It must not be supposed that in thus tracing the springs of our modern thought we necessarily approve of all the thought of Plotinos, Numenius or Plato. On the contrary, they were far more likely to have committed logical errors than we are, because they were hypnotized by the glamor of the terms they used, which to us are mere laboratory tools. The best way to prove this will be to appraise at its logical value for us Plotinos's discussion of Matter, elsewhere studied in its value for us. III. PLOTINOS'S VIEW OF MATTER. We have elsewhere pointed out the hopelessness of escaping either aspect of the problem of the One and the Many; and that the attempt of the Stoics to avoid the Platonic dualism by a materialistic monism was merely a change of names, the substance of the dualism remaining as the opposition of the contraries, such as active and passive, male and female, the predominant elements,[474] etc. Plotinos, in his abandonment of Numenian dualism, and championing of Stoicism, undertaking the feud with the Gnostics, the successors of Numenius, must therefore have inherited the same difficulties of thought, and we shall see how in spite of his mental agility he is caught in the same traditional meshes, and that these irreducible difficulties occur in each one of his three periods of life, the Eustochian, the Amelian, and the Porphyrian. In the Amelian, he teaches two matters, the physical and the intelligible, by which device he seeks to avoid the difficulties of dualism, crediting to intelligible matter any necessary form of Being, thus pushing physical matter into the outer darkness of non-being. So intelligible matter is still a form of Being, and we still hold to monism; as intelligible matter may participate in the good; while matter physical remains evil, being a deprivation of good, not possessing it. This, of course is dualism; and he thus has a convenient pun on the word matter, by which he can be monist or dualist, as the fancy takes him, or as exigencies demand. This participation, therefore, does not eliminate the dualism, while formally professing monism. Therefore Plotinos tries to choose between monism and dualism by surreptitiously accepting both.