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THREE:"Did you ever put me in it?" Bruce asked gravely.

THREE:

THREE: ‘What then,’ asks Plotinus, ‘is the One? No easy question to answer for us whose knowledge is based on ideas, and who can hardly tell what ideas are, or what is existence itself. The farther the soul advances in this formless region, where there is nothing for her to grasp, nothing whose impress she can receive, the more does her footing fail her, the more helpless and desolate does she feel. Oftentimes she wearies of such searching and is glad to leave it all and to descend into the world of sense until she finds rest on the solid earth, as the eyes are relieved in turning from small objects to large. For she does not know that to be one herself is to have gained the object of her search, for then she is no other than that which she knows. Nevertheless it is only by this method that we can master the philosophy of the One. Since, then, what we seek is one, and since we are considering the first principle of all things and the Good, he who enters on this quest must not place himself afar from the things that are first by descending to the things that are last, but he must leave the objects of sense, and, freed from all evil, ascend to the first principle of his own nature, that by becoming one, instead of many, he may behold the beginning and the One. Therefore he must become Reason, trusting his soul to Reason for guidance and support, that she may wakefully receive what it sees, and with this he must behold the One, not admitting any element of sense, but gazing on the purest with pure Reason and with that which in Reason is first. Should he who addresses himself to this enterprise imagine that the object of his vision possesses magnitude or form or bulk, then Reason is not his guide, for such perceptions do not belong to its nature but to sense and to the opinion which follows on sense. No; we must only pledge Reason to perform what it can do. Reason sees what precedes, or what contains, or what is derived from itself. Pure are the things in it, purer still those which precede, or rather, that which precedes it. This is neither reason nor anything that is; for whatever is has the form of existence, whereas this has none, not even an ideal form. For the One, whose nature is to generate all things, cannot be any of those things itself. Therefore it is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul; neither moving nor at rest, not in place, not in time, but unique of its kind, or rather kindless, being before all kind, before motion and before rest, for these belong to being, and are that to which its multiplicity is due. Why, then, if it does not move, is it not at rest? Because while one or both of these must be attributed to being, the very act of attribution involves a distinction between subject and predicate, which is impossible in the case of what is absolutely simple.’463Plotinus is not only the greatest and most celebrated of the Neo-Platonists, he is also the first respecting whose opinions we have any authentic information, and therefore the one who for all practical purposes must be regarded as the founder of the school. What we know about his life is derived from a biography written by his disciple Porphyry. This is a rather foolish performance; but it possesses considerable interest, both on account of the information which it was intended to supply, and also as affording indirect evidence of the height to which superstition had risen during the third century of our era. Plotinus gave his friends to understand that he was born in Egypt about 205 A.D.; but so reluctant was he to mention any circumstance connected with his physical existence, that his race and parentage always remained a mystery. He showed somewhat more communicativeness in speaking of his274 mental history, and used to relate in after-life that at the age of twenty-eight he had felt strongly attracted to the study of philosophy, but remained utterly dissatisfied with what the most famous teachers of Alexandria had to tell him on the subject. At last he found in Ammonius Saccas the ideal sage for whom he had been seeking, and continued to attend his lectures for eleven years. At the end of that period, he joined an eastern expedition under the Emperor Gordian, for the purpose of making himself acquainted with the wisdom of the Persians and Indians, concerning which his curiosity seems to have been excited by Ammonius. But his hopes of further enlightenment in that quarter were not fulfilled. The campaign terminated disastrously; the emperor himself fell at the head of his troops in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus had great difficulty in escaping with his life to Antioch. Soon afterwards he settled in Rome, and remained there until near the end of his life, when ill-health obliged him to retire to a country seat in Campania, the property of a deceased friend, Zêthus. Here the philosopher died, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.

THREE:Overhauling the seaplane was not the question.‘Happy is he who has learned

THREE:Dick agreed readily.146