solution, is, as it were, precipitated on reality, that memory is again employed. Plotinus would say that Reminiscence could impart only inferior knowledge, because it implies separation between the subject and the object. Ecstasy is superior-is absolute, being the realization of their identity. True to this doctrine of absorption, the pantheism of Plotinus teaches him to maintain, alike with the Oriental mystic at one extreme of time, and with the Hegelian at the other, that our individual existence is but phenomenal and transitory. Plotinus, accordingly, does not banish reason, he only subordinates it to ecstasy where the Absolute is in question. It is not till the last that he calls in supernatural aid. The wizard king builds his tower of speculation by the hands of human workmen till he reaches the top story, and then summons his genii to fashion the battlements of adamant, and crown them with starry fire.

Plotinus, wrapt in his proud abstraction, cared nothing for fame. An elect company of disciples made for a time his world; ere long, his dungeon-body would be laid in the dust, and the divine spark within him set free, and lost in the Universal Soul. Porphyry entered his school fresh from the study of Aristotle. At first the audacious opponent of his master, he soon became the most devoted of his scholars. With a temperament more active and practical than that of Plotinus, with more various ability and far more facility in method and adaptation, with an erudition equal to his fidelity, blameless in his life, pre-eminent in the loftiness and purity of his ethics, he was well fitted to do all that could be done towards securing for the doctrines he had espoused that reputation and that wider influence to which Plotinus was so indifferent. His aim was twofold. He engaged in a conflict hand to hand with two antagonists at once, by both of whom he was eventually vanquished. He commenced an assault on Christianity without, and he endeavoured to check the progress of superstitious practice within the pale of paganism. His doctrine concerning ecstasy is less extravagant than that of Plotinus. The ecstatic state does not involve with him the

loss of conscious personality. He calls it a dream, in which the soul, dead to the world, rises to an activity that partakes of the divine. It is an elevation above human reason, human action, human liberty, yet no temporary annihilation, but rather an ennobling restoration or transformation of the individual nature. In his well-known letter to Anebon, he proposes a series of questions which indicate that thorough scepticism concerning the pretensions of theurgy which so much scandalized Iamblichus. The treatise of the latter, De Mysteriis, is an elaborate reply, under the name of Abammon, to that epistle.

Thus much concerning the doctrine of the theosophic or spiritualist section of the Neo-Platonists. Iamblichus is the leader and representative of the wonder-working and theurgic branch of the school. With this party a strange mixture of charlatanry and asceticism takes the place of those lofty but unsatisfying abstractions which absorbed Plotinus. They are, in some sort, the lineal descendants of those ȧyúpraι of whom Plato speaks itinerant venders of expiations and of charms-the Grecian prototypes of Chaucer's Pardonere. Yet nothing can exceed the power to which they lay claim. If you believe Iamblichus, the theurgist is the vehicle and instrument of Deity, all the subordinate potencies and dominions of the upper world are at his beck, for it is not a man but a God who mutters the words of might, and chants the prayer which shakes celestial thrones and makes the heavens bow. When the afflatus is upon him, fiery appearances are seen, sweetest melodies tremble through the air, heavy with incense, or deep discordant sounds betray some terrible presence tamed by the master's art. There are four great orders of spiritual existence peopling the unseen world-gods, demons or heroes, demi-gods, and souls. The adept knows at once to which class the glorious shape which confronts him may belong-for they appear always with the insignia of their office, or in a form consonant with the rank they hold in the hierarchy of spiritual natures. The appearances of gods are uniform (μovoεidn), those of demons various in their hue (ToɩKíλa).

VOL. II.

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Often when a god reveals himself, he hides sun and moon, and appears, as he descends, too vast for earth. Each order has gifts of its own to bestow on those who summon them. The gods confer health of body, power and purity of mind: the principalities which govern the sublunary elements impart temporal advantages. At the same time there exist evil demons-anti-gods, who are hostile to the aspirant, who afflict, if they can, both body and mind, and hinder our escape from the world of appearance and of sense.

