But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own fertility, gave place
to the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran through much the same changes. It was
good for us, after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans,
unphilosophical as they were, swept it away. One feels in reading the
later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, even Cudworth (valuable as he
is), that the old accursed distinction between the philosopher, the
scholar, the illuminate, and the plain righteous man, was growing up
again very fast. The school from which the "Religio Medici" issued was
not likely to make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise.
Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote poor old Proclus as an
irrefragable authority, and believing that he, forsooth, represented the
sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but little chance
in the world. Bacon had been right in his dislike of Platonism years
before, though he was unjust to Plato himself. It was Proclus whom he
was really reviling; Proclus as Plato's commentator and representative.
The lion had for once got into the ass's skin, and was treated
accordingly. The true Platonic method, that dialectic which the
Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be tried, both in
England and in Germany; and I am much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it
be not found the ally, not the enemy, of the Baconian philosophy; in
fact, the inductive method applied to words, as the expressions of
Metaphysic Laws, instead of to natural phenomena, as the expressions of
Physical ones.
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