,
and equally adverse to the principles of Plato and Aristotle,
was their fatalism. In opposition to this, Plotinus proceeds
to develop the spiritualistic doctrine of free-will.438 In the
previous discussion, we had to notice how closely his arguments
resemble those employed by more modern controversialists.
We have here to point out no less wide a
difference between the two. Instead of presenting free-will
as a fact of consciousness which is itself irreconcilable with
the dependence of mental on material changes, our philosopher,
conversely, infers that the soul must be free both from the
conditions of mechanical causation and from the general
interdependence of natural forces, because it is an individual
substance.439 In truth, the phenomena of volition were handled
by the ancient philosophers with a vagueness and a feebleness
offering the most singular contrast to their powerful and
discriminating grasp of other psychological problems. Of
necessarianism, in the modern sense, they had no idea.
Aristotle failed to see that, quite apart from external
restraints, our choice may conceivably be determined with
the utmost rigour by an internal motive; nor could he
understand that the circumstances which make a man
responsible for his actions do not amount to a release of his
conduct from the law of universal causation. In this respect,
Plato saw somewhat deeper than his disciple, but created
fresh confusion by identifying freedom with the supremacy of
reason over irrational desire.440 Plotinus generally adopts the
Platonist point of view. According to this, the soul is free
when she is extricated from the bonds of matter, and determined
solely by the conditions of her spiritual existence.
Thus virtue is not so much free as identical with freedom;
while, contrariwise, vice means enslavement to the affections
of the body, and therefore comes under the domain of
material causation.441 Yet, again, in criticising the fatalistic
theories which represent human actions as entirely predetermined
by divine providence, he protests against the
ascription of so much that is evil to so good a source, and
insists that at least the bad actions of men are due to their
own free choice.442
In vindicating human freedom, Plotinus had to encounter
a difficulty exceedingly characteristic of his age. This was
the astrological superstition that everything depended on the
stars, and that the future fate of every person might be predicted
by observing their movements and configurations at
the time of his birth. Philosophers found it much easier to
demolish the pretensions of astrology by an abstract demonstration
of their absurdity, than to get rid of the supposed
facts which were currently quoted in their favour. That fortunes
could be foretold on the strength of astronomical calculations
with as much certainty as eclipses, seems to have been
an accepted article of belief in the time of Plotinus, and one
which he does not venture to dispute. He is therefore
obliged to satisfy himself with maintaining that the stars
do not cause, but merely foreshow the future, in the same
manner as the flight of birds, to the prophetic virtue of which
he also attaches implicit credence. All parts of Nature are
connected by such an intimate sympathy, that each serves as
a clue to the rest; and, on this principle, the stars may be
regarded as the letters of a scripture in which the secrets of
futurity are revealed.443
How much originality there may be in the anti-materialistic
arguments of Plotinus we cannot tell. He certainly
marks a great advance on Plato and Aristotle, approximating,
in this respect, much more closely than they do to the modern
standpoint. The indivisibility and permanence of mind had,
no doubt, been strongly insisted on by those teachers, in contrast
with the extended and fluctuating nature of body. But
they did not, like him, deduce these characteristics from a
direct analysis of consciousness as such. Plato inferred the
simplicity and self-identity of mind from the simplicity and
self-identity of the ideas which it contemplates. Aristotle
went a step further, or perhaps only expressed the same
meaning more clearly, when he associated immateriality with
the identity of subject and object in thought.444 Moreover,
both Plato and Aristotle seem to have rested the whole
spiritualistic case on objective rather than on subjective considerations;
although, as we have seen, the subjective interest
was what dominated all the while in their thoughts. Starting
with the analogy of a living body, Plato argues, both in the
Phaedrus and in the Laws, that soul must everywhere be the
first cause of motion, and therefore must exist prior to body.445
The elaborate scientific analysis of Aristotle’s Physics leads
up to a similar conclusion; and the ontological analysis of the
Metaphysics starts with the distinction between Form and
Matter in bodies, to end with the question of their relative
priority, and of the objective machinery by which they are
united. Plotinus, too, sometimes refers to mind as the source
of physical order; but this is rather in deference to his authorities
than because the necessity of such an explanation seemed
to him, as it did to them, the deepest ground of a spiritualistic
philosophy. On the other hand, his psychological arguments
for the immateriality of the soul are drawn from a wider area
of experience than theirs, feeling being taken into account no
less than thought; instead of restricting himself to one particular
kind of cognition for evidence of spiritual power, he
looks for it in every manifestation of living personality.
In criticising the Stoic system as a whole, the New
Academy and the later Sceptics had incidentally dwelt on
sundry absurdities which followed from the materialistic interpretation
of knowledge; and Plotinus evidently derived some
of his most forcible objections from their writings; but no
previous philosopher that we know of had set forth the whole
case for spiritualism and against materialism with such telling
effect. And what is, perhaps, more important than any
originality in detail, is the profound insight shown in choosing
this whole question of spiritualism versus materialism for the
ground whereon the combined forces of Plato and Aristotle
were to fight their first battle against the naturalistic system
which had triumphed over them five centuries before. It was
on dialectical and ethical grounds that the controversy between
Porch and Academy, on ethical and religious grounds
that the controversy between Epicureanism and all other
schools of philosophy, had hitherto been conducted. Cicero
and Plutarch never allude to their opponents as materialists.
Only once, in his polemic against Colôtes, does Plutarch
observe that neither a soul nor anything else could be made
out of atoms, but this is because they are discrete, not because
they are extended.446 For the rest, his method is to trip up
his opponents by pointing out their inconsistencies, rather than
to cut the ground from under their feet by proving that their
theory of the universe is wrong.
Under such guidance as this. Platonism had made but
little way. We saw, in the concluding sections of the last
chapter and in the opening section of the present chapter,
that it profited by the religious and literary revival of the
second century, just as it was to profit long afterwards by the
greater revival of the fifteenth century, so much so as to become
the fashionable philosophy of the age. Yet, even in that
period of its renewed splendour, the noblest of contemporary
thinkers was not a Platonist but a Stoic; and although it
would be unfair to measure the moral distance between the
Porch and the Academy by the interval which separates an
Aurelius from an Apuleius, still it would seem as if naturalism
continued to be the chosen creed of strenuous and dutiful
endeavour, while spiritualism was drifting into an alliance
with hysterical and sensuous superstition. If we may judge
by the points which Sextus Empiricus selects for controversial
treatment, Stoicism was still the reigning system in his time,
that is to say, about the beginning of the third century; and
if, a generation later, it had sunk into neglect, every rival
school, except that of Epicurus, was in exactly the same condition.
Thus the only advance made was to substitute one
form of materialism for another, until Neo-Platonism came
and put an end to their disputes by destroying the common
foundation on which they stood; while, at the same time, it
supplied a completely organised doctrine round which the
nobler elements of the Hellenic revival could rally for a last
stand against the foes that were threatening it from every
side.
We have seen how Plotinus establishes the spiritualistic
basis of his philosophy. We have now to see how he works
out from it in all directions, developing the results of his previous
enquiries into a complete metaphysical system. It will
have been observed that the whole method of reasoning by
which materialism was overthrown, rested on the antithesis
between the unity of consciousness and the divisibility of corporeal
substance. Very much the same method was afterwards
employed by Cartesianism to demonstrate the same
conclusion. But with Descartes and his followers, the opposition
between soul and body was absolute, the former
being defined as pure thought, the latter as pure extension.
Hence the extreme difficulty which they experienced in
accounting for the evident connexion between the two. The
spiritualism of Plotinus did not involve any such impassable
chasm between consciousness and its object. According to
him, although the soul is contained in or depends on an absolutely
self-identical unity, she is not herself that unity, but in
some degree shares the characters of divisibility and extension.447
If we conceive all existence as bounded at either extremity
by two principles, the one extended and the other inextended,
then soul will still stand midway between them;
not divided in herself, but divided in respect to the bodies
which she animates. Plotinus holds that such an assumption
is necessitated by the facts of sensation. A feeling of pain,
for example, is located in a particular point of the body, and
is, at the same time, apprehended as my feeling, not as some
one else’s. A similar synthesis obtains through the whole of
Nature. The visible universe consists of many heterogeneous
parts, held together by a single animating principle. And
we can trace the same qualities and figures through a multitude
of concrete individuals, their essential unity remaining
unbroken, notwithstanding the dispersion of the objects in
which they inhere.
Here Plotinus avowedly follows the teaching of Plato, who,
in the Timaeus, describes Being or Substance as composed by
mingling the indivisible and unchanging with the divisible
and corporeal principle.448 And, although there is no express
reference, we know that in placing soul between the two, he
was equally following Plato. It is otherwise in the next essay,
which undertakes to give a more explicit analysis of psychical
phenomena.449 The soul, we are told, consists, like external
objects, of two elements related to one another as Form and
Matter. These are reason and sense. The office of the
former is, primarily, to enlighten and control the latter. Plato
had already pointed to such a distinction; but Aristotle was
the first to work it out clearly, and to make it the hinge of
his whole system. It is, accordingly, under the guidance of
Aristotle that Plotinus proceeds in what he has next to say.
Just as there is a soul of the world corresponding to our soul,
so also, he argues, there must be a universal objective Reason
outside and above the world. In speaking of this Reason, we
shall, for clearness’ sake, in general call it by its Greek name,
Nous. Nous, according to Aristotle, is the faculty by which
we apprehend abstract ideas; it is self-thinking thought; and,
as such, it is the prime mover of Nature. Plotinus adopts the
first two positions unreservedly, and the third to a certain
extent; while he brings all three into combination with the
Platonic theory of ideas. It had always been an insuperable
difficulty in the way of Plato’s teaching that it necessitated,
or seemed to necessitate, the unintelligible notion of ideas
existing without any mind to think them. For a disciple of
Aristotle, the difficulty ceases to exist if the archetypal
essences assumed by Plato are conceived as residing in an
eternal Nous. But, on the other hand, how are we to reconcile
such an accommodation with Aristotle’s principle, that
the Supreme Intelligence can think nothing but itself?
Simply by generalising from the same master’s doctrine that
the human Nous is identical with the ideas which it contemplates.
Thought and its object are everywhere one. Thus,
according to Plotinus, the absolute Nous embraces the totality
of archetypes or forms which we see reflected and embodied
in the material universe. In thinking them, it thinks itself,
not passing from one to the other as in discursive reasoning,
nor bringing them into existence by the act of thought, but
apprehending them as simultaneously present realities.
To explain how the Nous could be identical with a
number of distinct ideas was a difficult problem. We shall
have to show at a more advanced stage of our exposition
how Plotinus endeavoured to solve it with the help of Plato’s
Sophist. In the essay where his theory is first put forward,
he cuts the knot by asserting that each idea virtually
contains every other, while each in its actual and separate
existence is, so to speak, an independent Nous. But correlation
is not identity; and to say that each idea thinks itself
is not to explain how the same subject can think, and in
thinking be identical with all. The personal identity of the
thinking subject still stands in unreconciled opposition to
the multitude of thoughts which it entertains, whether successively
or in a single intuition. Of two things one: either
the unity of the Nous or the diversity of its ideas must be
sacrificed. Plotinus evades the alternative by a kind of three-card
trick. Sometimes his ideal unity is to be found under
the notion of convergence to a common centre, sometimes
under the notion of participation in a common property,
sometimes under the notion of mutual equivalence.
The confusion was partly inherited from Aristotle. When
discussing the psychology of that philosopher, we showed that
his active Nous is no other than the idea of which we are at
any moment actually conscious. Our own reason is the
passive Nous, whose identity is lost in the multiplicity of
objects with which it becomes identified in turn. But
Aristotle was careful not to let the personality of God,
or the supreme Nous, be endangered by resolving it into
the totality of substantial forms which constitute Nature.
God is self-conscious in the strictest sense. He thinks
nothing but himself. Again, the subjective starting-point of
Plotinus may have affected his conception of the universal
Nous. A single individual may isolate himself from his
fellows in so far as he is a sentient being; he cannot do so
in so far as he is a rational being. His reason always
addresses itself to the reason of some one else—a fact
nowhere brought out so clearly as in the dialectic philosophy
of Socrates and Plato. Then, when an agreement has been
established, their minds, before so sharply divided, seem to
be, after all, only different personifications of the same
universal spirit. Hence reason, no less than its objects,
comes to be conceived as both many and one. And this
synthesis of contradictories meets us in modern German as
well as in ancient Greek philosophy.
