s as a whole in every part of the body_. Thus the soul may be
regarded as divisible, since it is distributed throughout the body; but
it must also be regarded as indivisible, since it is wholly in every
part.

Let the man to whom such sentences as these mean anything rejoice in
the meaning that he is able to read into them! If he can go as far as
Plotinus, perhaps he can go as far as Cassiodorus (477-570, A.D.), and
maintain that the soul is not merely as a whole in every part of the
body, but is wholly in each of its own parts.

Upon reading such statements one's first impulse is to exclaim: How is
it possible that men of sense should be led to speak in this
irresponsible way? and when they do speak thus, is it conceivable that
other men should seriously occupy themselves with what they say?

But if one has the historic sense, and knows something of the setting
in which such doctrines come to the birth, one cannot regard it as
remarkable that men of sense should urge them. No one coins them
independently out of his own brain; little by little men are impelled
along the path that leads to such conclusions. Plotinus was a careful
student of the philosophers that preceded him. He saw that mind must
be distinguished from matter, and he saw that what is given a location
in space, in the usual sense of the words, is treated like a material
thing. On the other hand, he had the common experience that we all
have of a relation between mind and body. How do justice to this
relation, and yet not materialize mind?

What he tried to do is clear, and it seems equally clear that he had
good reason for trying to do it. But it appears to us now that what he
actually did was to make of the mind or soul a something very like an
inconsistent bit of matter, that is somehow in space, and yet not
exactly in space, a something that can be in two places at once, a
logical monstrosity. That his doctrine did not meet with instant
rejection was due to the fact, already alluded to, that our experience
of the mind is something rather dim and elusive. It is not easy for a
man to say what it is, and, hence, it is not easy for a man to say what
it is not.

The doctrine of Plotinus passed over to Saint Augustine, and from him
it passed to the philosophers of the Middle Ages. How extremely
difficult it has been for the world to get away from it at all, is made
clearly evident in the writings of that remarkable man Descartes.

Descartes