The “leading of the soul” to truths, and gifts, and pleasures. Aristotle likewise adopts the word: and indeed it contains in itself the soul of criticism, though in Plato himself it sometimes has an unfavourable meaning, of “allurement,” “seduction.” The Neo-Platonists, at least, might be looked to with some hope. Their spirit at any rate was not negative, and they seem, [Sidenote: _The Neo-Platonists._] as a rule, to have been diligent and eager students of literature. But, on the other hand, their tendency towards mysticism, and also the strong colour which their philosophy took from the East, made them especially susceptible to the temptations of allegory, which, as we have seen and shall see, was a Delilah of criticism in almost all its stages in Greece. And when they escaped this they nearly always succumbed to the other temptations of merely grammatical and textual inquiries, or to those of an abstract and theoretical æstheticism, which leaves the actual estimation of literature as literature out of sight. Thus, from the two great chiefs of the school, Plotinus and Proclus, we have short treatises on the Beautiful—by Proclus [Sidenote: _Plotinus._] in the form of a commentary (not complete) on the _First Alcibiades_ of Plato, while the tractate of Plotinus[71] attaches itself somewhat less closely to the _Hippias_. From the very first this latter keeps rigidly and laboriously to the abstract. Beauty, we are told, specially affects the sense of sight, but the ear perceives it in eloquence, poetry, and music. It is also in emotions, in virtue, in science. Is all this derived from one principle or from many? What is it, or what are they? But as there is both essential and accidental beauty, we must first settle what the attractive principle is. A shrewd question, and one which, if followed out in the proper direction, would lead straight to the best criticism of literature; but, unluckily, Plotinus does not so follow it. Footnote 71: _Enn._, vi. 1. Separately printed with Proclus, in an edition which I have not seen, by Creuzer, in 1814. M. Théry included a French translation in the rather capriciously selected but interesting appendix of _pièces justificatives_ appended to his _Histoire des Opinions_; and I believe there is another. He proceeds to examine and expose the difficulties attending the proposition that beauty comes mainly or chiefly from proportion of parts. There must rather, he holds, be in the soul some faculty of perceiving the divine quality, whether manifested in proportion or in anything else. The beauty of bodily substances depends on their affinity with the divine: the beauty of things not recognised by the senses depends on their identity with it. In yet other words, and from a yet other point of view, Beauty is Good, Ugliness is Evil: the attraction of the first pair, the repulsion of the second, easily explains itself.