Life is short, and Art--at least the art of obtaining practical
guidance from the last of the Alexandrians--very long.
And yet--if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaithful to the
great root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them. We must
not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine
teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into confused notions of
what that teaching was like. Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus;
and it too came from the only source whence all good comes. Were there
no good in him I could not laugh at him as I have done; I could only
hate him. There are moments when he rises above his theories; moments
when he recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of Homer,
almost to the faith of Philo. Whether these are the passages of his
which his modern admirers prize most, I cannot tell. I should fancy
not: nevertheless I will read you one of them.
He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, that book in
which we generally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to
himself, and fallen from his usual inductive method to the ground of a
mere e priori theoriser--and yet of which Proclus is reported to have
said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timaeus,
and the Orphic fragments were preserved, he did not care whether every
other book on earth were destroyed.
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