After his preliminary analysis of Nous, we find Plotinus
working out in two directions from the conception so
obtained.450 He begins by explaining in what relation the
human soul stands to the universal reason. To him,
personally, it seemed as if the world of thought into which
he penetrated by reflecting on his own inmost essence, was
so much the real home of his soul that her presence in a
bodily habitation presented itself as a difficulty requiring to
be cleared up. In this connexion, he refers to the opinions
of the Pythagoreans, who looked on our earthly life as an
unmixed evil, a punishment for some sin committed in a
former stage of existence. Their views seem to have been
partly shared by Plato. Sometimes he calls the body a prison
and a tomb into which the soul has fallen from her original
abode. Yet, in his Timaeus, he glorifies the visible world, and
tells us that the universal soul was divinely appointed to give
it life and reason; while our individual souls have also their
part to play in perfecting the same providential scheme.
It is to the second theory that Plotinus evidently leans.
However closely his life may have been conformed to the
Pythagorean model—a point with respect to which we have
nothing better than the very prejudiced statements of
Porphyry to rely on—there is no trace of Pythagorean
asceticism in his writings. Hereafter we shall see how
hostile he was to Gnostic pessimism. In the preceding
essay, he had already specified admiration for physical
beauty as a first and necessary step in the soul’s ascent to a
contemplation of spiritual realities;451 and now it is under the
guidance of Plato’s later speculations that he proceeds to
account for her descent from that higher world to the
restraints of matter and of sense.
With regard to the universal soul of Nature, there is,
indeed, no difficulty at all. In giving a sensible realisation
to the noetic ideas, she suffers no degradation or pollution by
contact with the lower elements of matter. Enthroned on
the outer verge of the cosmos, she governs the whole course
of Nature by a simple exercise of volition, and in the enjoyment
of a felicity which remains undisturbed by passion or
desire. But just as we have seen the supreme Nous resolving
itself into a multitude of individual intelligences, so also does
the cosmic soul produce many lesser or partial souls of which
our own is one. Now these derivative souls cannot all be
equal, for that would be to defeat the purpose of creation,
which is to realise all the possibilities of creation from the
highest to the lowest. Thus each has an office corresponding
to her place in the scale of perfection.452 We may say of the
human soul that she stoops to conquer. Her mission is to
cope with the more recalcitrant forms of matter. It is to the
struggle with their impurities that the troubles and passions
of our life are due. By yielding to earthly temptations, we
suffer a second fall, and one much more real than the first;
by overcoming them, as is perfectly in our power to do, we
give scope and exercise to faculties which would otherwise
have remained dormant and unknown. Moreover, our soul
retains the privilege of returning to her former abode,
enriched by the experience acquired in this world, and with
that clearer perception of good which the knowledge of its
opposite alone can supply. Nay, paradoxical as the assertion
may seem, she has not entirely descended to earth, but
remains in partial communication with the noetic world by
virtue of her reasoning faculty; that is to say, when its
intuitions are not darkened and disturbed by the triumph of
sensuous impressions over the lower soul. On this and on
many other occasions, Plotinus betrays a glimmering consciousness
that his philosophy is purely subjective, and that
its attempted transcendentalism is, in truth, a projection of
psychological distinctions into the external world. Starting
with the familiar division of human nature into body, soul, and
spirit (or reason), he endeavours to find an objective counterpart
for each. Body is represented by the material universe,
soul by the animating principle of Nature, reason by the extramundane
Nous. Under these three heads is comprised the
totality of real existence; but existence itself has to be
accounted for by a principle lying above and beyond it,
which has still to be obtained by an effort of abstraction
from the data that self-consciousness supplies.453
In his very first essay, Plotinus had hinted at a principle
higher and more primordial than the absolute Nous, something
with which the soul is connected by the mediation of
Nous, just as she herself mediates between Nous and the
material world. The notion of such a supreme principle was
derived from Plato. In the sixth and seventh books of the
Republic, we are told that at the summit of the dialectic
series stands an idea to grasp which is the ultimate object of
all reasoning. Plato calls this the Idea of Good, and describes
it as holding a place in the intellectual world analogous to
that held by the sun in the physical world. For, just as the
sun brings all visible things into being, and also gives the
light by which they are seen, so also the Good is not only
that by which the objects of knowledge are known, but also
that whence their existence is derived, while at the same time
itself transcending existence in dignity and power.454
In a former part of this work455 we found reason to believe
that Plato’s supreme good is no other than the Idea of Sameness
which occurs in the Sophist and in the Timaeus, where
it is correlated with the Idea of Difference; and we also
concluded that the divine creator of the last-named dialogue
is intended to represent it under a more concrete and popular
form.456 We may, perhaps, also discover it in the Limit of the
Philêbus; and if we are to believe what Aristotle tells us
about the later teaching of Plato, it seems to have finally
coalesced with the Pythagorean One, which combines with
the unlimited Dyad to form first number, and then everything
else, just as the Same combines with the Different to form
existence in the Timaeus.457
For the Platonic Idea of Good, Aristotle had substituted
his own conception of self-thinking thought, as the absolute
on which all Nature hangs: and we have seen how Plotinus
follows him to the extent of admitting that this visible
universe is under the immediate control of an incorporeal
Reason, which also serves as a receptacle for the Platonic
Ideas. But what satisfied Aristotle does not fully satisfy
him. The first principle must be one, and Nous fails to
answer the conditions of absolute unity, Even self-thinking
thought involves the elementary dualism of object and
subject. Again, as Plotinus somewhat inconsistently argues,
Nous, being knowledge, must cognise something simpler than
itself.458 Or, perhaps, what he means is that in Nous, which is
its product, the first principle becomes self-conscious. Consciousness
means a check on the outflow of energy due to the
restraining action of the One, a return to and reflection on
itself of the creative power.459
If the necessity of the One is proved by the inward
differentiation of what seemed most simple, it is also proved
by the integration of what seems most divided. In his next
essay, our philosopher wanders off from the investigation of
what he has just begun, by abruptly starting the question
whether all souls are one.460 This question is, however, most
intimately connected with his main theme. He answers it in
the affirmative. Strictly personal as our feelings seem, we
are, in reality, one with each other, through our joint participation
in the world-soul. Love and sympathy among
human beings are solely due to this connexion. Plotinus
mentions, as another evidence of its reality, the secret affinities
called into play even at a great distance by magical spells—an
allusion very characteristic of his age.461 What prevents
us from more fully perceiving the unity of all souls is the
separateness of the bodies with which they are associated.
Matter is the principle of individuation. But even within the
soul there is a division between the rational and the irrational
part, concentration being the characteristic of the one and
dispersion of the other. The latter is fitted by its divided
nature for presiding over the bodily functions of sensation
and nutrition; and with the dissolution of the body it returns
to the unity of the higher soul. There are two ways in which
we can account for this pervading unity. It is either as
products or as portions of the universal soul that all particular
souls are one. Plotinus combines both explanations. The
world-soul first gives birth to an image of itself, and then this
is subdivided into as many partial souls as there are bodies
requiring animation.
On extending our survey still wider, we find that the existence
of a thing everywhere depends on its unity.462 All
bodies perish by dissolution, and dissolution means the loss of
unity. Health, beauty, and virtue are merely so many different
kinds of harmony and unison. Shall we then say that
soul, as the great unifying power in Nature, is the One of
which we are in search? Not so; for preceding investigations
have taught us that soul is only an agent for transmitting
ideas received from a higher power; and the psychic
faculties themselves are held together by a unifying principle
for which we have to account. Neither is the whole sum of
existence the One, for its very name implies a plurality of
parts. And the claims of the Nous to that distinction have
been already disproved. In short, nothing that exists can
be the One, for, as we have seen, unity is the cause of
existence and must therefore precede it.
‘What then,’ asks Plotinus, ‘is the One? No easy question to
answer for us whose knowledge is based on ideas, and who can
hardly tell what ideas are, or what is existence itself. The farther
the soul advances in this formless region, where there is nothing for
her to grasp, nothing whose impress she can receive, the more does
her footing fail her, the more helpless and desolate does she feel.
Oftentimes she wearies of such searching and is glad to leave it all
and to descend into the world of sense until she finds rest on the
solid earth, as the eyes are relieved in turning from small objects to
large. For she does not know that to be one herself is to have
gained the object of her search, for then she is no other than that
which she knows. Nevertheless it is only by this method that we
can master the philosophy of the One. Since, then, what we seek is
one, and since we are considering the first principle of all things and
the Good, he who enters on this quest must not place himself afar
from the things that are first by descending to the things that are
last, but he must leave the objects of sense, and, freed from all evil,
ascend to the first principle of his own nature, that by becoming one,
instead of many, he may behold the beginning and the One. Therefore
he must become Reason, trusting his soul to Reason for guidance
and support, that she may wakefully receive what it sees, and with
this he must behold the One, not admitting any element of sense, but
gazing on the purest with pure Reason and with that which in Reason
is first. Should he who addresses himself to this enterprise imagine
that the object of his vision possesses magnitude or form or bulk,
then Reason is not his guide, for such perceptions do not belong to
its nature but to sense and to the opinion which follows on sense.
No; we must only pledge Reason to perform what it can do.
Reason sees what precedes, or what contains, or what is derived
from itself. Pure are the things in it, purer still those which precede,
or rather, that which precedes it. This is neither reason nor anything
that is; for whatever is has the form of existence, whereas this
has none, not even an ideal form. For the One, whose nature is to
generate all things, cannot be any of those things itself. Therefore
it is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul; neither
moving nor at rest, not in place, not in time, but unique of its kind,
or rather kindless, being before all kind, before motion and before
rest, for these belong to being, and are that to which its multiplicity
is due. Why, then, if it does not move, is it not at rest? Because
while one or both of these must be attributed to being, the very act
of attribution involves a distinction between subject and predicate,
which is impossible in the case of what is absolutely simple.’463
The One cannot, properly speaking, be an object of knowledge,
but is apprehended by something higher than knowledge.
This is why Plato calls it ineffable and indescribable.
What we can describe is the way to the view, not the view itself.
The soul which has never been irradiated with the light of
that supreme splendour, nor filled with the passionate joy of
a lover finding rest in the contemplation of his beloved, cannot
be given that experience in words. But the beatific
vision is open to all. He from whom it is hidden has only
himself to blame. Let him break away from the restraints of
sense and place himself under the guidance of philosophy,
that philosophy which leads from matter to spirit, from soul
to Nous, from Nous to the One.
Plotinus himself, we are told, reached the climax of complete
unification several times in his life, Porphyry only once,
in the sixty-eighth year of his age. Probably the condition
so denominated was a species of hypnotic trance. Its importance
in the Neo-Platonic system has been considerably
exaggerated, and on the strength of this single point some
critics have summarily disposed of Plotinus and his whole
school as unreasoning mystics. Mysticism is a vague word
capable of very various applications. In the present instance,
we presume that it is used to express a belief in the existence
of some method for the discovery of truth apart from tradition;
observation, and reasoning. And, taken in this sense, the
Neo-Platonic method of arriving at a full apprehension of the
One would be considered an extreme instance of mysticism.
We must bear in mind, however, that Plotinus arrives at an
intellectual conception of absolute unity by the most strictly
logical process. It makes no difference that his reasoning is
unsound, for the same criticism applies to other philosophers
who have never been accused of mysticism. It may be said
that after leading us up to a certain point, reason is replaced
by intuition. Rather, what the ultimate intuition does is not
to take the place of logic, but to substitute a living realisation
for an abstract and negative conception. Moreover, the
intuition is won not by forsaking logic, but by straining its
resources to the very utmost. Again, one great characteristic
of mysticism, as ordinarily understood, is to deny the truth of
common observation and reasoning. Now Plotinus never
goes this length. As we have already remarked, he does not
even share Plato’s distrust of sensible impressions, but rather
follows the example of Aristotle in recognising their validity
within a certain sphere. Nor does he mention having
received any revelations of divine truth during his intercourse
with the absolute One. This alone marks an immense difference
between his ecstasies—if such they can be called—and
those of the Christian mystics with whom he is associated by
M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire.464
It may be said that the One is itself a mystical conception,
involving a reversal of all our ordinary beliefs. The
universe is a vast multiplicity of objects, held together, if you
will, by some secret bond of union possibly related to the personal
unity of consciousness, but still neither lost nor confused
in its identity. Precisely; but Plotinus himself fully admits
as much. His One is the cause of existence, not existence
itself. He knows just as well as we do, that the abstract idea
of unity has no reality apart from the mind. But if so, why
should he associate it, in the true mystical style, with the
transports of amorous passion? The question is pertinent,
but it might be addressed to other Greek systems as well.
