The Alexandrian mysticism is the most learned and the profoundest of all known mysticisms. In the heights of abstraction where it loses itself, it seems very far from popular superstitions; and yet the school of Alexandria unites ecstatic contemplation and theurgy. These are two things, in appearance, incompatible, but they pertain to the same principle, to the pretension of directly perceiving what inevitably escapes all our efforts. On the one hand, a refined mysticism aspires to God by ecstasy; on the other, a gross mysticism thinks to seize him by the senses. The processes, the faculties employed, differ, but the foundation is the same, and from this common foundation necessarily spring the most opposite extravagances. Apollonius of Tyanus is a popular Alexandrianist, and Jamblicus is Plotinus become a priest, mystagogue, and hierophant. A new worship shone forth by miracles; the ancient worship would have its own miracles, and philosophers boasted that they could make the divinity appear before other men. They had demons for themselves, and, in some sort, for their own orders; the gods were not only invoked, but evoked. Ecstasy for the initiates, theurgy for the crowd. At all times and in all places, these two mysticisms have given each other the hand. In India and in China, the schools where the most subtile idealism is taught, are not far from pagodas of the most abject idolatry. One day the Bhagavad-Gita or Lao-tseu[91] is read, an indefinable God is taught, without essential and determinate attributes; the next day there is shown to the people such or such a form, such or such a manifestation of this God, who, not having a form that belongs to him, can receive all forms, and being only substance in itself, is necessarily the substance of every thing, of a stone and a drop of water, of a dog, a hero, and a sage. So, in the ancient world under Julien, for example, the same man was at once professor in the school of Athens and guardian of the temple of Minerva or Cybele, by turns obscuring the _Timaeus_ and the _Republic_ by subtile commentaries, and exhibiting to the eyes of the multitude sometimes the sacred vale,[92] sometimes the shrine of the good goddess,[93] and in either function, as priest or philosopher, imposing on others and himself, under taking to ascend above the human mind and falling miserably below it, paying in some sort the penalty of an unintelligible metaphysics, in lending himself to the most shameless superstitions.