THREE:The history of Neo-Platonism, subsequently to the death of Plotinus, decomposes itself into several distinct tendencies, pursuing more or less divergent lines of direction. First of all, it was drawn into the supernaturalist movement against which it had originally been, in part at least, a reaction and a protest. One sees from the life of its founder how far his two favourite disciples, Amelius and Porphyry, were from sharing356 his superiority to the superstitions of the age. Both had been educated under Pythagorean influences, which were fostered rather than repressed by the new philosophy. With Porphyry, theoretical interests are, to a great extent, superseded by practical interests; and, in practice, the religious and ascetic predominates over the purely ethical element. Still, however great may have been his aberrations, they never went beyond the limits of Hellenic tradition. Although of Syrian extraction, his attitude towards Oriental superstition was one of uncompromising hostility; and in writing against Christianity, his criticism of the Old Testament seems to have closely resembled that of modern rationalism. But with Porphyrys disciple, Iamblichus, every restraint is thrown aside, the wildest Oriental fancies are accepted as articles of belief, and the most senseless devotional practices are inculcated as means towards the attainment of a truly spiritual life.It has been the fashion in certain quarters to look down on these early thinkersto depreciate the value of their speculations because they were thinkers, because, as we have already noticed, they reached their most important conclusions by thinking, the means of truly scientific observation not being within their reach. Nevertheless, they performed services to humanity comparable for value with the legislation of Solon and Cleisthenes, or the victories of Marathon and Salamis; while their creative imagination was not inferior to that of the great lyric and dramatic poets, the great architects and sculptors, whose contemporaries they were. They first taught men to distinguish between the realities of nature and the illusions of sense; they discovered or divined the indestructibility of matter and its atomic constitution; they taught that space is infinite, a conception so far from being self-evident that it transcended the capacity of Aristotle to grasp; they held that the seemingly eternal universe was brought into its present form by the operation of mechanical forces which will also effect its dissolution; confronted by the seeming permanence and solidity of our planet, with the innumerable varieties of life to be found on its surface, they declared that all things had arisen by differentiation8 from a homogeneous attenuated vapour; while one of them went so far as to surmise that man is descended from an aquatic animal. But higher still than these fragmentary glimpses and anticipations of a theory which still awaits confirmation from experience, we must place their central doctrine, that the universe is a cosmos, an ordered whole governed by number and law, not a blind conflict of semi-conscious agents, or a theatre for the arbitrary interference of partial, jealous,6 and vindictive gods; that its changes are determined, if at all, by an immanent unchanging reason; and that those celestial luminaries which had drawn to themselves in every age the unquestioning worship of all mankind were, in truth, nothing more than fiery masses of inanimate matter. Thus, even if the early Greek thinkers were not scientific, they first made science possible by substituting for a theory of the universe which is its direct negation, one that methodised observation has increasingly tended to confirm. The garland of poetic praise woven by Lucretius for his adored master should have been dedicated to them, and to them alone. His noble enthusiasm was really inspired by their lessons, not by the wearisome trifling of a moralist who knew little and cared less about those studies in which the whole soul of his Roman disciple was absorbed.
Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock
