s a frame of
mind.[455] The feeling that there is an eternal highest good which lies
beyond all outer experience and is not even the intelligible, this
feeling, with which was united the conviction of the entire
worthlessness of everything earthly, was produced and fostered by
Neoplatonism. But it was unable to describe the contents of that highest
being and highest good, and therefore it was here compelled to give
itself entirely up to fancy and aesthetic feeling. Therefore it was
forced to trace out "mysterious ways to that which is within", which,
however, led nowhere. It transformed thought into a dream of feeling; it
immersed itself in the sea of emotions; it viewed the old fabled world
of the nations as the reflection of a higher reality, and transformed
reality into poetry; but in spite of all these efforts it was only able,
to use the words of Augustine, to see from afar the land which it
desired. It broke this world into fragments; but nothing remained to it,
save a ray from a world beyond, which was only an indescribable
"something."

And yet the significance of Neoplatonism in the history of our moral
culture has been, and still is, immeasurable. Not only because it
refined and strengthened man's life of feeling and sensation, not only
because it, more than anything else, wove the delicate veil which even
to-day, whether we be religious or irreligious, we ever and again cast
over the offensive impression of the brutal reality, but, above all,
because it begat the consciousness that the blessedness which alone can
satisfy man, is to be found somewhere else than in the sphere of
knowledge. That man does not live by bread alone, is a truth that was
known before Neoplatonism; but it proclaimed the profounder truth, which
the earlier philosophy had failed to recognise, that man does not live
by knowledge alone. Neoplatonism not only had a propadeutic significance
in the past, but continues to be, even now, the source of all the moods
which deny the world and strive after an ideal, but have not power to
raise themselves above aesthetic feeling, and see no means of getting a
clear notion of the impulse of their own heart and the land of their
desire.

* * * * *

_Historical Origin of Neoplatonism._

The forerunners of Neoplatonism were, on the one hand, those Stoics who
recognise the Platonic distinction of the sensible and supersensible
world, and on the other, the so-called Neop