Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 4 In Chronological Order,...

Platonic traces, there would naturally be; but it will be noticed that they are far less numerous than the Pythagorean. To begin with, we find the reverent spirit towards the divinities, which prays for their blessing at the inception of all tasks.710 To us who live in these latter days, such a prayer seems out of place in philosophy; but that is only because we have divorced philosophy from theology; in other words, because our theology has left the realm of living thought, and, being fixed once for all, we are allowed to pursue any theory of existence we please as if it had nothing whatever to do with any reality; in other words, we are deceiving ourselves. On the contrary, in those days, every philosophical speculation was a genuine adventure in the spiritual world, a magical operation that might unexpectedly lead to the threshold of the cosmic sanctuary. Wise, indeed, therefore, was he who began it by prayer.

Of other technical Platonic terms there are quite a few. The lower is always the image of the higher.711 So the world might be considered the statue of the Divinity.712 The ideas are in a realm above the world.713 The soul here below is as in a prison.714 There is a divinity higher than the one generally known.715 The divinity is in a stability resultant of firmness and perfect motion.716 The perfect movement, therefore, is circular.717 This inter-communion of the universe therefore results in matter appearing in the intelligible world as "intelligible matter."718 By dialectics, also called "bastard reasoning,"719 we abstract everything720 till we reach the thing-in-itself,721 or, in other words, matter as a substrate of the world.722 Thus we metaphysically reach ineffable solitude.723

The same goal is reached psychologically, however, in the ecstasy.724 This idea occurred in Plato only as a poetic expression of metaphysical attainment; and in the case of Plotinos at least may have been used as a practical experience chiefly to explain his epileptic attacks; and this would be all the more likely as this disease was generally called the "sacred disease." Whether Numenius also was an epileptic, we are not told; it is more likely he took the idea from Philo, or Philo's oriental sources; at least Numenius seems to claim no personal ecstatic experiences such as those of Plotinos.

We have entered the realm of psychology; and this teaches us that that in which Numenius and Plotinos differ from Plato and Philo is chiefly their psychological or experimental application of pure philosophy. No body could subsist without the soul to keep it together.725 Various attempts are made to describe the nature of the soul; it is the extent or relation of circumference to circle.726 Or it is like a line and its divergence.727 In any case, the divinity and the soul move around the heavens,728 and this may explain the otherwise problematical progress or evolution ("prosodos" or "stolos") of ours.729