ntre, and grows dimmer as it
passes outwards, till it shades off at last into total darkness. This
total darkness is matter. Matter, as negation of light, as the limit
of being, is in itself not-being. Thus the crucial difficulty of all
Greek philosophy, the problem of the whence of matter, the dualism of
matter and thought, which we have seen Plato and Aristotle struggling
in vain to subjugate, is loosely and lightly slurred over by Plotinus
with poetic metaphors and roseate phrases.

Matter Plotinus considers to be the ground of plurality and the cause
of all evil. Hence the object of life can {376} only be, as with
Plato, to escape from the material world of the senses. The first step
in this process of liberation is _"katharsis,"_ purification, the
freeing of oneself from the dominion of the body and the senses. This
includes all the ordinary ethical virtues. The second step is thought,
reason, and philosophy. In the third stage the soul rises above
thought to an intuition of the Nous. But all these are merely
preparatory for the supreme and final stage of exaltation into the
Absolute One, by means of trance, rapture, ecstasy. Here all thought
is transcended, and the soul passes into a state of unconscious swoon,
during which it is mystically united with God. It is not a thought of
God, it is not even that the soul sees God, for all such conscious
activities involve the separation of the subject from its object. In
the ecstasy all such disunion and separation are annihilated. The soul
does not look upon God from the outside. It becomes one with God. It
is God. Such mystical raptures can, in the nature of the case, only be
momentary, and the soul sinks back exhausted to the levels of ordinary
consciousness. Plotinus claimed to have been exalted in this divine
ecstasy several times during his life.

After Plotinus Neo-Platonism continues with modifications in his
successors, Porphyry, Iamblicus, Syrianus, Proclus, and others.

The essential character of Neo-Platonism comes out in its theory of
the mystical exaltation of the subject to God. It is the extremity of
subjectivism, the forcing of the individual subject to the centre of
the universe, to the position of the Absolute Being. And it follows
naturally upon the heels of Scepticism. In the Sceptics all faith in
the power of thought and reason had finally died out. They {377} took
as their watchword the utter impotence of reason to reach the truth.
From this it w