Note to page 90. M. Simon has shown, with much acuteness, in what way the exigencies of the system of Plotinus compelled him to have recourse to a new faculty, distinct from reason. Plotinus perceived that Plato had not been true to the consequences of his own dialectics. When he had reached the summit of his logical abstraction,—had passed through definition after definition, each more intangible than the last, on his way upward towards the One, he arrived at last at a God who was above Being itself. From this result he shrank, and so ceased to be consistent. How could such a God be a God of Providence, such a shadow of a shade a creator? Plato was not prepared, like Plotinus, to soar so completely above experience and the practical as to accept the utmost consequences of his logical process. So, that his God might be still the God of Providence, he retained him within the sphere of reason, gave him Being, Thought, Power, and called him the Demiurge. When Plotinus, like a true eclectic, carried still farther his survey of what history afforded him, he found Aristotle postulating a Deity so restricted by his own abstraction and immutability as to render it impossible to associate with his nature the idea of superintendence. It was feared that to represent God as the God of Creation and of Providence would be to dualize him. And yet the world did exist. How were the serene and remote Unity demanded by logic, and that activity and contact with matter no less imperatively demanded for God by experience, to be reconciled with each other? It is scarcely necessary to observe that there was no real difficulty. The whole problem was the result of the notion, so universal, concerning the evil of matter, and of the wrong answer given by ancient philosophy to the vexed question—Does the Supreme work τῷ εἶναι, or τῷ βούλεσθαι? Philosophy maintained the former; the Christian Church the latter. To remove this obstacle which philosophy had itself constructed, Plotinus proposed his theory of these hypostases, in the Divine Nature. Above and beyond a God such as that of Plato, he places another like that of Aristotle, and above him a simple Unity, like the God of the Eleatics. The last was the ultimatum of the process of logical simplification—a something above being. But the hypothesis was destitute of proof—it was, in fact, contrary to reason. Plotinus must therefore either surrender his theory or bid farewell to reason. He chose the latter course. He does not deny the important services of reason, but he professes to transcend its limits. He calls in mysticism to substantiate, by the doctrines of Illumination and Identity, his imaginary God. He affirms a God beyond reason, and then a faculty beyond reason to discern that God withal.