ATHERTON. True; but in this case I should invert the order, and say that as the promise of theurgy exercised an attraction of growing strength on an order of mind less fitted for speculation, such temperaments would readily drop the speculative principle of mysticism in their eagerness to grasp the illusive prize—apparently so practical—which a commerce with superior natures held out. WILLOUGHBY. And so the intellectual ambition and the poetical spirit, so lofty in Plotinus, subside, among the followers of Iamblichus, into the doggrel of the necromancer’s charm. GOWER. Much such a descent as the glory of Virgil has suffered, whose tomb at Pausilipo is now regarded by the populace of degenerate Naples less with the reverence due to the poet than with the awe which arises from the legendary repute of the mediæval magician. ATHERTON. So the idealism of strong minds becomes superstition in the weak. In the very shrine where culture paid its homage to art or science, feebleness and ignorance, in an age of decline, set up the image-worship of the merely marvellous. MRS. ATHERTON. I think you mentioned only one other of these worthies. ATHERTON. Proclus. He is the last great name among the Neo-Platonists. He was the most eclectic of them all, perhaps because the most learned and the most systematic. He elaborated the trinity of Plotinus into a succession of impalpable Triads, and surpassed Iamblichus in his devotion to the practice of theurgy. Proclus was content to develop the school in that direction which Iamblichus—(successful from his very faults)—had already given it. With Proclus, theurgy was the art which gives man the magical passwords that carry him through barrier after barrier, dividing species from species of the upper existences, till, at the summit of the hierarchy, he arrives at the highest. According to him, God is the Non-Being who is above all being. He is apprehended only by negation. When we are raised out of our weakness, and on a level with God, it seems as though reason were silenced, for then we are above reason. We become intoxicated with God, we are inspired as by the nectar of Olympus. He teaches philosophy as the best preparation for Quietism. For the scientific enquirer, toiling in his research, Proclus has a God to tell of, supreme, almighty, the world-maker and governor of Plato. For him who has passed through this labour, a God known only by ecstasy—a God who is the repose he gives—a God of whom the more you deny the more do you affirm.