s. On this is founded the doctrine
of transmigration. But at length reunion with the universal Intellect
takes place, Nirwana is reached, oblivion is attained, a state that has
no relation to matter, space, or time, the state into which the departed
flame of the extinguished taper has gone, the state in which we were
before we were born. This is the end that we ought to hope for; it is
reabsorption in the universal Force--supreme bliss, eternal rest.

Through Aristotle these doctrines were first introduced into Eastern
Europe; indeed, eventually, as we shall see, he was regarded as the
author of them. They exerted a dominating influence in the later period
of the Alexandrian school. Philo, the Jew, who lived in the time of
Caligula, based his philosophy on the theory of emanation. Plotinus
not only accepted that theory as applicable to the soul of man, but as
affording an illustration of the nature of the Trinity. For, as a beam
of light emanates from the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam
when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates,
and thence the Holy Ghost. From these views Plotinus derived a practical
religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of
ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul.
In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness. In like
manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God. He was a Tyrian
by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity;
his treatise on that subject was answered by Eusebius and St. Jerome,
but the Emperor Theodosius silenced it more effectually by causing all
the copies to be burnt. Porphyry bewails his own unworthiness, saying
that he had been united to God in ecstasy but once in eighty-six years,
whereas his master Plotinus had been so united six times in sixty years.
A complete system of theology, based on the theory of emanation, was
constructed by Proclus, who speculated on the manner in which absorption
takes place: whether the soul is instantly reabsorbed and reunited in
the moment of death, or whether it retains the sentiment of personality
for a time, and subsides into complete reunion by successive steps.

ARABIC PSYCHOLOGY. From the Alexandrian Greeks these ideas passed to
the Saracen philosophers, who very soon after the capture of the great
Egyptian city abandoned to the lower orders their anthropomorphic
notions of the nature of God and the sim