=The General Character of the Teaching of Plotinus.= There is a great division of opinion about the value of the teaching of Plotinus, for he drew his philosophy only in the broadest outlines, and he made no attempt to advance from a general view of the world to exact knowledge of it. Intellectually his philosophy is an abstraction; and yet emotionally, in an intimate way, it touched deeply an age weary with culture. Thus one can see how the actual achievement of Plotinus was small, but how at the same time its force and influence was very great. It was a religious teaching which rose to magnificent heights of contemplation from miserable intellectual surroundings. Nevertheless, the philosophy of Plotinus was an extreme form of intellectualism――it was an intellectual ennobling and transforming of religion. The earlier philosophy had supported the happiness of the individual by offers of infinitude; but Plotinus thought of the individual as never isolated from the Infinite, but as always longing for the Infinite. Fellowship with God is knowledge of Him, but it is knowledge of a peculiar kind. It is enthusiasm, intuition, ecstasy. There is a chasm between man and God, which Plotinus would bridge by placing reality so deeply within consciousness as to annihilate all antitheses and contradictions. Thus this deep reality below consciousness is cosmic and not human; and the religion of Plotinus is cosmocentric and not anthropocentric. Plotinus intensifies and summarizes Greek culture in order to consolidate and defend it. But in thus thinking out the Greek conceptions to their logical completeness, those conceptions collapse. =The Mystic God.= There are two characteristics that distinguish the mystic God of Plotinus. 1. The first characteristic is the supra-consciousness of God. God is the indefinable, original Being who is above all antitheses. He is _supra_-everything, even _supra_-conscious. Nothing can be attributed to Him, not even thought or will, for these imply two elements and God is a unity. Any description of Him must be in negative terms (“negative theology”). If we speak of Him as the One, the First, the Cosmic Cause, Goodness, or as Light, we are only relatively and not really describing Him. God is present in all, yet He is not divided; He is the source of all, and yet He himself is perfectly finished. In his conception of God as compared to the world, Plotinus added the realm of the supra-conscious and the sub-conscious to the conscious.