FORE:In fixing the relation of Plotinus to his own age, we have gone far towards fixing his relation to all ages, the place which350 he occupies in the development of philosophy as a connected whole. We have seen that as an attempt to discover the truth of things, his speculations are worthless and worse than worthless, since their method no less than their teaching is false. Nevertheless, Wisdom is justified of all her children. Without adding anything to the sum of positive knowledge, Plotinus produced an effect on mens thoughts not unworthy of the great intellect and pure life which he devoted to the service of philosophy. No other thinker has ever accomplished a revolution so immediate, so comprehensive, and of such prolonged duration. He was the creator of Neo-Platonism, and Neo-Platonism simply annihilated every school of philosophy to which it was opposed. For thirteen centuries or more, the three great systems which had so long divided the suffrages of educated mindsStoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticismceased to exist, and were allowed to lapse into such complete oblivion that only a few fragments of the works in which they were originally embodied have been preserved. And Plotinus was enabled to do this by the profound insight which led him to strike less at any particular doctrine held by his opponents than at the common foundation on which they all stood, the materialism openly professed by the Stoics and Epicureans, and assumed by the Sceptics as the necessary presupposition of every dogmatic philosophy. It is true that the principle which he opposed to theirs was not of his own origination, although he stated it more powerfully than it had ever been stated before. But to have revived the spiritualism of Plato and Aristotle in such a way as to win for it universal acceptance, was precisely his greatest merit. It is also the only one that he would have claimed for himself. As we have already mentioned, he professed to be nothing more than the disciple of Plato. And although Aristotelian ideas abound in his writings, still not only are they overbalanced by the Platonic element, but Plotinus might justly have contended that they also belong, in a sense, to Plato,351 having been originally acquired by a simple development from his teaching.As might be expected from the immense exuberance of their intellectual life, we find every kind of scepticism represented among the Greeks; and, as with their other philosophical tendencies, there is evidence of its existence previous to126 or independent of scientific speculation. Their very religion, though burdened with an enormous mass of fictitious legends, shows a certain unwillingness to transgress the more obvious laws of nature, not noticeable in the traditions of kindred or neighbouring races. Its tendency is rather to imagine supernatural causes for natural events, or to read a divine meaning into accidental occurrences, than to introduce impossibilities into the ordinary course of history. And some of its most marvellous stories are told in such a manner that the incredulous satire with which they were originally received is, by a beautiful play of irony, worked into the very texture of the narrative itself. For example, the Greeks were especially disinclined to believe that one of the lower animals could speak with a human voice, or that a dead man could be brought back to lifecontradicted as both suppositions were by the facts of universal experience. So when the horse Xanthus replies to his masters reproaches, Homer adds that his voice was arrested by the Erinyesthat is to say, by the laws of nature; and we may suspect that nothing more is intended by his speech than the interpretation which Achilles would spontaneously put on the mute and pathetic gaze of the faithful steed. And when, to illustrate the wondrous medical skill of Asclpius, it is related that at last he succeeded in restoring a dead man to life, the story adds that for this impious deed both the healer and his patient were immediately transfixed by a thunderbolt from heaven.215 Another impossibility is to predict with any certainty the future fate of individuals, and here alsoas has been already observed in a different connexion216the Greeks showed their extreme scepticism with regard to any alleged contravention of a natural law, under the transparent disguise of stories about persons whom ambiguous predictions had lured to their fall.