We must remember that Plotinus is only commenting and
enlarging on Plato. In the Republic also, the Idea of Good
is described as transcending the existence and the knowledge
which it produces,465 and in the Symposium, the absolute self
beautiful, which seems to be the Good under another name, is
spoken of in terms not less passionately enthusiastic than any
applied by Plotinus to the vision of the One.466 Doubtless the
practical sense of the great Attic master did not desert him
even here: the object of all thought, in its widest sweep and
in its highest flight, is to find room for every possible expansion
of knowledge, for every possible elevation of life.
Plotinus was a stranger to such broad views; but in departing
from Plato, as usual he follows Aristotle. The absolute self-thinking
thought of the Stagirite is, when we examine it
closely, only one degree less chimerical than the Neo-Platonic
unification. For it means consciousness of self without the
correlative consciousness of a not-self, and as such, according
to Aristotle, it affords an eternal felicity equal or superior to
the best and happiest moments of our sensitive human life.
What Plotinus does is to isolate personal identity from reason
and, as such, to make it at once the cause and the supreme
ideal of existence. This involves two errors: first a false
abstraction of one subjective phenomenon from the sum total
of conscious life; and, secondly, an illegitimate generalisation
of this abstraction into an objective law of things. But
in both errors, Aristotle had preceded him, by dissociating
reason from all other mental functions, and by then attributing
the whole cosmic movement to the love which this isolated
faculty of reason, in its absolute self-existence, for ever
inspires. And he also set the example of associating happiness,
which is an emotional state, with an intellectual abstraction
from which emotion is necessarily excluded.
Again, the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics all pass for
being absolute rationalists. Yet their common ideal of
impassive self-possession, when worked out to its logical consequences,
becomes nearly indistinguishable from the self-simplification
of Plotinus. All alike exhibit the Greek
tendency towards endless abstraction—what we have called
the analytical moment of Greek thought, working together
with the moments of antithesis and circumscription. The
sceptical isolation of man from Nature, the Epicurean isolation
of the individual from the community, the Stoic isolation
of will from feeling, reached their highest and most abstract
expression in the Neo-Platonic isolation of pure self-identity
from all other modes of consciousness and existence combined.
In estimating the intellectual character of Plotinus, we
must also remember that the theory of the absolute One
occupies a relatively small place in his speculations; while, at
a rough computation, the purely mystical portions of his
writings—by which we understand those in which allusion is
made to personal and incommunicable experiences of his
own—do
not amount to more than one per cent. of the whole. If
these have attracted more attention than all the rest put
together, the reason probably is that they offer an agreeable
relief to the arid scholasticism which fills so much of the
Enneads, and that they are the only very original contribution
made by Plotinus to Greek literature. But the significance
of a writer must not always be measured by his most original
passages, and this is eminently true of our philosopher. His
great merit was to make the spiritualism of Plato and
Aristotle more intelligible and interesting than it had been
before, and to furnish reason with a rallying-point when it
was threatened with utter destruction by the religious revival
of the empire.
So far our investigation has been analytical. We have seen
Plotinus acquire, one after another, the elements out of which
his system has still to be constructed. The first step was to
separate spirit from matter. They are respectively distinguished
as principles of union and of division. The bodies
given to us in experience are a combination of the two, a
dispersion of form over an infinitely extended, infinitely
divisible, infinitely changeful substratum. Our own souls,
which at first seemed so absolutely self-identical, present,
on examination, a similarly composite character. A fresh
analysis results in the separation of Nous or Reason from the
lower functions of conscious life. And we infer by analogy
that the soul in Nature bears the same relation to a transcendent
objective Nous. Nous is essentially pure self-consciousness,
and from this self-consciousness the world of
Ideas is developed. Properly speaking, Ideas are the sole
reality: sensible forms are an image of them impressed on
matter through the agency of the world-soul. But Nous, or
the totality of Ideas, though high, is not the highest. All
that has hitherto occupied us, Nature, Soul, and Reason, is
pervaded by a fundamental unity, without which nothing
could exist. But Soul is not herself this unity, nor is
Reason. Self-consciousness, even in its purest expression,
involves a duality of object and subject. The notion of
Being is distinct from the notion of oneness. The principle
represented by the latter, as the cause of all things, must
itself transcend existence. At the same time, it is revealed
to us by the fact of our own personal identity. To be united
with oneself is to be united with the One.
Thus we have, in all, five gradations: the One, Nous,
Soul, the sensible world, and, lastly, unformed Matter.
Taken together, the first three constitute a triad of spiritual
principles, and, as such, are associated in a single group by
Plotinus.467 Sometimes they are spoken of as the Alexandrian
Trinity. But the implied comparison with the Trinity of
Catholicism is misleading. With Neo-Platonism, the supreme
unity is, properly speaking, alone God and alone One.
Nous is vastly inferior to the first principle, and Soul, again,
to Nous. Possibly the second and third principles are personal;
the first most certainly is not, since self-consciousness
is expressly denied to it by Plotinus. Nor is it likely that
the idea of a supernatural triad was suggested to Neo-Platonism
by Christianity. Each of the three principles may
be traced to its source in Greek philosophy. This has been
already shown in the case of the One and of the Nous.
The universal soul is to be found in Plato’s Timaeus; it is
analogous, at least in its lower, divided part, to Aristotle’s
Nature; and it is nearly identical with the informing spirit
of Stoicism. As to the number three, it was held in high
esteem long before the Christian era, and was likely to be
independently employed for the construction of different
systems at a time when belief in the magical virtue of
particular numbers was more widely diffused than at any
former period of civilised history.
From another point of view, as we have already observed
with Kirchner, the fundamental triad assumed by Plotinus is
body, soul, and spirit. Under their objective aspect of the
sensible universe, the world-soul, and the Nous, these three
principles constitute the sum of all reality. Take away
plurality from Nous and there remains the One. Take away
soul from body and there remains unformed matter. These
are the two transcendent principles between which the others
extend, and by whose combination in various proportions
they are explained. It is true that Plotinus himself does
not allude to the possibility of such an analysis, but it exhibits,
better than any other, the natural order of his dialectic.
Plotinus passes by an almost insensible transition from
the more elementary and analytical to the more constructive
portion of his philosophy. This naturally falls into two great
divisions, the one speculative and the other practical. It has
to be shown by what necessity and in what order the great
cosmic principles are evolved from their supreme source; and
it has also to be shown in what way this knowledge is connected
with the supreme interests of the human soul. The
moral aspect of Neo-Platonism is not at first very clearly
distinguished from its metaphysical aspect; and both find
their most general solution in the same line of thought that
has led us up to a contemplation of the ultimate One. For
the successive gradations of our ascent represent, in an inverted
order, the steps of creative energy by which all things
are evolved from their primal source; while they directly
correspond to the process of purification through which every
soul must pass in returning from the exile of her separate
and material existence to the happiness of identification with
God. And here we at once come on the fundamental contradiction
of the system. What we were so carefully taught to
consider as one and nothing more, must now be conceived as
the first cause and the supreme good. Plotinus does, indeed,
try to evade the difficulty by saying that his absolute is only
a cause in relation to other things, that it is not so much good
as the giver of good, that it is only one in the sense of not
being many.468 But after making these reservations, he continues
to use the old terms as confidently as if they stood for
the ideas usually associated with them. His fundamental
error was to identify three distinct methods of connecting
phenomena, in thought, with each other or with ourselves.
We may view things in relation to their generating antecedents,
in relation to other things with which they are
associated by resemblance or juxtaposition, or in relation to
the satisfaction of our own wants. These three modes of
reference correspond to Aristotle’s efficient, formal, and final
causes; but the word causation should be applied only to
the first. Whether their unfortunate confusion both by
Aristotle and by his successors was in any appreciable
degree due to their having been associated by him under a
common denomination, may reasonably be doubted. It is
rather more probable that the same name was given to these
different conceptions in consequence of their having first
become partially identified in thought. Social arrangements,
which have a great deal to do with primitive speculation,
would naturally lead to such an identification. The king or
other chief magistrate stands at the head of the social hierarchy
and forms the bond of union among its members; he is
the source of all authority; and his position, or, failing that, his
favour, is regarded as the supreme good. Religion extends
the same combination of attributes to her chief God; and
philosophy, following on the lines of religion, employs it to
unify the methods of science and morality.
All existence, according to Plotinus, proceeds from the
One, which he also calls God. But God does not create the
world by a conscious exercise of power; for, as we have seen,
every form of consciousness is excluded from his definition.
Neither does it proceed from him by emanation, for this
would imply a diminution of his substance.469 It is produced
by an overflow of his infinite power.470 Our philosopher tries
to explain and defend this rather unintelligible mode of
derivation by the analogy of physical substances and their
actions. Light is constantly coming from the sun without
any loss to the luminary itself.471 And all things are, in like
manner, constantly communicating their proper virtue to
others while remaining unaltered themselves. Here we have
a good example of the close connexion between science and
abstract speculation. People often talk as if metaphysics
was something beyond the reach of verification. But some
metaphysical theories admit, at any rate, of disproof, in so far
as they are founded on false physical theories. Had Plotinus
known that neither the sun nor anything else in Nature can
produce force out of nothing, he would, very probably, have
hesitated to credit the One with such a power.
In reasoning up from the world to its first cause, we were
given to understand that the two were related to one another
as contradictory opposites. The multiple must proceed from
the simple, and existence from that which does not exist.
But the analogies of material production now suggest a
somewhat different view. What every power calls into
existence is an image of itself, but the effect is never more
than a weakened and imperfect copy of its original. Thus
the universe appears as a series of diminishing energies
descending in a graduated scale from the highest to the
lowest. Here, again, bad science makes bad philosophy.
Effects are never inferior to their causes, but always exactly
equal, the effect being nothing else than the cause in another
place or under another form. This would be obvious enough,
did not superficial observation habitually confound the real
cause with the sum of its concomitants. What we are accustomed
to think of as a single cause is, in truth, a whole bundle
of causes, which do not always converge to a single point, and
each of which, taken singly, is, of course, inferior to the whole
sum taken together. Thus when we say that the sun heats
the earth, this is only a conventional way of speaking. What
really does the work is a relatively infinitesimal part of the
solar heat separately transmitted to us through space. Once
neglect this truth, and there is no reason why effects should
not exceed as well as fall short of their causes in any assignable
proportion. Such an illusion is, in fact, produced when
different energies converge to a point. Here it is the consequent
and not the antecedent which is confounded with
the sum of its concomitants, as when an explosion is said to
be the effect of a spark.
Of course we are speaking of causation as exercised under
the conditions of time, space, matter, and motion. It is then
identical with the transmission of energy and obeys the laws
of energy. And to talk about causation under any other
conditions than these is utter nonsense. But Plotinus and
other philosophers exclude the most essential of the conditions
specified from their enquiries into the ultimate origin
of things. We are expressly informed that the genesis of
Nous from the One, and of Soul from Nous, must not be
conceived as taking place in time but in eternity.472 Unfortunately
those who make such reservations are not consistent.
They continue to talk about power, causation, priority, and
so forth, as if these conceptions were separable from time.
Hence they have to choose between making statements
which are absolutely unintelligible and making statements
which are absolutely untrue.
Perhaps the processes of logic and mathematics may be
adduced as an exception. It may be contended that the
genus is prior to the species, the premise to the conclusion,
the unit to the multiple, the line to the figure, in reason
though not in time. And Plotinus avails himself to the
fullest extent of mathematical and logical analogies in his
transcendental constructions. His One is the starting-point
of numeration, the centre of a circle, the identity involved in
difference; and under each relation it claims an absolute
priority, of which causal power is only the most general
expression. We have already seen how a multitude of
archetypal Ideas spring from the supreme Nous as from their
fountain-head. Their production is explained, on the lines of
Plato’s Sophist, as a process of dialectical derivation. By
logically analysing the conception of self-consciousness, we
obtain, first of all, Nous itself, or Reason, as the subject, and
Existence as the object of thought. Subject and object,
considered as the same with one another, give us Identity;
considered as distinct, they give us Difference. The passage
from one to the other gives Motion; the limitation of thought
to itself gives Rest. The plurality of determinations so
obtained gives number and quantity, their specific difference
gives quality, and from these principles everything else is
derived.473 It might seem as if, here at least, we had something
which could be called a process of eternal generation—a
causal order independent of time. But, in reality, the
assumed sequence exists only in our minds, and there it
takes place under the form of time, not less inevitably than
do the external re-arrangements of matter and motion. Thus
in logic and mathematics, such terms as priority, antecedence,
and evolution can only be used to signify the order in which
our knowledge is acquired; they do not answer to causal
relations existing among things in themselves. And apart
from these two orders—the objective order of dynamical
production in space and time, and the subjective order of
intelligibility in thought—there is no kind of succession that
we can conceive. Eternal relations, if they exist at all, must
be relations of co-existence, of resemblance, or of difference,
continued through infinite time. Wherever there is antecedence,
the consequent can only have existed for a finite
time.
