In this way myths that were partly immoral and partly fantastic can be rehabilitated as symbolical coverings of speculative ideas. The souls of men, too, originate from the eternal world soul. By their transition, however, into the world of sense they are hampered and fettered by corporeity. They themselves complete their redemption through emancipation from the bonds of sense by means of asceticism and the practice of virtue. In this way they secure a return into the ideal world and the vision of the highest good, sometimes as moments of ecstatic mystical union with that world, even during this earthly life, but an eternally unbroken continuance thereof is only attained unto after complete emancipation from all the bonds of matter.[31]--Plotinus’ most celebrated scholar, who also wrote his life, and collected and arranged his literary remains, was =Porphyry=. He also taught in Rome and died there in A.D. 304. His ἐκ τῶν λογίων φιλοσοφία, a collection of oracular utterances, was a positive supplement to his polemic against Christianity (§ 23, 3), and afforded to paganism a book of revelation, a heathen bible, as Philostratus had before sought to portray a heathen saviour. Of greater importance for the development of mediæval scholasticism was his Commentary on the logical works of Aristotle, published in several editions of the Aristotelian Organon.--His scholar =Iamblichus= of Chalcis in Cœle-Syria, who died A.D. 333, was the founder of the Syrian school. The development which he gave to the Neo-platonic doctrine consisted chiefly in the incorporation of a fantastic oriental mythology and theurgy. This also brought him the reputation of being a magician.--Finally, the Athenian school had in =Proclus=, who died in A.D. 485, its most distinguished representative. While on the one hand, he proceeded along the path opened by Iamblichus to develop vagaries about dæmons and theurgical fancies, on the other hand, he gave to his school an impulse in the direction of scholarly and encyclopædic culture.--The Neo-platonic speculation exercised no small influence on the development of Christian philosophy. The philosophizing church fathers, whose darling was Plato, got acquaintance with his philosophical views from its relatively pure reproduction met with in the works of the older Neo-platonists. The influence of their mystico-theosophic doctrine, especially as conveyed in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius (§ 47, 11), is particularly discernible in the Christian mysticism of the middle ages, and has been thence transmitted to modern times.[32] § 25. Jewish and Samaritan Reaction.