no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of
thought. No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries;
because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen.
Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as
Theosophy. The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he
did: the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had
failed of its greatest success. What we owe to him--his genius
and inestimable gift to the world--is precisely that matchless
camouflage. It has been effective, in spite of efforts--

That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and
studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the
intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as
colts do their mothers. A youth, it is said, who revered Plato
always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as
a Platonist. But he never could have understood the inwardness
of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to
scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and
the illumination of the Soul. He adopted much of the teaching,
but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist,
either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of
the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize
it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.
I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from
the Encyclopedia suffice: "Philosophic differences" it says "are
best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism
is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a
philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us
think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven,
Aristotle of the natural and the whole world."

Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato's inspiration,
and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the
Brain-mind. The most famous of Plato's disciples, he did what he
could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato's message.
But Plato's method had guarded that, so that for mystics
it should always be there, Aristotle or no. But for mere
philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted
it. It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists--who
turned it back Plato-ward--to the Moslems: through Avicenna, who
Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from
him to Europe; where Bacon pre