Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NKOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH293be extravagant. The wider the grasp with which heembraced in his speculation the religions of all peoples,the more perfectly he must have thought himself tohave reached the end at which his philosophy aimed.It is needless to enter into more detail as to theparticular views of Porphyrius and lamblichus, or ofProclus, the last exponent of this philosophy. Suchas it appears in Plotinus, it continues in its mainprinciples and conclusions to the end.There can be no doubt that this Philosophy, as itis the last production ^* of the Greek mind, so it is theissue and the outcome of a long preceding train ofthought. We are told that Plotinus, like his greatdecessors who were the objects of his professedPythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, was aman of the most curious mind. He had, in fact,followed up with a sort of devotion the lives of thephilosophers who preceded him, and examined theirseveral tenets. He composed a system which wasthe working out and arrangement of certain fundamentalideas inherited from Pythagoras, Plato, andthe Stoics on the one hand, from Philo and the Alexandrineschool of thought on the other. The workso accomplished was the logical issue of the wholeNeopythagorean movement, a movement which in thedays of Cicero and Seneca, as we have seen themdeclare did not exist but which we have found sostrong in the time of Plutarch. Plotinus, indeedmay be said to be his interpreter, to give a logicand connected expression to that which was at thebottom of Plutarch's mind. What was the causeof all this movement ? What resuscitated, with aforce it had never before possessed, a train of thoughtwhich had apparently come to an end in Seneca's time ?