Some may think that we have pushed this point at unnecessary
length. But the Neo-Platonic method is not quite
so obsolete as they, perhaps, suppose. Whenever we repeat
the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, we are expressing our
religious belief in the language of the Alexandrian schools,
thus pledging ourselves to metaphysical dogmas which we can
neither explain nor defend. Such terms as sonship and procession
have no meaning except when applied to relations
conceived under the form of time; and to predicate eternity
of them is to reduce them to so much unintelligible jargon.
An energy continually advancing through successive gradations,
and diminishing as it advances—such, as we have
seen, is the conception of existence offered by Plotinus. We
have seen, also, how to explain the genesis of one principle
from another without the aid of supernatural volition or
of mechanical causation, he is compelled to press into the
service every sort of relationship by which two objects can be
connected, and to invest it with a dynamical significance
which only the phenomena of matter and motion can possess.
But what he chiefly relies on for guidance in this tortuous
labyrinth of timeless evolution, is the old Greek principle that
contraries are generated from one another. And with him, as
with the earlier thinkers, all contraries reduce themselves, in
the last analysis, to the four great antitheses of the One and
the Many, Being and not-Being, the Same and the Other,
Rest and Motion. It matters nothing that he should have
followed Plato to the extent of co-ordinating five of these terms
as supreme archetypal Ideas, immediately resulting from the
self-consciousness of Nous, and themselves producing all other
forms of existence. They are used, quite independently of
that derivation, to explain the connexion of the various
creative principles with one another. Nous is deduced from
its first cause as Being from not-Being, as the Many from the
One, as Difference from Identity, and as Motion from Rest.474
To explain the generation of Soul from Nous is a more
difficult problem. The One had originally been defined
as the antithetical cause of Nous, and therefore the latter
could easily be accounted for by simply reversing the analytical
process; whereas Nous had not been defined as the cause
of Soul, but as the model whence her creative Ideas are
derived. Soul, in fact, is not opposed to anything; she is the
connecting link between sense and spirit. In this strait,
Plotinus seems to think that the antithesis between Rest and
Motion is the best fitted to express the nature of her descent
from the higher principle; and on one occasion he illustrates
the relation of his three divine substances to one another by
the famous figure of a central point representing the One, a
fixed circle round that point representing the Nous, and
outside that, again, a revolving circle representing the Soul.475
Still, the different parts of the system are very awkwardly
pieced together at this juncture; for the creative energy of the
Nous has already been invoked to account for the Ideas or
partial intelligences into which it spontaneously divides; and
one does not understand how it can be simultaneously applied
to the production of something that is not an Idea at all.
Fresh difficulties arise in explaining the activity which
the Soul, in her turn, exerts. As originally conceived, her
function was sufficiently clear. Mediating between two worlds,
she transforms the lower one into a likeness of the higher,
stamping on material objects a visible image of the eternal
Ideas revealed to her by a contemplation of the Nous. And,
as a further elaboration of this scheme, we were told that
the primary soul generates an inferior soul, which, again,
subdivides itself into the multitude of partial souls required
for the animation of different bodily organisms. But now
that our philosopher has entered on a synthetic construction
of the elements furnished by his preliminary analysis, he finds
himself confronted by an entirely new problem. For his
implied principle is that each hypostasis must generate the
grade which comes next after it in the descending series of
manifestations, until the possibilities of existence have been
exhausted. But in developing and applying the noetic Ideas,
the Soul, apparently, finds a pre-existing Matter ready to
hand. Thus she has to deal with something lower than
herself, which she did not create, and which is not created by
the Forms combined with it in sensible experience. We hear
of a descent from thought to feeling, and from feeling to simple
vitality,476 but in each instance the depth of the Soul’s fall is
measured by the extent to which she penetrates into the
recesses of a substance not clearly related to her nor to
anything above her.
Plotinus is driven by this perplexity to reconsider the
whole theory of Matter.477 He takes Aristotle’s doctrine as
the groundwork of his investigation. According to this, all
existence is divided into Matter and Form. What we know of
things—in other words, the sum of their differential characteristics—is
their Form. Take away this, and the unknowable
residuum is their Matter. Again, Matter is the vague
indeterminate something out of which particular Forms are
developed. The two are related as Possibility to Actuality, as
the more generic to the more specific substance through every
grade of classification and composition. Thus there are two
Matters, the one sensible and the other intelligible. The
former constitutes the common substratum of bodies, the other
the common element of ideas.478 The general distinction
between Matter and Form was originally suggested to Aristotle
by Plato’s remarks on the same subject; but he differs
from his master in two important particulars. Plato, in his
Timaeus, seems to identify Matter with space.479 So far, it is a
much more positive conception than the ὕλη of the Metaphysics.
On the other hand, he constantly opposes it to reality as
something non-existent; and he at least implies that it is opposed
to absolute good as a principle of absolute evil.480 Thus
while the Aristotelian world is formed by the development of
Power into Actuality, the Platonic world is composed by the
union of Being and not-Being, of the Same and the Different,
of the One and the Many, of the Limit and the Unlimited, of
Good and Evil, in varying proportions with each other.
Plotinus, as we have said, starts with the Aristotelian
account of Matter; but by a process of dialectical manipulation,
he gradually brings it into almost complete agreement
with Plato’s conception; thus, as usual, mediating between and
combining the views of his two great authorities. In the first
place, he takes advantage of Aristotle’s distinction between
intelligible and sensible Matter, to strip the latter of that
positive and vital significance with which it had been clothed
in the Peripatetic system. In the world of Ideas, there is an
element common to all specific forms, a fundamental unity in
which they meet and inhere, which may without impropriety
be called their Matter. But this Matter is an eternal and
divine substance, inseparably united with the fixed forms
which it supports, and, therefore, something which, equally with
them, receives light and life and thought from the central
source of being. It is otherwise with sensible Matter, the
common substance of the corporeal elements. This is, to use
the energetic expression of our philosopher, a decorated corpse.481
It does not remain constantly combined with any form, but is
for ever passing from one to another, without manifesting a
particular preference for any. As such, it is the absolute
negation of Form, and can only be conceived, if at all, by
thinking away every sensible quality. Neither has it any
quantity, for quantity means magnitude, and magnitude
implies definite figure. Aristotle opposed to each particular
form a corresponding privation, and placed Matter midway
between them. Plotinus, on the other hand, identifies Matter
with the general privation of all forms. It is at this point
that he begins to work his way back to the Platonic notion of
Matter as simple extension. There must, after all, be something
about Matter which enables it to receive every kind of
quality and figure,—it must have some sort of mass or bulk,
not, indeed, in any definite sense, but with an equal capacity
for expansion and for contraction. Now, says Plotinus, the
very indeterminateness of Matter is precisely the capacity for
extension in all directions that we require. ‘Having no
principle of stability, but being borne towards every form, and
easily led about in all directions, it acquires the nature of a
mass.’482
Henceforth, whatever our philosopher says about Matter
will apply to extension and to extension alone. It cannot be
apprehended by sight, nor by hearing, nor by smell, nor by
taste, for it is neither colour, nor sound, nor odour, nor juice.
Neither can it be touched, for it is not a body, but it becomes
corporeal on being blended with sensible qualities. And, in a
later essay, he describes it as receiving all things and letting
them depart again without retaining the slightest trace of their
presence.483 Why then, it may be asked, if Plotinus meant
extension, could he not say so at once, and save us all this
trouble in hunting out his meaning? There were very good
reasons why he should not. In the first place, he wished to
express himself, so far as possible, in Aristotelian phraseology,
and this was incompatible with the reduction of Matter to
extension. In the next place, the idea of an infinite void had
been already appropriated by the Epicureans, to whose system
he was bitterly opposed. And, finally, the extension of ordinary
experience had not the absolute generality which was needed
in order to bring Matter into relation with that ultimate
abstraction whence, like everything else, it has now to be
derived.
As a result of the preceding analysis, Plotinus at last
identifies Matter with the Infinite—not an infinite something,
but the Infinite pure and simple, apart from any subject of
which it can be predicated. We started with what seemed a
broad distinction between intelligible and sensible Matter.
That distinction now disappears in a new and more comprehensive
conception; and, at the same time, Plotinus begins to
see his way towards a restatement of his whole system in
clearer terms. ‘The Infinite is generated from the infinity or
power or eternity of the One; not that there is infinity in the
One, but that it is created by the One.’484 With the first
outrush of energy from the primal fount of things, Matter
begins to exist. But no sooner do movement and difference
start into life, than they are restrained and bent back by the
presence of the One; and this reflection of power or being on
itself constitutes the supreme self-consciousness of Nous.485
Whether the subsequent creation of Soul involves a fresh
production of energy, or whether a portion of the original
stream, which was called into existence by the One, escapes
from the restraining self-consciousness of Nous and continues
its onward flow—this Plotinus does not say. What he does say
is that Soul stands to Nous in the relation of Matter to Form,
and is raised to perfection by gazing back on the Ideas
contained in Nous, just as Nous itself had been perfected by
returning to the One.486 But while the two higher principles
remain stationary, the Soul, besides giving birth to a fresh
stream of energy, turns towards her own creation and away
from the fountain of her life. And, apparently, it is only by
this condescension on her part that the visible world could have
been formed.487 We can explain this by supposing that as the
stream of Matter departs more and more from the One, its
power of self-reflection continually diminishes, and at length
ceases altogether. It is thus that the substratum of sensible
objects must, as we have seen, be conceived under the aspect
of a passive recipient for the forms imposed on it by the Soul;
and just as those forms are a mere image of the noetic Ideas,
so also, Plotinus tells us, is their Matter an image of the
intelligible Matter which exists in the Nous itself; only the
image realises the conception of a material principle more
completely than the archetype, because of its more negative
and indeterminate nature, a diminution of good being equivalent
to an increase of evil.488
Still Plotinus gives no clear answer to the question whence
comes this last and lowest Matter. He will not say that it is
an emanation from the Soul, nor yet will he say that it is a
formless residue of the element out of which she was shaped
by a return to the Nous. In truth, he could not make up his
mind as to whether the Matter of sensible objects was created
at all. He oscillates between unwillingness to admit that
absolute evil can come from good, and unwillingness to
admit that the two are co-ordinate principles of existence.
And, as usual, where ideas fail him, he helps himself out of
the difficulty with metaphors. The Soul must advance, and
in order to advance she must make a place for herself, and
that there may be a place there must be body. Or, again,
while remaining fixed in herself, she sends out a great light,
and by the light she sees that there is darkness beyond its
extreme verge, and moulds its formless substance into
shape.489
The ambiguities and uncertainties which Plotinus exhibits
in theorising on the origin of Matter, are due not only to the
conflicting influences of Plato and Aristotle, but also to another
influence quite distinct from theirs. This is the Stoic
cosmology. While utterly repudiating the materialism of
the Stoics, Plotinus evidently felt attracted by their severe
monism, and by the consistent manner in which they derived
every form of existence from the divine substance. They too
recognised a distinction between Form and Matter, the active
and the passive principle in Nature, but they supposed that the
one, besides being penetrated and moulded by the other, had
also been originally produced by it. Such a theory was well
suited to the energetic and practical character of Stoic
morality, with its aversion from mere contemplation, its
immediate bearing on the concrete interests of life. Man
was conceived as an intelligent force, having for his proper
function to bring order out of chaos, ‘to make reason and
the will of God prevail,’ and this ideal appeared to be
reflected in the dynamic constitution of Nature. With
Plotinus, on the other hand, as with Aristotle, theory and
not practice was the end of life, or rather, as he himself
expressed it, practice was an inferior kind of theorising, an
endeavour to set before oneself in outward form what should
properly be sought in the noetic world where subject and
object are one.490 Accordingly, while accepting the Stoic
monism, he strove to bring it into close agreement with
Aristotle’s cosmology, by substituting contemplation for will
as the creative principle in all existence, no less than as the
ideal of happiness for man.
