sticism in its full sense, practical as well as
speculative, and who is also its most profound exponent. Plotinus (A.D.
204-270), who was an Egyptian by birth, lived and studied under Ammonius
Sakkas in Alexandria at a time when it was the centre of the
intellectual world, seething with speculation and schools, teachers and
philosophies of all kinds, Platonic and Oriental, Egyptian and
Christian. Later, from the age of forty, he taught in Rome, where he was
surrounded by many eager adherents. He drew the form of his thought both
from Plato and from Hermetic philosophy (his conception of Emanation),
but its real inspiration was his own experience, for his biographer
Porphyry has recorded that during the six years he lived with Plotinus
the latter attained four times to ecstatic union with "the One."
Plotinus combined, in unusual measure, the intellect of the
metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was
able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in
most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason. His
sixth Ennead, "On the Good or the One," is one of the great philosophic
treatises of the world, and it sums up in matchless words the whole
mystic position and experience. There are two statements in it which
contain the centre of the writer's thought. "God is not external to any
one, but is present in all things, though they are ignorant that he is
so." "God is not in a certain place, but wherever anything is able to
come into contact with him there he is present" (_Enn._ vi. 9, Sec.Sec. 4, 7).
It is because of our ignorance of the indwelling of God that our life is
discordant, for it is clashing with its own inmost principle. We do not
know ourselves. If we did, we would know that the way home to God lies
within ourselves. "A soul that knows itself must know that the proper
direction of its energy is not outwards in a straight line, but round a
centre which is within it" (_Enn._ vi. 9, Sec. 8).

The whole Universe is one vast Organism (_Enn._ ix. 4, Sec.Sec. 32, 45), and
the Heart of God, the source of all life, is at the centre, in which all
finite things have their being, and to which they must flow back; for
there is in this Organism, so Plotinus conceives, a double circulatory
movement, an eternal out-breathing and in-breathing, the way down and
the way up. The way down is the out-going of the undivided "One" towards
manifestation. From Him there flows out