In trying to make it mean
exclusively the intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely
logical and abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless
phantom, a mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to
mere conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object,
as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the
school will try to make the spiritual something real, or, at least,
something conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter,
and talking of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or
electricity, or force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the
accidents of brute matter, and a part of that nature which is born to
die.
The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus. The
unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and
Iamblichus, has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her
doctrine by that of her instructors and her pupils. Proclus was taught
by the men who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the
Platonic succession descended from her to him. His throne, however, was
at Athens, not at Alexandria. After the murder of the maiden
philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece.
Pages:
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131