Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.

ALEXANDRINISM.—Amid all this, metaphysics—namely, the effort to comprehend the universe—appears somewhat at a discount. It enjoyed a renaissance in the third century of our era among some teachers from Alexandria (hence the name of the Alexandrine school) who came to lecture at Rome with great success. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism"—that is, a renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one.

PLOTINUS.—Plotinus taught this: God and matter exist. God is one, matter is multiple and divisible. God in Himself is incomprehensible, and is only to be apprehended in his manifestations. Man rises not to comprehension of Him but to the perception of Him by a series of degrees which are, as it were, the progressive purification of faith, and which lead us to a kind of union with Him resembling that of one being with another whom he could never see, but of whose presence he could have no doubt. Matter, that is, the universe, is an emanation from God, as perfume comes from a flower. All is not God, and only God can be God, but all is divine and all participates in God, just as each of our thoughts participates of our soul. Now, if all emanates from God, all also tends to return to Him, as bodies born of earth, nourished by earth, invigorated by the forces proceeding from the earth, tend to return to the earth. This is what makes the harmony of the world. The law of laws is, that every fragment of the universe derived from God returns to Him and desires to return to Him. The universe is an emanation from the perfect, and an effort towards perfection. The universe is a God in exile who has nostalgia for himself. The universe is a progressive descent from God with a tendency towards reintegration with Him.

How does this emanation from God becoming matter take place? That is a mystery; but it may be supposed to take place by successive stages. From God emanates spirit, impersonal spirit which is not spirit of this or that, but universal spirit spread through the whole world and animating it. From spirit emanates the soul, which can unite itself to a body and form an individual. The soul is less divine than spirit, which in turn is less divine than God, but yet retains divinity. From the soul emanates the body to which it unites itself. The body is less divine than the soul, which was less divine than spirit, which was less divine than God; but it still possesses divinity for it has a form, a figure, a design marked and impressed with divine spirit. Finally, matter without form is the most distant of the emanations from God, and the lowest of the descending stages of God. God is in Himself; He thinks in pure thought in spirit; He thinks in mixed and confused thought in the soul; He feels in the body; He sleeps in unformed matter. The object of unformed matter is to acquire form, that is a body; and the object of a body is to have a soul; and the aim of a soul is to be united in spirit, and the aim of spirit is to be absorbed into God.

Souls not united to bodies contemplate spirit and enjoy absolute happiness. Other souls not united to bodies, but solicited by a certain instinct to unite themselves to bodies, are of ambiguous but still very exalted nature. Souls united to bodies (our own) have descended far, but can raise themselves and be purified by contemplation of the eternal intelligence, and by relative union with it. This contemplation has several degrees, so to speak, of intensity, degrees which Plotinus termed hypostases. By perception we obtain a glimpse of ideas, by dialectics we penetrate them; by a final hypostasis, which is ecstasy, we can sometimes unite ourselves directly to God and live in Him.

THE PUPILS OF PLOTINUS.—Plotinus had as pupils and successors, amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves little except the exposition of the doctrine of his master, and shows originality only as a logician. Iamblichus and his school made a most interesting effort to revive exhausted and expiring paganism and to constitute a philosophic paganism. The philosophers of the school of Iamblichus are, by the way, magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men as antipositivist as possible. Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential deity from whom he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary deities to emanate, ranging from those purely immaterial to those inherent in matter. The subtle wanderings of Neoplatonism were continued obscurely in the school of Athens until it was closed for ever in 529 by the Emperor Justinian as being hostile to the religion of the Empire, which at that epoch was Christianity.