GOWER. I hope you are ready, Atherton, to illumine my darkness concerning Neo-Platonism, by taking up that individual instance you were speaking of last Monday. ATHERTON. I have something ready to inflict; so prepare to listen stoutly. (_Reads._) Plato pronounces Love the child of Poverty and Plenty—the Alexandrian philosophy was the offspring of Reverence and Ambition. It combined an adoring homage to the departed genius of the age of Pericles with a passionate, credulous craving after a supernatural elevation. Its literary tastes and religious wants were alike imperative and irreconcilable. In obedience to the former, it disdained Christianity; impelled by the latter, it travestied Plato. But for that proud servility which fettered it to a glorious past, it might have recognised in Christianity the only satisfaction of its higher longings. Rejecting that, it could only establish a philosophic church on the foundation of Plato’s school, and, forsaking while it professed to expound him, embrace the hallucinations of intuition and of ecstasy, till it finally vanishes at Athens amid the incense and the hocus-pocus of theurgic incantation. As it degenerates, it presses more audaciously forward through the veil of the unseen. It must see visions, dream dreams, work spells, and call down deities, demi-gods, and dæmons from their dwellings in the upper air. The Alexandrians were eclectics, because such reverence taught them to look back; mystics, because such ambition urged them to look up. They restore philosophy, after all its weary wanderings, to the place of its birth; and, in its second childhood, it is cradled in the arms of those old poetic faiths of the past, from which, in the pride of its youth, it broke away.