We have seen how, in accordance with this view, each
principle is perfected by looking back on its source.491 Thus
the activity of the world-soul, so far as it is exercised for the
benefit of what comes after and falls beneath her, is an
anomaly only to be accounted for by her inferior place in
the system of graduated descent; or else by the utter
impotence of Matter, which is incapable of raising itself
into Form by a spontaneous act of reflection, and can only
passively receive the images transmitted to it from above,
without being able to retain even these for any time. Nay,
here also, what looks like creative energy admits of being
assimilated more or less closely to an exercise of idealising
thought. It is really for her own sake that the Soul fills what
lies beyond her with life and light, not, like Plato’s Soul, from
pure disinterested joy in the communication and diffusion of
good. It is because she recoils with horror from darkness
and nonentity that she shapes the formless substance into a
residence for herself, on the model of the imperial palace
whence she came. Thus the functions of sensation, nutrition,
and reproduction are to be regarded as so many modes of
contemplation. In the first, the Soul dwells on the material
images which already exist; in the second and third, she
strives to perpetuate and multiply them still further. And
the danger is that she may become so enthralled by her own
creation as to forget the divine original after which it is
formed.492 Should she yield to the snare, successive transmigrations
will sink her lower and lower into the depths of
animalism and material darkness. To avoid this degradation,
to energise with the better part of our nature, is to be good.
And with the distinction between good and evil, we pass from
the metaphysical to the ethical portion of the system.
All virtue, with Plotinus, rests on the superiority of the
soul to the body. So far, he follows the common doctrine of
Plato and Aristotle. But in working out the distinction, he is
influenced by the individualising and theoretic philosophy of
the latter rather than by the social and practical philosophy
of the former. Or, again, we may say that with him the
intellectualism of Aristotle is heightened and warmed by the
religious aspirations of Plato, strengthened and purified by
the Stoic passionlessness, the Stoic independence of external
goods. In his ethical system, the virtues are arranged in an
ascending scale. Each grade reproduces the old quadripartite
division into Wisdom, Courage, Temperance and Justice, but
in each their respective significance receives a new interpretation.
As civic virtues, they continue to bear the meaning
assigned to them in Plato’s Republic. Wisdom belongs to
reason, Courage to passionate spirit, Temperance to desire,
while Justice implies the fulfilment of its appropriate function
by each.493 But all this only amounts to the restriction of what
would otherwise be unregulated impulse, the imposition of
Form on Matter, the supremacy of the soul over the body;
whereas what we want is to get rid of matter altogether.
Here also, Plato sets us on the right track when he calls the
virtues purifications. From this point of view, for the soul
to energise alone without any interference, is Wisdom; not to
be moved by the passions of the body is Temperance; not to
dread separation from the body is Courage; and to obey the
guidance of reason is Justice.494 Such a disposition of the
soul is what Plato means by flying from the world and becoming
like God. Is this enough? No, it is not. We have,
so far, been dealing only with the negative conditions of good,
not with good itself. The essential thing is not purification,
but what remains behind when the work of purification is
accomplished. So we come to the third and highest grade of
virtue, the truly divine life, which is a complete conversion to
reason. Our philosopher endeavours to fit this also into the
framework of the cardinal virtues, but not without imposing
a serious strain on the ordinary meaning of words. Of Wisdom
nothing need be said, for it is the same as rationality.
Justice is the self-possession of mind, Temperance the inward
direction towards reason, Courage the impassivity arising
from resemblance to that which is by nature impassive.495
Plotinus is careful to make us understand that his morality
has neither an ascetic nor a suicidal tendency. Pleasures are
to be tolerated under the form of a necessary relief and relaxation;
pains are to be removed, but if incurable, they are
to be patiently borne; anger is, if possible, to be suppressed,
and, at any rate, not allowed to exceed the limits of an
involuntary movement; fear will not be felt except as a
salutary warning. The bodily appetites will be restricted to
natural wants, and will not be felt by the soul, except, perhaps,
as a transient excitement of the imagination.496 Whatever
abstinences our philosopher may have practised on his
own account, we find no trace of a tendency towards self-mortification
in his writings, nothing that is not consistent
with the healthiest traditions of Greek spiritualism as originally
constituted by the great Athenian school.
While not absolutely condemning suicide, Plotinus restricts
the right of leaving this world within much narrower
limits than were assigned to it by the Stoics. In violently
separating herself from the body, the soul, he tells us, is acting
under the influence of some evil passion, and he intimates
that the mischievous effects of this passion will prolong
themselves into the new life on which she is destined to enter.497
Translated into more abstract language, his meaning probably
is that the feelings which ordinarily prompt to suicide, are
such as would not exist in a well-regulated mind. It is
remarkable that Schopenhauer, whose views of life were, on
other points, the very reverse of those held by Plotinus,
should have used very much the same argument against self-destruction.
According to his theory, the will to life, which
it should be our principal business to conquer, asserts itself
strongly in the wish to escape from suffering, and only delays
the final moment of peaceful extinction by rushing from one
phase of existence to another. And in order to prove the
possibility of such a revival, Schopenhauer was obliged to
graft on his philosophy a theory of metempsychosis, which,
but for this necessity, would certainly never have found a
place in it at all. In this, as in many other instances, an
ethical doctrine is apparently deduced from a metaphysical
doctrine which has, in reality, been manufactured for its
support. All systems do but present under different formulas
a common fund of social sentiment. A constantly growing
body of public opinion teaches us that we do not belong to
ourselves, but to those about us, and that, in ordinary circumstances,
it is no less weak and selfish to run away from life
than to run away from death.
Plotinus follows up his essay on the Virtues by an essay
on Dialectic.498 As a method for attaining perfection, he places
dialectic above ethics; and, granting that the apprehension of
abstract ideas ranks higher than the performance of social
duties, he is quite consistent in so doing. Not much, however,
can be made of his few remarks on the subject. They seem
to be partly meant for a protest against the Stoic idea that
logic is an instrument for acquiring truth rather than truth
itself, and also against the Stoic use or abuse of the syllogistic
method. In modern phraseology, Plotinus seems to view
dialectic as the immanent and eternal process of life itself,
rather than as a collection of rules for drawing correct inferences
from true propositions, or from propositions assumed to
be true. We have seen how he regarded existence in the
highest sense as identical with the self-thinking of the absolute
Nous, and how he attempted to evolve the whole series
of archetypal Ideas contained therein from the simple fact of
self-consciousness. Thus he would naturally identify dialectic
with the subjective reproduction of this objective evolution;
and here he would always have before his eyes the splendid
programme sketched in Plato’s Republic.499 His preference of
intuitive to discursive reasoning has been quoted by Ritter as
a symptom of mysticism. But here, as in so many instances,
he follows Aristotle, who also held that simple abstraction
is a higher operation, and represents a higher order of real
existence than complex ratiocination.500
The ultimate stage of perfection is, of course, the identification
of subject and object, the ascent from the Nous to
the One. But, on this point, Plotinus never added anything
essential to what has already been quoted from the analytical
portion of his enquiry, and the essay containing that passage
is accordingly placed last in Porphyry’s arrangement of his
works.
Our account of Neo-Platonism has, with the exception of
a few illustrations, been derived exclusively from the earlier
essays of Plotinus. His subsequent writings are exceedingly
obscure and tedious, and they add little by way either of
development or defence to the outlines which he had sketched
with a master’s hand. Whatever materials they may supply
for a better appreciation, whether of his philosophy or of his
general character as a thinker, will most profitably find their
place in the final survey of both which we shall now attempt
to give.
Every great system of philosophy may be considered
from four distinct points of view. We may ask what is its
value as a theory of the world and of human life, measured
either by the number of new truths which it contains, or by
the stimulus to new thought which it affords. Or we may
consider it from the aesthetic side, as a monumental structure
interesting us not by its utility, but by its beauty and
grandeur. Under this aspect, a system may be admirable
for its completeness, coherence, and symmetry, or for the
great intellectual qualities exhibited by its architect, although
it may be open to fatal objections as a habitation for human
beings, and may fail to reproduce the plan on which we now
know that the universe is built. Or, again, our interest in the
work may be purely historical and psychological; we may
look on it as the product of a particular age and a particular
mind, as summing up for us under their most abstract form
the ideas and aspirations which at any given moment had
gained possession of educated opinion. Or, finally, we may
study it as a link in the evolution of thought, as a result of
earlier tendencies, and an antecedent of later developments.
We propose to make a few remarks on the philosophy of
Plotinus, or, what is the same thing, on Neo-Platonism in
general, from each of these four points of view.
In absolute value, Neo-Platonism stands lowest as well as
last among the ancient schools of thought. No reader who
has followed us thus far will need to be reminded how many
valuable ideas were first brought to light, or reinforced with
new arguments and illustrations by the early Greek thinkers,
by the Sophists and Socrates, by Plato and Aristotle, by the
Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, and by the moralists of the
Roman empire. On every subject of speculation that can be
started, we continue to ask, like Plotinus himself, what the
‘blessed ancients’ had to say about it;501 not, of course,
because they lived a long time ago, but because they came
first, because they said what they had to say with the unique
charm of original discovery, because they were in more direct
contact than we are, not, indeed, with the facts, but with the
phenomena of Nature and life and thought. It is true that
we have nothing more to learn from them, for whatever was
sound in their teaching has been entirely absorbed into
modern thought, and combined with ideas of which they did
not dream. But until we come to Hume and his successors,
there is nothing in philosophical literature that can be
compared to their writings for emancipating and stimulating
power; and, perhaps, when the thinkers of the last and
present centuries have become as obsolete as Bacon and
Descartes are now, those writings will continue to be studied
with unabating zeal. Neo-Platonism, on the other hand, is
dead, and every attempt made to galvanise it into new life
has proved a disastrous failure. The world, that is to say
the world of culture, will not read Plotinus and his successors,
will not even read the books that are written about them by
scholars of brilliant literary ability like MM. Vacherot and
Jules Simon in France, Steinhart and Kirchner in Germany.502
We have not far to seek for the cause of this fatal condemnation.
Neo-Platonism is nothing if not a system, and
as a system it is false, and not only false but out of relation
to every accepted belief. In combining the dialectic of Plato
with the metaphysics of Aristotle and the physics of Stoicism,
Plotinus has contrived to rob each of whatever plausibility
it once possessed. The Platonic doctrine of Ideas was an
attempt to express something very real and important, the
distinction between laws and facts in Nature, between
general principles and particular observations in science,
between ethical standards and everyday practice in life.
The eternal Nous of Aristotle represented the upward
struggle of Nature through mechanical, chemical, and vital
movements to self-conscious thought. The world-soul of
Stoicism represented a return to monism, a protest against
the unphilosophical antithesis between God and the world,
spirit and matter, necessity and free-will. Plotinus attempts
to rationalise the Ideas by shutting them up in the Aristotelian
Nous, with the effect of severing them still more
hopelessly from the real world, and, at the same time,
making their subjective origin still more flagrantly apparent
than before. And along with the Stoic conception of a
world-soul, he preserves all those superstitious fancies about
secret spiritual sympathies and affinities connecting the
different parts of Nature with one another which the conception
of a transcendent Nous, as originally understood by
Aristotle, had at least the merit of excluding. Finally, by a
tremendous wrench of abstraction, the unity of existence is
torn away from existence itself, and the most relative of all
conceptions is put out of relation to the thought which, in
the very same breath, it is declared to condition, and to the
things which it is declared to create.
Again, on the practical side, by combining Plato with
Aristotle and both with Stoicism, Plotinus contrives to
eliminate what is most valuable in each. If, in the Republic,
the Good was placed above all existence, this was only that we
might transform existence into its image. If Aristotle placed
the theoretical above the ethical virtues, he assigned no limits
but those of observation and reasoning to the energising of
theoretic power. If the Stoics rested morality on the
absolute isolation of the human will, they deduced from this
principle not only the inwardness of virtue, but also the
individualisation of duty, the obligation of beneficence, and
the forgiveness of sin. But with Plotinus, Reason has no
true object of contemplation outside its own abstract ideas,
and the self-realisation of Stoicism means a barren consciousness
of personal identity, from which every variety of interest
and sympathy is excluded: it is not an expansion of our own
soul into coincidence with the absolute All, but a concentration
of both into a single point, a flight of the alone to the
alone;503 and only in this utter solitude does he suppose that
the Platonic Good is finally and wholly possessed.
