bsisted in
the believer. Platonism, to become a religion, had to appeal to
superstition. Unity, for instance (which, according to Plato himself, is
a category applicable to everything concomitantly with the complementary
category of multiplicity, for everything, he says, is evidently both one
and many)--unity could not become the One, an independent and supreme
deity, unless the meaning and function of unity were altogether
forgotten and a foolish idolatry, agape at words, were substituted for
understanding. Some one had to come with an air of authority and report
his visions of the One before such an entity could be added to the
catalogue of actual existences. The reality of all neo-Platonic
hypostasis was thus dependent on revelation and on forgetting the
meaning once conveyed by the terms so mysteriously transfigured into
metaphysical beings.

[Sidenote: Hypostasis ruins ideals.]

This divorce of neo-Platonic ideas from the functions they originally
represented in human life and discourse was found in the end to defeat
the very interest that had prompted it--enthusiasm for the ideal.
Enthusiasm for the ideal had led Plato to treat all beauties as
stepping-stones toward a perfect beauty in which all their charms might
be present together, eternally and without alloy. Enthusiasm for the
ideal had persuaded him that mortal life was only an impeded effort to
fall back into eternity. These inspired but strictly unthinkable
suggestions fell from his lips in his zeal to express how much the
burden and import of experience exceeded its sensuous vehicle in
permanence and value. A thousand triangles revealed one pregnant
proportion of lines and areas; a thousand beds and bridles served one
perpetual purpose in human life, and found in fulfilling it their
essence and standard of excellence; a thousand fascinations taught the
same lesson and coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty and
nobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sense
for the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcend
them; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values,
an idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum of
such enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendence
without its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be an
idealisation, an interpretation of reality reaching prophetically to its
goals. It became a super-numerary second physics,