ndu, matter
is an obstruction and a deception, and the Eastern mystic despises and
rejects and subdues all that is material, and bends all his faculties on
realising his spiritual consciousness, and dwelling in that.

This type of thought certainly existed to some extent in both Greece
and Egypt before the Christian era. Much of Plato's thought is mystical
in essence, and that which be points out to be the motive force of the
philosophic mind is also the motive force of the mystic, namely, the
element of attraction, and so of love towards the thing which is akin to
him. The illustration of the dog being philosophic because he is angry
with a stranger but welcomes his friend,[3] though at first it may seem,
like many of Plato's illustrations, far-fetched or fanciful, in truth
goes to the very root of his idea. Familiarity, akinness, is the basis
of attraction and affection. The desire of wisdom, or the love of
beauty, is therefore nothing but the yearning of the soul to join itself
to what is akin to it. This is the leading conception of the two great
mystical dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. In the former,
Socrates, in the words of the stranger prophetess Diotima, traces the
path along which the soul must travel, and points out the steps of the
ladder to be climbed in order to attain to union with the Divine. From
beauty of form and body we rise to beauty of mind and spirit, and so to
the Beauty of God Himself.

He who under the influence of true love rising upward from these
begins to see that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true
order of going or being led by another to the things of love, is to
use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards
for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from
two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and
from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he
arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what
the essence of beauty is. This ... is that life above all others
which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.[4]

That is a passage whose music re-echoes through many pages of English
literature, especially in the poems of Spenser, Shelley, and Keats.

Plato may therefore be regarded as the source of speculative mysticism
in Europe, but it is Plotinus, his disciple, the Neo-platonist, who is
the father of European my