Nor, with a single exception, is the fundamental untruth
of the system redeemed by any just and original observations
on points of detail such as lie so thickly scattered over the
pages of other metaphysicians, both in ancient and modern
literature. The single exception is the refutation of
materialism to which attention has been already directed.
Apart from this, the Enneads do not contain one single
felicitous or suggestive idea, nothing that can enlarge the
horizon of our thoughts, nothing that can exalt the purpose
of our lives.
If, however, we pass to the second point of view, and judge
Neo-Platonism according to the requirements, not of truth or of
usefulness, but of beauty, our first verdict of utter condemnation
will be succeeded by a much more favourable opinion.
Plotinus has used the materials inherited from his predecessors
with unquestionable boldness and skill; and the constructive
power exhibited in the general plan of his vast system is fully
equalled by the close reasoning with which every detail is
elaborated and fitted into its proper place. Nothing can be
imagined more imposing than this wondrous procession of
forms defiling from the unknown to the unknown—from the
self-developing consciousness of Reason as it breaks and
flames and multiplies into a whole universe of being and life
and thought, ever returning, by the very law of their production,
to the source whence they have sprung—onward and
outward on the wings of the cosmic Soul, through this visible
world, where they reappear as images of intellectual beauty
in the eternal revolutions of the starry spheres above, in the
everlasting reproduction of organic species below, in the loveliest
thoughts and actions of the loveliest human souls—till
the utmost limits of their propagation and dispersion have
been reached, till the last faint rays of existence die out in
the dark and void region that extends to infinity beyond.
Nothing in the realm of abstractions can be more moving
than this Odyssey of the human soul, wakened by visions of
earthly loveliness to a consciousness of her true destiny, a
remembrance of her lost and forgotten home; then abandoning
these for the possession of a more spiritual beauty, ascending
by the steps of dialectic to a contemplation of the
archetypal Ideas that lie folded and mutually interpenetrated
in the bosom of the eternal Reason where thought and being
are but the double aspect of a single absolute reality; seeking
farther and higher, beyond the limits of existence itself, for a
still purer unity, and finding in the awful solitude of that
supreme elevation that the central source of all things does
not lie without but within, that only in returning to self-identity
does she return to the One; or, again, descending
to the last confines of light and life that she may prolong
their radiation into the formless depths of matter, projecting
on its darkness an image of the glory whose remembrance
still attends her in her fall.
Still more impressive, if we consider the writings of
Plotinus on their personal side, and as a revelation of their
author’s mind, is the high and sustained purity, the absolute
detachment and disinterestedness by which they are characterised
throughout. No trace of angry passion, no dallying
with images of evil, interferes to mar their exalted spirituality
from first to last. While the western world was passing
through a period of horror and degradation such as had
never been known before, the philosopher took refuge in an
ideal sphere, and looked down on it all with no more disturbance
to his serenity than if he had been the spectator of a
mimic performance on the stage.504 This, indeed, is one of
the reasons why the Enneads are so much less interesting,
from a literary point of view, than the works of the Roman
Stoics. It is not only that we fail to find in them any
allusions even of the faintest kind to contemporary events or
to contemporary life and manners, such as abound in Seneca
and Epictêtus, but there is not the slightest reference to the
existence of such a thing as the Roman empire at all. One or
two political illustrations occur, but they are drawn from old
Greek city life, and were probably suggested by Plato or
Aristotle.505 But this tremendous blank is so perfectly in keeping
with the whole spirit of Neo-Platonism as to heighten
instead of lowering its aesthetic effect. In studying the
philosophy of the preceding centuries, to whatever school it
may belong, we have the image of death always before our
eyes; and to fortify us against its terrors, we are continually
called upon to remember the vanity of life. This is the protest
of thought against the world, just as in Lucian and Sextus
we hear the protest of the world against thought. At
last the whole bitter strife comes to an end, the vision of
sense passes away,
And leaves us with Plotinus and pure souls.
Here we need no deliverance from troubles and indignities
which are not felt; nor do we need to be prepared for death,
knowing that we can never die. The world will no longer look
askance at us, for we have ceased to concern ourselves about
its reformation. No scepticism can shake our convictions,
for we have discovered the secret of all knowledge through
the consciousness of that which is eternal in ourselves. Thus
the world of outward experience has dropped out of our
thoughts, because thought has orbed into a world of its own.
In the foregoing remarks we have already passed from the
purely aesthetic to the historical or psychological view of
Neo-Platonism—that is, the view which considers a philosophy
in reference to the circumstances of its origin. Every speculative
system reflects, more or less fully, the spirit of the age
in which it was born; and the absence of all allusion to contemporary
events does not prove that the system of Plotinus
was an exception to this rule. It only proves that the
tendency of the age was to carry away men’s thoughts from
practical to theoretical interests. We have already characterised
the first centuries of Roman imperialism as a period of
ever-increasing religious reaction; and in this reaction we
attempted to distinguish between the development of supernaturalist
beliefs which were native to Greece and Italy, and
the importation of beliefs which had originated in the East.
We saw also how philosophy shared in the general tendency,
how it became theological and spiritualistic instead of ethical
and naturalistic, how its professors were converted from
opponents into upholders of the popular belief. Now, according
to some critics, Neo-Platonism marks another stage in the
gradual substitution of faith for reason, of authority for independent
thought; the only question being whether we should
interpret it as a product of Oriental mysticism, or as a simple
sequence of the same movement which had previously led
from Cicero to Seneca, from Seneca to Epictêtus, from
Epictêtus to Marcus Aurelius.
Of these views, the first is taken by Ritter, and adopted
with some modifications by M. Vacherot in his Histoire de
l’École d’Alexandrie. It is also unreservedly accepted by
Donaldson in his continuation of Müller’s History of Greek
Literature, and is probably held at this moment by most
Englishmen who take any interest in the subject at all. The
second view—according to which Neo-Platonism is, at least in
its main features, a characteristic although degenerate product
of Greek thought—is that maintained by Zeller. As against
the Orientalising theory, it seems to us that Zeller has
thoroughly proved his case.506 It may be doubted whether
there is a single idea in Plotinus which can be shown to have
its exact counterpart in any of the Hindoo or other Asiatic
systems whence he is supposed to have drawn; and, as our
own analysis has abundantly shown, he says nothing that
cannot be derived, either directly or by a simple and easy
process of evolution, from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
On the other hand, has not Zeller gone much too far in treating
Neo-Platonism as a product of the great religious reaction
which unquestionably preceded and accompanied its appearance?
Has he not altogether underrated its importance as a
purely speculative system, an effort towards the attainment of
absolute truth by the simple exercise of human reason? It
seems to us that he has, and we shall offer some grounds for
venturing to differ from his opinion.
To appreciate the labours of Plotinus, we must, first of all,
compare his whole philosophic method with that of his predecessors.
Now, Zeller himself has shown quite clearly that in
reach of thought, in power of synthesis, in accuracy of reasoning,
not one of these can be compared to the founder of Neo-Platonism
for a single moment.507 We may go still further
and declare with confidence that no philosopher of equal
speculative genius had appeared in Hellas since Chrysippus,
or, very possibly, since Aristotle. The only ground for
disputing his claims to take rank with the great masters of
Hellenic thought seems to be that his system culminates on
the objective side in something which lies beyond existence,
and on the subjective side in a mystical ecstasy which is the
negation of reason. We have shown, however, that if the
One is represented as transcending reality, so also is the Idea
of Good which corresponds to it in Plato’s scheme; and that
the One is reached if not grasped by a process of reasoning
which, although unsound, still offers itself as reasoning alone,
and moves in complete independence of any revelation or
intuition such as those to which the genuine systems of mysticism
so freely resort.
It cannot be too often repeated that the One in no way
conflicts with the world of real existence, but, on the contrary,
creates and completes it. Now, within that world,
with which alone reason is properly concerned, Plotinus
never betrays any want of confidence in its power to discover
truth; nor, contrary to what Zeller assumes, does he seem
to have been in the least affected by the efforts of the later
Sceptics to invalidate its pretensions in this respect.508 Their
criticism was, in fact, chiefly directed against Stoicism, and
did not touch the spiritualistic position at all. That there
can be no certain knowledge afforded by sensation, or,
speaking more generally, by the action of an outward object
on an inward subject, Plotinus himself fully admits or rather
contends.509 But while distrusting the ability of external perception,
taken alone, to establish the existence of an external
object by which it is caused, he expressly claims such a power
for reason or understanding.510 For him, as for Aristotle, and
probably for Plato also, the mind is one with its real object;
in every act of cognition the idea becomes conscious of itself.
We do not say that Scepticism is powerless against such a
theory as this, but, in point of fact, it was a theory which the
ancient Sceptics had not attacked, and their arguments no
more led Plotinus to despair of reason, than the similar
arguments of Protagoras and Gorgias had led Plato and
Aristotle to despair of it six centuries before. If Sextus
and his school contributed anything to the great philosophical
revolution of the succeeding age, it was by so
weakening the materialistic systems as to render them less
capable of opposing the spiritualistic revival when it came.
Unquestionably Plotinus was influenced by the supernaturalistic
movement of his age, but only as Plato had been
influenced by the similar reaction of his time; and just as the
Athenian philosopher had protested against the superstitions
which he saw gaining ground, so also did the Alexandrian
philosopher protest, with far less vigour it is true, but still to
some extent, against the worse extravagances universally
entertained by his contemporaries. Among these, to judge
by numerous allusions in his writings, astrology and
magic held the foremost place. That there was something
in both, he did not venture to deny, but he constantly
endeavours to extenuate their practical significance and to
give a more philosophical interpretation to the alleged phenomena
on which they were based. Towards the old
polytheism, his attitude, without being hostile, is perfectly
independent. We can see this even in his life, notwithstanding
the religious colouring thrown over it by Porphyry. When
invited by his disciple Amelius to join in the public worship
of the gods, he proudly answered, ‘It is their business to come
to me, not mine to go to them.’511 In allegorising the old
myths, he handles them with as much freedom as Bacon, and
evidently with no more belief in their historical character.512
In giving the name of God to his supreme principle, he is
careful to exclude nearly every attribute associated with
divinity even in the purest forms of contemporary theology.
Personality, intelligence, will, and even existence, are expressly
denied to the One. Although the first cause and highest
good of all things, it is so not in a religious but in an abstract,
metaphysical sense. The Nous with its ideal offspring and
the world-soul are also spoken of as gods; but their personality,
if they have any, is of the most shadowy description,
and there is no reason for thinking that Plotinus ever worshipped
them himself or intended them to be worshipped by
his disciples. Like Aristotle, he attributes animation and
divinity to the heavenly bodies, but with such careful provisions
against an anthropomorphic conception of their nature,
that not much devotional feeling is likely to have mingled
with the contemplation of their splendour. Finally, we
arrive at the daemons, those intermediate spirits which play
so great a part in the religion of Plutarch and the other
Platonists of the second century. With regard to these,
Plotinus repeats many of the current opinions as if he shared
them; but his adhesion is of an extremely tepid character;
and it may be doubted whether the daemons meant much
more for him than for Plato.513
The immortality of the soul is a subject on which idealistic
philosophers habitually express themselves in terms of apparently
studied ambiguity, and this is especially true of Plotinus.
