Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory. He enters
into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul. Whether it is one
or many. How it can be both one and many. He has the strongest
perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, "Time and Space
are no gods." He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world
of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet,
after he has wrestled with the two Titans, through page after page, and
apparently conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the battle-
field, the moment his back is turned. He denies that the one Reason has
parts--it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet he
cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by saying
that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest,
receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing. Ritter has worked
out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred
contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions
which I suspect to be inseparable from any philosophy starting from his
grounds. Is he not looking for the spiritual in a region where it does
not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which
are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we
express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his
Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as
nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that
that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived
of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and
has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and
wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men,
involves a free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert?
And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an
universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man,
that one Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also? At
least, so strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this
direction, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which
yawned between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by
reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Daemonology
borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis,
which formed a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest
Deities to heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of
the philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could
rise above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and
become the pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.
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