Spirit is; it is the Real. It makes the body, thereby presenting itself in sensible form; it is not confined by body or dependent on body as its cause or necessary ground. In many ways men have expressed, and will express hereafter, the creative or causal antecedence of the spiritual principle. In many ways they have striven to establish this principle in God who is Spirit, or in the Absolute One. Many also have been the processes of individualization and diverse the mediatorial means, through which philosopher, apostle, or Church Doctor has tried to bring this principle down to man, and conceive him as spirit manifesting an intelligible selfhood through the organs of sense. Platonism was a beautiful, if elusive, expression of this endeavour, and Neo-Platonism a very palpable although darkening statement of the same.
All men, except fools, have their irrational sides. Who does not believe what his reason shall labour in vain to justify? Such belief may have its roots spread through generalizations broader than any specific rational processes of which the man is conscious. And a man is marked by the character of his supra-rational convictions, or beliefs or credulous conjectures. One thinks how Plato wove and coloured his dialectic, and angled with it, after those transcendencies that he well knew could never be so hooked and taken. His conviction—non-dialectical—of the supreme and beautiful reality of spirit led him on through all his arguments, some of which appear as playful, while others are very earnest.
Less elusive than Plato's was the supra-rationality of his distant disciple, the Egyptian Plotinus (died 270), creator of Neo-Platonism. With him the supra-rational represented an élan, a reaching beyond the clearly seen or clearly known, to the Spirit itself. He had a disciple Porphyry, like himself a sage—and yet a different sage. Porphyry's supra-rationalities hungered for many things from which his rational nature turned askance. But he has a disciple, lamblicus by name, whose rational nature not only ceases to protest, but of its free will prostitutes itself in the service of unreason.
The synthetic genius of Plotinus enabled him to weave