Here, as elsewhere, he repeats the opinions and arguments of
Plato, but with certain developments which make his adhesion
to the popular belief in a personal duration after death considerably
more doubtful than was that of his master. One
great difficulty in the way of Plato’s doctrine, as commonly
understood, is that it attributes a permanence to individuals,
which, on the principles of his system, should belong only to
general ideas. Now, at first sight, Plotinus seems to evade
this difficulty by admitting everlasting ideas of individuals no
less than of generic types.514 A closer examination, however,
shows that this view is even more unfavourable than Plato’s
to the hope of personal immortality. For either our real self
is independent of our empirical consciousness, which is just
what we wish to have preserved, or, as seems more probable,
the eternal existence which it enjoys is of an altogether ideal
character, like that which Spinoza also attributed to the
human soul, and which, in his philosophy, certainly had
nothing to do with a prolongation of individual consciousness
beyond the grave. As Madame de Staël observes of a
similar view held at one time by Schelling, ‘cette immortalité-là
ressemble terriblement à la mort.’ And when, in addition
to his own theory of individual ideas, we find Plotinus adopting
the theory of the Stoics, that the whole course of mundane
affairs periodically returns to its starting-point and is
repeated in the same order as before,515 we cannot help concluding
that human immortality in the popular sense must have
seemed as impossible to him as it did to them. We must,
therefore, suppose that the doctrine of metempsychosis and
future retributions which he unquestionably professes, applies
only to certain determinate cycles of psychic life; or that
it was to him, what it had probably been to Plato, only a
figurative way of expressing the essential unity of all souls,
and the transcendent character of ethical distinctions.516
In this connexion we may deal with the question whether
the philosophy of Plotinus is properly described as a pantheistic
system. Plotinus was certainly not a pantheist in the
same sense as Spinoza and Hegel. With him, the One and the
All are not identical; although impersonal and unconscious,
his supreme principle is not immanent in the universe, but
transcends and creates it: the totality of things are dependent
on it, but it is independent of them. Even were we to
assume that the One is only ideally distinct from the existence
which it causes, still the Nous would remain separate from
the world-soul, the higher Soul from Nature, and, within the
sphere of Nature herself, Matter would continue to be perpetually
breaking away from Form, free-will would be left in
unreconciled hostility to fate. Once, and once only, if we
remember rightly, does our philosopher rise to the modern
conception of the universe as an absolute whole whose parts
are not caused but constituted by their fundamental unity,
and are not really separated from one another in Nature, but
only ideally distinguished in our thoughts. And he adds that
we cannot keep up this effort of abstraction for long at a
time; things escape from us, and return to their original
unity.517 With Plotinus himself, however, the contrary was
true: what he could not keep up was his grasp on the
synthetic unity of things. And he himself supplies us with a
ready explanation why it should be so, when he points to the
dividing tendency of thought as opposed to the uniting
tendency of Nature. What he and the other Hellenic thinkers
wanted above all, was to make the world clear to themselves
and to their pupils, and this they accomplished by their method
of serial classification, by bringing into play what we have
often spoken of as the moments of antithesis, mediation, and
circumscription, Stoicism also had just touched the pantheistic
idea, only to let it go again. After being nominally identified
with the world, the Stoic God was represented as a designing
intelligence, like the Socratic God—an idea wholly alien from
real pantheism.
If Plotinus rose above the vulgar superstitions of the West,
while, at the same time, using their language for the easier
expression of his philosophical ideas, there was one more
refined superstition of mixed Greek and Oriental origin
which he denounced with the most uncompromising vigour.
This was Gnosticism, as taught by Valentinus and his school.
Towards the close of our last chapter, we gave some account
of the theory in question. It was principally as enemies of
the world and maligners of its perfection that the Gnostics
made themselves offensive to the founder of Neo-Platonism.
To him, the antithesis of good and evil was represented, not
by the opposition of spirit and Nature, but by the opposition
between his ideal principle through all degrees of its perfection,
and unformed Matter. Like Plato, he looked on the
existing world as a consummate work of art, an embodiment
of the archetypal Ideas, a visible presentation of reason. But
in the course of his attack on the Gnostics,518 other points of
great interest are raised, showing how profoundly his philosophy
differed from theirs, how entirely he takes his stand on
the fixed principles of Hellenic thought. Thus he particularly
reproaches his opponents for their systematic disparagement
of Plato, to whom, after all, they owe whatever is true and
valuable in their metaphysics.519 He ridicules their belief in
demoniacal possession, with its wholly gratuitous and clumsy
employment of supernatural agencies to account for what can
be sufficiently explained by the operation of natural causes.520
And, more than anything else, he severely censures their
detachment of religion from morality. On this last point,
some of his remarks are so striking and pertinent that they
deserve to be quoted.
Above all, he exclaims, we must not fail to notice what effect this
doctrine has on the minds of those whom they have persuaded to
despise the world and all that it contains. Of the two chief methods
for attaining the supreme good, one has sensual pleasure for its end, the
other virtue, the effort after which begins and ends with God. Epicurus,
by his denial of providence, leaves us no choice but to pursue
the former. But this doctrine [Gnosticism], involving as it does a
still more insolent denial of divine order and human law, laughs to
scorn what has always been the accepted ideal of conduct, and, in its
rage against beauty, abolishes temperance and justice—the justice
that is associated with natural feeling and perpetuated by discipline
and reason—along with every other ennobling virtue. So, in the
absence of true morality, they are given over to pleasure and utility
and selfish isolation from other men—unless, indeed, their nature is
better than their principles. They have an ideal that nothing here
below can satisfy, and so they put off the effort for its attainment to
a future life, whereas they should begin at once, and prove that they
are of divine race by fulfilling the duties of their present state. For
virtue is the condition of every higher aspiration, and only to those
who disdain sensual enjoyment is it given to understand the divine.
How far our opponents are from realising this is proved by their
total neglect of ethical science. They neither know what virtue is,
nor how many virtues there are, nor what ancient philosophy has to
teach us on the subject, nor what are the methods of moral training,
nor how the soul is to be tended and cleansed. They tell us to look
to God; but merely saying this is useless unless they can tell us
what the manner of the looking is to be. For it might be asked,
what is to prevent us from looking to God, while at the same time
freely indulging our sensual appetites and angry passions. Virtue
perfected, enlightened, and rooted in the soul, will reveal God to us,
but without it he will remain an empty name.521
Even M. Vacherot, with all his anxiety to discover an
Oriental origin for Neo-Platonism, cannot help seeing that
this attack on the Gnostics was inspired by an indignant
reaction of Greek philosophy against the inroads of Oriental
superstition, and that the same character belongs more or
less to the whole system of its author. But, so far as we are
aware, Kirchner is the only critic who has fully worked out
this idea, and exhibited the philosophy of Plotinus in its true
character as a part of the great classical revival, which after
producing the literature of the second century reached its
consummation in a return to the idealism of Plato and
Aristotle.522
Neo-Platonism may itself furnish us with no inapt image
of the age in which it arose. Like the unformed Matter
about which we have been hearing so much, the consciousness
of that period was in itself dark, indeterminate and
unsteady, uncreative, unspontaneous, unoriginating, but with
a receptive capacity which enabled it to seize, reflect, and
transmit the power of living Reason, the splendour of eternal
thought.
In fixing the relation of Plotinus to his own age, we have
gone far towards fixing his relation to all ages, the place which
he occupies in the development of philosophy as a connected
whole. We have seen that as an attempt to discover the
truth of things, his speculations are worthless and worse than
worthless, since their method no less than their teaching is
false. Nevertheless, Wisdom is justified of all her children.
Without adding anything to the sum of positive knowledge,
Plotinus produced an effect on men’s thoughts not unworthy
of the great intellect and pure life which he devoted to the
service of philosophy. No other thinker has ever accomplished
a revolution so immediate, so comprehensive, and of
such prolonged duration. He was the creator of Neo-Platonism,
and Neo-Platonism simply annihilated every school of
philosophy to which it was opposed. For thirteen centuries
or more, the three great systems which had so long divided
the suffrages of educated minds—Stoicism, Epicureanism,
and Scepticism—ceased to exist, and were allowed to lapse
into such complete oblivion that only a few fragments of the
works in which they were originally embodied have been
preserved. And Plotinus was enabled to do this by the
profound insight which led him to strike less at any particular
doctrine held by his opponents than at the common foundation
on which they all stood, the materialism openly professed
by the Stoics and Epicureans, and assumed by the Sceptics
as the necessary presupposition of every dogmatic philosophy.
It is true that the principle which he opposed to theirs was not
of his own origination, although he stated it more powerfully
than it had ever been stated before. But to have revived the
spiritualism of Plato and Aristotle in such a way as to win
for it universal acceptance, was precisely his greatest merit.
It is also the only one that he would have claimed for himself.
As we have already mentioned, he professed to be nothing
more than the disciple of Plato. And although Aristotelian
ideas abound in his writings, still not only are they overbalanced
by the Platonic element, but Plotinus might justly
have contended that they also belong, in a sense, to Plato,
having been originally acquired by a simple development
from his teaching.
We have said that the founder of Neo-Platonism contrived
to blend the systems of his two great authorities in such a
manner as to eliminate much of the relative truth which is
contained in each of them taken by itself. It has been reserved
for modern thought to accomplish the profounder
synthesis which has eliminated their errors in combining
their truths. Yet, perhaps, no other system would have
satisfied the want of the time so well as that constructed by
Plotinus out of the materials at his disposal. Such as it was,
that system held its ground as the reigning philosophy until
all independent thinking was suppressed by Justinian, somewhat
more than two and a half centuries after its author’s
death. Even then it did not become extinct, but reappeared
in Christian literature, in the writings attributed to Dionysius
the Areopagite, and again in the daring speculations of
Erigena, the father of mediaeval philosophy, to pass under
more diluted forms into the teaching of the later Schoolmen,
until the time arrived for its renewed study in the original
sources as an element of the Platonic revival in the fifteenth
century. All this popularity proves, as we say, that Plotinus
suited his own age and other ages which reproduced the same
general intellectual tendencies. But the important thing was
that he made Plato and Aristotle more interesting, and thus
led men to study their writings more eagerly than before.
The true reign of those philosophers does not begin until we
reach the Middle Ages, and the commanding position which
they then enjoyed was due, in great measure, to the revolution
effected by Plotinus.
But when Neo-Platonism, as a literature and a system,
had given way to the original authorities from which it was
derived, its influence did not, on that account, cease to be
felt. In particular, Plotinus gave currency to a certain interpretation
of Plato’s teaching which has been universally
accepted until a comparatively recent period, perhaps one
may say until the time of Schleiermacher. We have seen
how many elements of Platonism he left out of sight; and,
thanks to his example, followed as it naturally was by
Catholic theologians, the world was content to leave them
out of sight as well. The charming disciple of Socrates
whom we all know and love—the literary and dramatic
artist, the brilliant parodist, the sceptical railleur from the
shafts of whose irony even his own theories are not safe, the
penetrating observer of human life, the far-seeing critic and
reformer of social institutions—is a discovery of modern
scholarship. Not as such did the master of idealism appear
to Marsilio Ficino and Michael Angelo, to Lady Jane Grey
and Cudworth and Henry More, to Berkeley and Hume and
Thomas Taylor, to all the great English poets from Spenser
to Shelley; not as such does he now appear to popular
imagination; but as a mystical enthusiast, a dreamer of
dreams which, whether they be realised or not in some far-off
sphere, are, at any rate, out of relation to the world of
sensuous experience and everyday life. So absolute, indeed,
is the reaction from this view that we are in danger of rushing
to the contrary extreme, of forgetting what elements of truth
the Plotinian interpretation contained, and substituting for it
an interpretation still more one-sided, still more inadequate
to express the scope and splendour of Plato’s thoughts.
Plato believed in truth and right and purity, believed in
them still more profoundly than Plotinus; and his was a more
effectual faith precisely because he did not share the sterile
optimism of his Alexandrian disciple, but worked and watched
for the realisation of what, as yet, had never been realised.523
Finally, by the form which he gave to Platonism, Plotinus
has had a large share in determining the direction of modern
metaphysics. Although, as we have seen, not, properly
speaking, a pantheist himself, he showed how the ideal
theory could be transformed into a pantheistic system, and
pantheism it immediately became when the peculiar limitations
and subtleties of Greek thought had ceased to dominate
over the western mind, and when the restraints of Catholic
orthodoxy had been removed or relaxed. The stream of
tendency in this direction runs all through the Middle Ages,
and acquires new volume and momentum at the Renaissance,
until, by a process which will be analysed in the next chapter,
it reaches its supreme expansion in the philosophy of Spinoza.
Then, after a long pause, it is taken up by Kant’s successors,
and combined with the subjective idealism of modern psychology,
finally passing, through the intervention of Victor
Cousin and Sir William Hamilton, into the philosophy of
Mr. Herbert Spencer.
The last-named thinker would, no doubt, repudiate the
title of pantheist; and it is certain that, under his treatment,
pantheism has reverted, by a curious sort of atavism, to something
much more nearly resembling the original doctrine of
the Neo-Platonic school. Mr. Spencer tells us that the world
is the manifestation of an unknowable Power. Plotinus said
nearly the same, although not in such absolutely self-contradictory
terms.524 Mr. Spencer constantly assumes, by speaking of
it in the singular number, that the creative Power of which we
know nothing is one; having, apparently, convinced himself of
its unity by two methods of reasoning. First, he identifies
the transcendent cause of phenomena with the absolute, which
is involved in our consciousness of relation; leaving it to be
inferred that as relativity implies plurality, absoluteness must
imply unity. And, secondly, from the mutual convertibility
of the physical forces, he infers the unity of that which underlies
force. Plotinus also arrives at the same result by two
lines of argument, one à posteriori, and derived from the unity
pervading all Nature; the other à priori, and derived from
the fancied dependence of the Many on the One. Even in
his use of the predicate Unknowable without a subject, Mr.
