nay, above even reason, and become merged in the Primal Being itself. This ecstasy does not come to all men, and only seldom to those who know it by experience. Plotinus himself had it but four times. But it is the goal towards which strive the greatest efforts of the soul and the reward of all labors is not to be without some glimpse of the celestial glory. Happy the man who has attained unto the blessed vision. "Oftentimes when I awake out of the slumber of the body and come to a realizing sense of myself, and retiring from the world outside, give myself up to inward contemplation, I behold a wonderful beauty. I believe then that I verily belong to a higher and better world, and strive to develop within me a glorious life, and become one with the Godhead. And by this means I receive such an energy of life that I rise far above all other things, even the intelligible world. What then must he experience who now beholds the absolute beauty in and for itself in all its purity, without corporeal shape, freed from all bondage to time and space. And this therefore is

the life of the gods and of divine and happy men, a liberation from all earthly concerns, a life unaccompanied with human pleasures, and the flight of the alone to the alone."

From the above passages we may see that though the style of Plotinus may be difficult and often obscure, yet his fundamental conceptions are full of extreme beauty and fraught with an irresistible fascination. We may easily understand how he completely dominated the world of mystic thought for nearly two thousand years. But not only his fundamental doctrines were influential on the succeeding centuries, but even the symbols and metaphors he used, either those he borrowed from his predecessors or those he found himself. Time and again the student of transcendental philosophy and religious mysticism meets the same language, the phenomenal world as a symbol of the ideal world, a shadow hung out between time and eternity; the world-soul, the overflow of the great sea of Being and the flowing back of all things to the One; the sun and its light reflected in the universe, the mirror in which

the glory of God is reflected, the mystical ladder by means of which the homesick soul painfully climbs from the flux and agitation of the phenomenal world, through all the various stages that intervene between it and its fatherland, even the heart of the Unknown God.

CHAPTER VI.

PLATONISM, PAST AND PRESENT.

WITH Plotinus the Neo-Platonic system reached its perfect expression. After him many changes and additions were made, but it was not a development, so much as a systematizing and a transformation into a religion, or rather in the case of Porphyry and Jamblichus into a theurgy. The greatest of his followers was Proclus, a man who united the mystical nature of Plotinus and Plato, with the talent for organization and arrangement of Aristotle. It was he who took the system of Neo-Platonism, who arranged it in a series of logical formulas and who handed it down to the Middle Ages clothed in the garments of

scholasticism. His work was continued in the

East by the Pseudo-Dionysius, through whom it was transplanted to the Roman Church; but this was not till the tenth century, when Duns Scotus translated "The Celestial Hierarchy." During the centuries preceding this the Western world had seen the philosophy of Plato and Plotinus as a definite system die gradually out. Two men alone kept alive for a short time their influence-St. Augustine, and Boethius. The story is well known how Augustine was led by reading the "Hortensius" of Cicero to Platonic ideas; and the influence of Neo-Platonism is very clear in the beautiful scene between himself and his mother Monica, as they looked out of their window at Ostia at night and talked with one another of the kingdom of God.

Greek philosophy, as well as Neo-Platonism, may be said to end as an independent system with Boethius. This last scion of a noble race, the prime minister of Theodoric, King of the Goths, by whom he was imprisoned and put to death through false accusations; this