Here lies the difficulty: either God made the world, or he did not. If he made it, whence did he make it? He could not, said logic, make it out of Nothing; for nothing can come of Nothing; he must, therefore, have made it out of his own substance. If it is made out of his own substance, then it is identical with him : it must, then, have existed already in him, or he could not have produced it. But this identification of God with the world is Pantheism; and begs the question it should answer.

If he did not make it out of his own substance, he must have made it out of some substance already existing; and thus, also, the question still remains unanswered.

This problem was solved by the Christians and Alexandrians in a similar, though apparently different, manner. The Christians said that God created the world out of Nothing by the mere exercise of his omnipotent will; for to Omnipotence every thing is possible; one thing is as easy as another. The Alexandrians said that the world was distinct from God in act rather than in essence: it was the manifestation of his will or of his intelligence.

Thus the world is God; but God is not the world. Without the necessity of two principles, the distinction is preserved between the Creator and the Created. God is not confounded with Matter; and yet Philosophy is no longer oppressed with the difficulty of accounting for two eternally existing and eternally distinct principles.

Plotinus had by his Dialectics discovered the necessity of Unity as the basis of existence: he had also by the same means discovered that the Unity could not possibly remain alone: otherwise there would never have been the Many. If the Many implies the One, the One also implies the Many. It is the property of each principle to engender that which follows it: to engender it in virtue of an ineffable power which loses nothing of itself. This power, ineffable, inexhaustible, exercises itself without stopping, from generation to generation, till it attains the limits of possibility.

By this law, which governs the world, and from which God himself cannot escape, the totality of existences, which Dialectics teach us to arrange in a proper hierarchy from God to sensible Matter, appear to us thus united in one indissoluble chain, since each being is the necessary product of that which precedes it, and the necessary producer of that which succeeds it.

If asked why Unity should ever become Multiplicity—why God should ever manifest himself in the world? the answer is ready: The One, as conceived by the Eleatics, had long been found incomplete; for a God who had no intelligence could not be perfect as Aristotle says, a God who does not think is unworthy of respect. If, therefore, God is Intelligent, he is necessarily active: a force that engenders nothing, can that be a real force ? It was, therefore, in the very nature of God a necessity for him to create the world: ἐν τῇ φύσει ἦν τὸ ποιεῖν.

God, therefore, is in his very essence a Creator, TomTns. He is like a Sun pouring forth his rays, without losing any of its substance : οἷον ἐκ φωτὸς, τὴν ἐξ αὐτοῦ περίλαμψιν. All this fuxthis constant change of things, this birth and death—is but the restless manifestation of a restless force. These manifestations have no absolute truth, no duration. The individual perishes, because individual: it is only the universal that endures. The individual is the finite, the perishable; the universal is the infinite, immortal. God is the only existence: he is the real existence, of which we, and other things, are but the transitory phenomena. And yet timid ignorant man fears death! timid because ignorant. To die is to live the true life: it is to lose, indeed, sensation, passions, interests, to be free from the conditions of space and time,to lose personality; but it is also to quit this world and to be born anew in God,-to quit this frail and pitiable individuality, to be absorbed in the being of the Infinite. To die is to live the true life. Some faint glimpses of it-some overpowering anticipations of a bliss intolerable to mortal sense, are realized in the brief moments of Ecstasy, wherein the Soul is absorbed in the Infinite, although it cannot long remain there. Those moments

so exquisite yet so brief are sufficient to reveal to us the divinity, and to show us that deep imbedded in our personality there is a ray of the divine source of light, a ray which is always struggling to disengage itself, and return to its source. To die is to live the true life and Plotinus dying, answered, in his agony, to friendly questions: "I am struggling to liberate the divinity within me."

This mysticism is worth attention, as indicative of the march of the human mind. In many preceding thinkers we have seen a very strong tendency towards the desecration of personality. From Heraclitus to Plotinus there is a gradual advance in this direction. The Cynics and the Stoics made it a sort of philosophical basis. Plato implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, gave it his concurrence. The conviction of man's insignificance, and of the impossibility of his ever in this world ascertaining the truth, seem to have oppressed philosophers with self-contempt. To curse the bonds which bound them to ignorance, and to quit a world in which they were thus bound, were the natural consequences of their doctrines; but, linked mysteriously as we are to life-even to the life we curse-our doctrines seldom lead to suicide. In default of suicide, nothing remained but Asceticisma moral suicide. As man could not summon courage to quit the world, he would at least endeavor to lead a life as far removed from worldly passion and worldly condition as was possible; and he would welcome death as the only true life.

CHAPTER III.

PROCLUS.

PLOTINUS attempted to unite Philosophy with Religion, attempted to solve by Faith the problems insoluble by Reason; and the result of such an attempt was necessarily mysticism. But, although the mystical element is an important one in his doctrine, he did not allow himself to be seduced into all the extravagances which naturally flowed from it. That was reserved for his successors, Iamblicus in particular, who performed miracles, and constituted himself High Priest of the Universe.

With Proclus the Alexandrian School made a final effort, and with him its defeat was entire. He was born at Constantinople, A. D. 412. He came early to Alexandria, where Olympiodorus was teaching. He passed onwards to Athens, and from Plutarch and Syrianus he learnt to comprehend the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. Afterwards, becoming initiated into the Theurgical mysteries, he was soon made a High Priest of the Universe.

The theological tendency is still more visible in Proclus than in Plotinus. He regarded the Orphic poems and the Chaldean oracles as divine revelations, and, therefore, as the real source of philosophy, if properly interpreted; and in this allegorical interpretation consisted his whole system.

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That had her haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanish'd,
They live no longer in the faith of reason!
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.
And to yon starry world they now are gone,

Spirits or Gods that used to share this earth

With man as with their friend."*

To breathe the breath of life into the nostrils of these defunct deities, to restore the beautiful Pagan creed, by interpreting its symbols in a new sense, was the aim of the whole Alexandrian School.

Proclus placed Faith above Science. It was the only faculty by which The Good, that is to say, The One, could be apprehended. "The Philosopher," said he, "is not the Priest of one Religion, but of all Religions;" that is to say, he is to reconcile. all modes of Belief by his interpretations. Reason is the Expositor of Faith. But Proclus made one exception: there was one Religion which he could not tolerate, which he would not interpret, that was the Christian.

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With this conception of his mission, it is easy to see that his method must be eclectic. Accordingly, in making Philosophy the expositor of Religion, he relied upon the doctrines of his decessors without pretending to discover new ones for his purpose. Aristotle, whom he called "the Philosopher of the understanding," he regarded as the man whose writings formed the best introduction to the study of wisdom. In him the student learnt the use of his Reason; learnt also the forms of thought. After this preparatory study came the study of Plato, whom he called the "Philosopher of Reason," the sole guide to the region of Ideas, that is, of Eternal Truths. The reader will probably recognize here the distinction between Understanding and Reason, revived by Kant, and so much insisted on by Coleridge and his followers.

Plato was the idol of Proclus; and the passionate disciple thought every word of the master an oracle; he discovered every where some hidden and oracular meaning, interpreting the simplest recitals into sublime allegories. Thus the affection of Socrates for Alcibiades became the slender text for a whole volume of mystical exposition.

* Coleridge, in his translation of the Piccolomini.