Such was the teaching which attracted Longinus, Herennius, and Origen (not the Father). It makes an epoch in the life of Plotinus. He desires now no other instructor, and is preparing to become himself a leader in the pathway Ammonius has pointed out. He is convinced that Platonism, exalted into an enthusiastic illuminism, and gathering about itself all the scattered truth upon the field of history,—Platonism, mystical and catholic, can alone preserve men from the abyss of scepticism. One of the old traditions of Finland relates how a mother once found her son torn into a thousand fragments at the bottom of the River of Death. She gathered the scattered members to her bosom, and rocking to and fro, sang a magic song, which made him whole again, and restored the departed life. Such a spell the Alexandrian philosophy sought to work—thus to recover and re-unite the relics of antique truth, dispersed and drowned by time. Plotinus occupied himself only with the most abstract questions concerning knowledge and being. Detail and method—all the stitching and clipping of eclecticism, he bequeathed as the handicraft of his successors. His fundamental principle is the old _petitio principii_ of idealism. Truth, according to him, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself—it is rather the agreement of the mind with itself. The objects we contemplate and that which contemplates, are identical for the philosopher. Both are thought; only like can know like; all truth is within us. By reducing the soul to its most abstract simplicity, we subtilise it so that it expands into the infinite. In such a state we transcend our finite selves, and are one with the infinite; this is the privileged condition of ecstasy. These blissful intervals, but too evanescent and too rare, were regarded as the reward of philosophic asceticism—the seasons of refreshing, which were to make amends for all the stoical austerities of the steep ascent towards the abstraction of the primal unity.