What is loved by us here is mortal and hurtful. Our love is love for an image, that often turns into its opposite, because what we loved was not truly worthy of love, nor the good which we sought. God alone is the true object of our love.--Plotinus. The practical and the contemplative lives, which Plato and Aristotle had labored so hard to combine and correlate, in order to save human worth and Greek civilization, fell asunder, despite all their efforts--greatly, of course, to the detriment of both. In the terrible picture which Quintilian draws of Roman life in the first century of our era, we see one side of the result of this divorce: in the cruel satires of Lucian, written less than a century later, we may find depicted the other. But, just as, in the midst of the moral corruption and brutality, there arose from time to time worthy men like Quintilian and Tacitus, so amid the philosophical charlatanry and pretence, there still survived a few earnest thinkers, who aspired with all the power that was in them to divine truth, and strove to find in the eternal world that reality which was so miserably wanting in this. By far the greater number of these men were neither Greeks nor Romans, but Orientals, men whose thinking combined Greek philosophy with some earnest form of Eastern mysticism. To such men this life was merely an opportunity of preparing for a higher, in which lay all beauty, all good, and all blessedness. It is not difficult to see what sort of education would follow from this view of life. It may best be characterized by the one word "ascetic." It no longer seeks to train harmoniously all the faculties of body and mind with a view to a worthy social life, but to enable the soul to die to the body and to social life, and so rise to union and consubstantiality with God. In no sect was this tendency more marked than in the Neoplatonic, or, as it might equally well be called, the Neoaristotelian or Neopythagorean, the greatest name in which is Plotinus.