It is not a little curious to observe the process by which a more refined and intellectual mysticism gives way to a more gross, and theosophy is superseded by theurgy, in Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and Romanism alike. At first, ecstasy is an indescribable state— any form or voice would mar and materialize it—the vague boundlessness of this exaltation, of that expanse of bliss and glory in which the soul seems to swim and lose itself, is not to be even hinted at by the highest utterance of mortal speech. But a degenerate age, or a lower order of mind, demands the detail and imagery of a more tangible marvel. The demand creates supply, and the mystic, deceiver or deceived, or both, most commonly begins to furnish out for himself and others a full itinerary of those regions of the unseen world which he has scanned or traversed in his moments of elevation. He describes the starred baldrics and meteorswords of the aerial panoply-tells what forlorn shapes have been seen standing dark against a far depth of brightness, like stricken pines on a sunset horizon-what angelic forms, in gracious companies, alight about the haunts of men, thwarting the evil, and opening pathways for the good-what genii tend what mortals, and under what astral influences they work weal or woe- -what dwellers in the middle air cover with embattled rows the mountain side, or fill some vast amphitheatre of silent inaccessible snow-how some encamp in the valley, under the pennons of the summer lightning, and others find a tented field where the slow wind unrolls the exhalations along the marsh, or builds a canopy of vapours-all is largely told-what ethereal heraldry marshals with its blazon the thrones and dominions

of the unseen realm-what giant powers and principalities among them darken with long shadow, or illumine with a winged wake of glory the forms of following myriads, their ranks and races, wars and destiny, as minutely registered as the annals of some neighbour province, as confidently recounted as though the seer had nightly slipped his bonds of flesh, and made one in their council or their battle.

Thus the metaphysical basis and the magical pretensions of Alexandrian mysticism are seen to stand in an inverse ratio to each other. Porphyry qualifies the intuitional principle of his master, and holds more soberly the theory of illumination. Iamblichus, the most superstitious of all in practice, diminishes still further the province of theosophy. He denies what both Plotinus and Porphyry maintained, that man has a faculty inaccessible to passion, and eternally active. Just in proportion as these men surrendered their lofty ideas of the innate power of the mind did they seek to indemnify themselves by recourse to supernatural assistance from without. The talisman takes the place of the contemplative reverie. Philosophic abstraction is abandoned for the incantations of the cabbalist ; and as speculation droops superstition gathers strength.

Such are the leading features of that philosophical religionism which attempted to rival Christianity at Alexandria, and which strove to cope, in the name of the past, with the spiritual aims and the miraculous credentials of the new faith. What were the immediate causes of its failure? The attempt to piece with new cloth the old garment was necessarily vain. Porphyry endeavoured to refute the Christian, and to reform the pagan by a single stroke. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and heathendom would not be renovated. In vain did he attempt to substitute a single philosophical religion, which should be universal, for the manifold and popular polytheism of his day. Christian truth repelled his attack on the one side, and idolatrous superstition carried his defences on the other. The Neo-Platonists, moreover, volunteered their services as the champions of a paganism which did but partially acknowledge their advocacy. The philosophers were often objects of suspicion to

the emperor, always of dislike to the jealousy of the heathen priest. In those days of emperor-worship the emperor was sometimes a devouring deity, and, like the sacred crocodile of Egypt, more dangerous to his worshippers than to his foes, would now and then breakfast on a devotee. The Neo-Platonists defended paganism not as zealots, but as men of letters. They defended it because the old faith could boast of great names and great achievements in speculation, literature, and art, and because the new appeared barbarian in its origin, and humiliating in its claims. They wrote, they lectured, they disputed in favour of the temple, and against the church, not because they worshipped idols, but because they worshipped Plato. They exclaimed against vice, while they sought to conserve its incentives, so abundant in every heathen mythology, fondly dreaming that they could bring a clean thing out of an unclean. Their great doctrine was the unity and immutability of the abstraction they called God; yet they took their place as the conservators of polytheism. They saw Christianity denouncing every worship except its own; and they resolved to assert the opposite, accrediting every worship except that Christianity enjoined. They failed to observe in that benign intolerance of falsehood, which stood out as so novel a characteristic in the Christian faith, one of the credentials of its divine origin. They forgot that lip-homage paid to all religions is the virtual denial of each. They strove to combine religion and philosophy, and robbed the last of its only principle, the first of its only power. In their hands speculation lost its scientific precision, and deserted its sole consistent basis in the reason; for they compelled philosophy to receive a fantastic medley of sacerdotal inventions, and to labour, blinded and dishonoured, an enfeebled Samson in the prison-house of their eclecticism, that these might be woven together into a flimsy tissue of pantheistic spiritualism. On the other hand, the religions lost in the process whatever sanctity or authoritativeness may once have been theirs. This endeavour to philosophise superstition could only issue in the paradoxical product of a philosophy without reason,