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ONE:The immortality of the soul is a subject on which idealistic philosophers habitually express themselves in terms of apparently studied ambiguity, and this is especially true of Plotinus. Here, as elsewhere, he repeats the opinions and arguments of Plato, but with certain developments which make his adhesion to the popular belief in a personal duration after death considerably more doubtful than was that of his master. One great difficulty in the way of Plato��s doctrine, as commonly understood, is that it attributes a permanence to individuals, which, on the principles of his system, should belong only to general ideas. Now, at first sight, Plotinus seems to evade this difficulty by admitting everlasting ideas of individuals no less than of generic types.514 A closer examination, however, shows that this view is even more unfavourable than Plato��s to the hope of personal immortality. For either our real self is independent of our empirical consciousness, which is just what we wish to have preserved, or, as seems more probable, the eternal existence which it enjoys is of an altogether ideal character, like that which Spinoza also attributed to the346 human soul, and which, in his philosophy, certainly had nothing to do with a prolongation of individual consciousness beyond the grave. As Madame de Sta?l observes of a similar view held at one time by Schelling, ��cette immortalit��-l�� ressemble terriblement �� la mort.�� And when, in addition to his own theory of individual ideas, we find Plotinus adopting the theory of the Stoics, that the whole course of mundane affairs periodically returns to its starting-point and is repeated in the same order as before,515 we cannot help concluding that human immortality in the popular sense must have seemed as impossible to him as it did to them. We must, therefore, suppose that the doctrine of metempsychosis and future retributions which he unquestionably professes, applies only to certain determinate cycles of psychic life; or that it was to him, what it had probably been to Plato, only a figurative way of expressing the essential unity of all souls, and the transcendent character of ethical distinctions.516From utter confusion to extreme nihilism there was but a single step. This step was taken by Gorgias, the Sicilian rhetorician, who held the same relation towards western Hellas and the Eleatic school as that which Protagoras held towards eastern Hellas and the philosophy of Heracleitus. He, like his eminent contemporary, was opposed to the thinkers whom, borrowing a useful term from the nomenclature of the last century, we may call the Greek physiocrats. To confute them, he wrote a book with the significant title, On Nature or Nothing: maintaining, first, that nothing exists; secondly, that if anything exists, we cannot know it; thirdly, that if we know it, there is no possibility of communicating our knowledge to others. The first thesis was established by pushing the Eleatic arguments against movement and change a little further; the second by showing that thought and existence are different, or else everything that is thought of would exist; the third by establishing a similar incommensurability between words and sensations. Grote96 has attempted to show that Gorgias was only arguing against the existence of a noumenon underlying phenomena, such as all idealists deny. Zeller has, however, convincingly proved that Gorgias, in common with every other thinker before Plato, was ignorant of this distinction;72 and we may add that it would leave the second and third theses absolutely unimpaired. We must take the whole together as constituting a declaration of war against science, an assertion, in still stronger language, of the agnosticism taught by Protagoras. The truth is, that a Greek controversialist generally overproved his case, and in order to overwhelm an adversary pulled down the whole house, even at the risk of being buried among the ruins himself. A modern reasoner, taking his cue from Gorgias, without pushing the matter to such an extreme, might carry on his attack on lines running parallel with those laid down by the Sicilian Sophist. He would begin by denying the existence of a ��state of Nature��; for such a state must be either variable or constant. If it is constant, how could civilisation ever have arisen? If it is variable, what becomes of the fixed standard appealed to? Then, again, supposing such a state ever to have existed, how could authentic information about it have come down to us through the ages of corruption which are supposed to have intervened? And, lastly, granting that a state of Nature accessible to enquiry has ever existed, how can we reorganise society on the basis of such discordant data as are presented to us by the physiocrats, no two of whom agree with regard to the first principles of natural order; one saying that it is equality, another aristocracy, and a third despotism? We do not say that these arguments are conclusive, we only mean that in relation to modern thought they very fairly represent the dialectic artillery brought to bear by Greek humanism against its naturalistic opponents.