Spencer has been anticipated by Damascius, one of the last
Neo-Platonists, who speaks of the supreme principle as τὸ
ἄγνωστον.525 And the same philosopher anticipates the late
Father Dalgairns in suggesting the very pertinent question,
how, if we know nothing about the Unknowable, we know
that it is unknowable.
Nor is this all. Besides the arguments from relativity
and causation, Mr. Spencer has a third method for arriving at
his absolute. He thinks away all the determinations imposed
by consciousness on its objects, and identifies the residual
substance with the ultimate reality of things. Now, this
residue, as we have seen, exactly corresponds to the Matter,
whether intelligible or sensible, of Aristotle and Plotinus. As
such, it stands in extreme antithesis to the One, and yet
there is a near kinship between them. Probably, according
to Plotinus, and certainly according to Proclus,526 Matter is a
direct product of the One, whose infinite power it reflects.
All existence is formed by the union, in varying proportions,
of these two principles. Above all, both are unknowable.
Thus it was natural that in the hands of less subtle analysts
than the Greeks they should coalesce into a single substance.
And, as a matter of fact, they have so coalesced in the systems
of Giordano Bruno, of Spinoza, and finally of Mr. Spencer.
Here we imagine an impatient reader exclaiming, ‘How
can Mr. Herbert Spencer, who knows, if possible, even less of
Greek philosophy than of his own Unknowable, have derived
that principle from the Greeks?’ Well, we have already
traced the genealogy by which the two systems of agnosticism
are connected. And some additional light will be thrown on
the question if we consider that the form of Neo-Platonism
was largely determined by the manner in which Plotinus
brought the spiritualistic conceptualism of Plato and Aristotle
into contact with the dynamic materialism of the Stoics;
and that the form of Mr. Spencer’s philosophy has been
similarly determined by bringing the idealism of modern
German thought into contact with the mechanical evolutionism
of modern science. Thus, under the influence of old
associations, has pantheism been metamorphosed into a crude
agnosticism, which faithfully reproduces the likeness of its
original ancestors, the Plotinian Matter and the Plotinian
One.
The history of Neo-Platonism, subsequently to the death
of Plotinus, decomposes itself into several distinct tendencies,
pursuing more or less divergent lines of direction. First of
all, it was drawn into the supernaturalist movement against
which it had originally been, in part at least, a reaction and a
protest. One sees from the life of its founder how far his two
favourite disciples, Amelius and Porphyry, were from sharing
his superiority to the superstitions of the age. Both had
been educated under Pythagorean influences, which were
fostered rather than repressed by the new philosophy. With
Porphyry, theoretical interests are, to a great extent, superseded
by practical interests; and, in practice, the religious
and ascetic predominates over the purely ethical element.
Still, however great may have been his aberrations, they never
went beyond the limits of Hellenic tradition. Although of
Syrian extraction, his attitude towards Oriental superstition
was one of uncompromising hostility; and in writing against
Christianity, his criticism of the Old Testament seems to have
closely resembled that of modern rationalism. But with
Porphyry’s disciple, Iamblichus, every restraint is thrown
aside, the wildest Oriental fancies are accepted as articles of
belief, and the most senseless devotional practices are inculcated
as means towards the attainment of a truly spiritual
life.
Besides the general religious movement which had long
been in action, and was daily gaining strength from the increasing
barbarisation of the empire, there was, at this juncture,
a particular cause tending to bring Greek philosophy into
close alliance with the mythology which it had formerly
rejected and denounced. This was the rapid rise and spread
of Christianity. St Augustine has said that of all heathen
philosophers none came nearer to the Christian faith than
the Neo-Platonists.528 Nevertheless, it was in them that the
old religion found its only apologists and the new religion its
most active assailants. We have already alluded to the
elaborate polemic of Porphyry. Half a century later, the
same principles could boast of a still more illustrious
champion. The emperor Julian was imbued with the doctrines
of Neo-Platonism, and was won back to the ancient
faith by the teaching of its professors.
What seems to us the reactionary attitude of the spiritualist
school was dictated by the circumstances of its origin.
A product of the great classical revival, its cause was necessarily
linked with the civilisation of ancient Greece, and of
that civilisation the worship of the old gods seemed to form
an integral element. One need only think of the Italian
Renaissance, with its predilection for the old mythology, to
understand how much stronger and more passionate this feeling
must have been among those to whom Greek literature
still spoke in a living language, whose eyes, wherever they
turned, still rested on the monuments, unrivalled, undesecrated,
unfallen, unfaded, of Greek religious art. Nor was
polytheism what some have imagined it to have been at this
period, merely a tradition, an association, a dream, drawing
shadowy sustenance from the human works and human
thoughts which it had once inspired. To Plotinus and
Proclus, as formerly to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the
luminaries of day and night blazed down from heaven as
animated and immortal witnesses of its truth. It was not
simply that the heavens declared the glory of God; to the
pious beholder, they were visibly inhabited by glorious gods,
and their constellated fires were, as Plotinus said, a scripture
in which the secrets of destiny might be read. The same
philosopher scornfully asks the Gnostics, who, in this respect,
were indistinguishable from the Christians, whether they were
so infatuated as to call the worst men their brothers, while
refusing that title to the sun; and at a much later period, notwithstanding
the heavy penalties attached to it, the worship of
the heavenly bodies continued to be practised by the profoundest
thinkers and scholars of the Neo-Platonic school.529
Moreover, polytheism, by the very weakness and unfixity of
its dogmas, gave a much wider scope to independent speculation
than could be permitted within the limits of the
Catholic Church, just because Catholicism itself constituted a
philosophical system in which all the great problems of existence
were provided with definite and authoritative solutions.
The final defeat of polytheism proved, in some respects,
an advantage to Neo-Platonism, by compelling it to exchange
theological controversy for studies which could be prosecuted,
at least for a time, without giving umbrage to the
dominant religion. At Alexandria the new spiritualism was
associated, on genuinely Platonic principles, with the teaching
of geometry by the noble and ill-fated Hypatia. In all the
Neo-Platonic schools, whether at Rome, at Alexandria, at
Constantinople, or at Athens, the writings of Plato and
Aristotle were attentively studied, and made the subject of
numerous commentaries, many of which are still extant.
This return to the two great masters of idealism was, as we
have already said, the most valuable result of the metaphysical
revival, and probably contributed more than any
other cause to the preservation of their works amidst the
general wreck of ancient philosophical literature. Finally,
efforts were made to present the doctrine of Plotinus under a
more popular or a more scientific form, and to develope it
into systematic completeness.
Driven by Christian intolerance from every other centre
of civilisation, Greek philosophy found a last refuge in Athens,
where it continued to be taught through the whole of the fifth
century and the first quarter of the sixth. During that period,
all the tendencies already indicated as characteristic of Neo-Platonism
exhibited themselves once more, and contributed
in about equal degrees to the versatile activity of its last
original representative, Proclus (410-485). This remarkable
man offers one of the most melancholy examples of wasted
power to be found in the history of thought. Endowed with
an enormous faculty for acquiring knowledge, a rare subtlety
in the analysis of ideas, and an unsurpassed genius for their
systematic arrangement, he might, under more favourable
auspices, have been the Laplace or Cuvier of his age. As
it was, his immense energies were devoted to the task of
bringing a series of lifeless abstractions into harmony with a
series of equally lifeless superstitions. A commentator both
on Euclid and on Plato, he aspired to present transcendental
dialectic under the form of mathematical demonstration. In
his Institutes of Theology, he offers proofs equally elaborate
and futile of much that had been taken for granted in the
philosophy of Plotinus. Again, where there seems to be a
gap in the system of his master, he fills it up by inserting
new figments of his own. Thus, between the super-essential
One and the absolute Nous, he interposes a series of henads
or unities, answering to the multiplicity of intelligences or
self-conscious Ideas which Plotinus had placed within the
supreme Reason, or to the partial souls which he had placed
after the world-soul. In this manner, Proclus, following the
usual method of Greek thought, supplies a transition from
the creative One to the Being which had hitherto been
regarded as its immediate product; while, at the same time,
providing a counterpart to the many lesser gods with which
polytheism had surrounded its supreme divinity. Finally, as
Plotinus had arranged all things on the threefold scheme of
a first principle, a departure from that principle, and a subsequent
reunion with it, Proclus divides the whole series of
created substances into a succession of triads, each reproducing,
on a small scale, the fundamental system of an origin,
a departure, and a return. And he even multiplies the triads
still further by decomposing each separate moment into a
secondary process of the same description. For example,
Intelligence as a whole is divided into Being, Life, and
Thought, and the first of these, again, into the Limit, the
Unlimited, and the absolute Existence (οὐσία), which is the
synthesis of both. The Hegelian system is, as is well known,
constructed on a similar plan; but while with Hegel the
logical evolution is a progress from lower to higher and
richer life, with Proclus, as with the whole Neo-Platonic
school, and, indeed, with almost every school of Greek
thought, each step forward is also a step downward, involving
a proportionate loss of reality and power.
Thus Proclus was to Plotinus what Plotinus himself had
been to Plato and Aristotle: that is to say, he stood one
degree further removed from the actual truth of things and
from the spontaneity of original reflection. And what we
have said about the philosophic position of the master may
be applied, with some modification, to the claims of his most
eminent disciple. From a scientific point of view, the system,
of Proclus is a mere mass of wearisome rubbish; from an
aesthetic point of view it merits our admiration as the most
comprehensive, the most coherent, and the most symmetrical
work of the kind that antiquity has to show. It would seem
that just as the architectural skill of the Romans survived all
their other great gifts, and even continued to improve until
the very last—the so-called temple of Minerva Medica being
the most technically perfect of all their monuments—so also
did the Greek power of concatenating ideas go on developing
itself as long as Greece was permitted to have any ideas of
her own.
The time arrived when this last liberty was to be taken
away. In the year 529, Justinian issued his famous decree
prohibiting the public teaching of philosophy in Athens, and
confiscating the endowments devoted to the maintenance of
its professors. It is probable that this measure formed part
of a comprehensive scheme for completing the extirpation of
paganism throughout the empire. For some two centuries
past, the triumph of Christianity had been secured by an
unsparing exercise of the imperial authority, as the triumph
of Catholicism over heresy was next to be secured with the aid
of the Frankish sword. A few years afterwards, the principal
representatives of the Neo-Platonic school, including the
Damascius of whom we have already spoken, and Simplicius,
the famous Aristotelian commentator, repaired to the court
of Khosru Nuschirvan, the King of Persia, with the intention
of settling in his country for the rest of their lives. They
were soon heartily sick of their adopted home. Khosru was
unquestionably an enlightened monarch, greatly interested in
Hellenic culture, and sincerely desirous of diffusing it among
his people. It is also certain that Agathias, our only authority
on this subject, was violently prejudiced against him. But it
may very well be, as stated by that historian530 that Khosru
by no means came up to the exaggerated expectations formed
of him by the exiled professors. He had been described to
them as the ideal of a Platonic ruler, and, like inexperienced
bookmen, they accepted the report in good faith. They found
that he cared a great deal more for scientific questions about
the cause of the tides and the modifications superinduced on
plants and animals by transference to a new environment,
than about the metaphysics of the One.531 Moreover, the
immorality of Oriental society and the corruption of Oriental
government were something for which they were totally unprepared.
Better, they thought, to die at once, so that it
were but on Roman soil, than to live on any conditions in
such a country as Persia. Khosru was most unwilling to
lose his guests, but on finding that they were determined to
leave him, he permitted them to depart, and even made it a
matter of express stipulation with the imperial government
that they should be allowed to live in their old homes without
suffering any molestation on account of their religious
opinions.532
Simplicius continued to write commentaries on Aristotle
after his return, and was even succeeded by a younger
generation of Platonic expositors; but before the end of the
sixth century paganism was extinct, and Neo-Platonism, as a
separate school of philosophy, shared its fate. It will be the
object of our next and concluding chapter to show that the
disappearance of the old religion and the old methods of
teaching did not involve any real break in the continuity of
thought, and that modern speculation has been, through the
greater part of its history, a reproduction of Greek ideas in
new combinations and under altered names.