the Body and this Sensitive life . . . and therefore, besides those ἀρεταὶ καθαρτικαί by which the Souls of men were to be separated from Sensuality . . . they devised a further way of separation which was their Mathemata, or mathematical contemplations

besides many other ways they had, whereby to rise out of this dark body; ἀναβάσεις ἐκ τοῦ σπηλαίου, several steps and ascents out of this miry cave of mortality, before they could set any sure footing with their intellectual part in the Land of Light and Immortal Being."1 "The Priests of Mercury, as Plutarch tells us, in the eating of their holy things, were wont to cry out yλvkỳ ý áλýОela, Sweet is Truth. But how sweet and delicious that Truth is which holy and heaven-born Souls feed upon in their mysterious converses with the Deity, who can tell but they that taste it? When Reason once is raised by the mighty force of the Divine Spirit into a converse with God, it is turned into Sense : that which before was only Faith well built upon sure principles (for such our Science may be) now becomes Vision. We shall then converse with God T ve, whereas before we conversed with him only T Savoia, with our Discursive faculty, as the Platonists were wont to distinguish. Before we laid hold on him only λóyo άπodeIKTIK, with a struggling, agonistical, and contentious Reason, hotly combating with difficulties and sharp contests of diverse opinions, and labouring in it self in its deductions of one thing from another; we shall then fasten our minds upon him Aóy❤ ἀποφαντικῷ, with such a serene understanding, γαλήνῃ νοερᾷ, such an intellectual calmness and serenity as will present us with a blissful, steady, and invariable sight of him." 2

It may perhaps be thought that in the foregoing passage Smith oversteps a little the line which divides "ecstasy" as "Holy Life" from "ecstasy" as temporary state of exalted religious feeling; and perhaps in the following passage too, from his Discourse of the Immortality of the Soul, he may be thought to commit the same fault; yet the passage seems to me to contain what is so valuable for our understanding of the influence of Platonism-as mythological, rather than logical system-on present-day religious thought, that I venture to transcribe it, together with the notable quotation from Plotinus included in it :-

Though in our contentious pursuits after science, we cast Wisdom, Power, Eternity, Goodness, and the like into several 1 o.c. pp. 10, 11.

2 o.c. pp. 16, 17. This and the foregoing quotations are all from the Discourse concerning the True Way or Method of attaining to Divine Knowledge.

formalities, so that we may trace down Science in a constant chain of Deductions; yet in our naked Intuitions and Visions of them, we clearly discern that Goodness and Wisdom lodge together, Justice and Mercy kiss each other: and all these and whatsoever pieces else the cracked glasses of our Reasons may sometime break Divine and Intelligible Being into, are fast knit up together in the invincible bonds of Eternity. And in this sense is that notion of Proclus descanting upon Plato's riddle of the Soul s γεννητὴ καὶ ἀγέννητος, as if it were generated and yet not generated, to be understood; χρόνος ἅμα καὶ αἰὼν περὶ τὴν ψυχήν, the Soul partaking of Time in its broken and particular conceptions and apprehensions, and of Eternity in its Comprehensive and Stable Contemplations. I need not say that when the Soul is once got up to the top of this bright Olympus, it will then no more doubt of its own Immortality, or fear any Dissipation, or doubt whether any drowsy sleep shall hereafter seize upon it: no, it will then feel itself grasping fast and safely its own Immortality, and view itself in the Horizon of Eternity. In such sober kind of ecstasies did Plotinus find his own Soul separated from his body . . . "I being often awakened into a sense of my self, and being sequestered from my body, and betaking myself from all things else into my self; what admirable beauty did I then behold." But here we must use some caution, lest we should arrogate too much to the power of our own Souls, which indeed cannot raise up themselves into that pure and steady contemplation of true Being; but will rather act with some multiplicity or repóτns (as they speak) attending it. But thus much of its high original may appear to us, that it can correct itself for dividing and disjoining therein, as knowing all to be every way one most entire and simple. . . . We shall add but this one thing further to clear the Soul's Immortality, and it is indeed that which breeds a true sense of it-viz., True and real goodness. Our highest speculations of the Soul may beget a sufficient conviction thereof within us, but yet it is only True Goodness and Virtue in the Souls of men that can make them both know and love, believe and delight themselves in their own Immortality. Though every good man is not so logically subtile as to be able by fit mediums to demonstrate his own Immortality, yet he sees it in a higher light: his Soul being purged and enlightened by true Sanctity is more capable of those divine irradiations, whereby it feels itself in conjunction with God, and by a σvvavyela (as the Greeks speak), the Light of divine goodness mixing itself with the light of its own Reason, sees more clearly not only that it may, if it please the Supreme Deity, of its own nature exist eternally, but also that it shall do so. It is indeed nothing else that makes men question the Immortality of their Souls, so much as their own base and earthly loves,

which first makes them wish their Souls were not immortal, and then think they are not; which Plotinus hath well observed and accordingly hath soberly pursued this argument: . . . "Let us now (saith he, Enn. iv. 7. 10) consider a Soul, not such a one as is immersed into the Body . . . but such a one as hath cast away Concupiscence and Anger and other Passions. . . . Such a one as this will sufficiently manifest that all Vice is unnatural to the Soul, and something acquired only from abroad, and that the best Wisdom and all other Virtues lodge in a purged Soul, as being allied to it. If, therefore, such a Soul shall reflect upon itself, how shall it not appear to itself to be of such a kind of nature as Divine and Eternal Essences are? For Wisdom and true Virtue being Divine Effluxes can never enter into any unhallowed and mortal thing: it must, therefore, needs be Divine, seeing it is filled with a Divine nature διὰ συγγένειαν καὶ τὸ Sμoovorov, by its kindred and consanguinity therewith. . . . Contemplate, therefore, the Soul of man, denuding it of all that which itself is not, or let him that does this, view his own Soul; then he will believe it to be immortal, when he shall behold it év r νοητῷ καὶ ἐν τῷ καθαρῳ, fxed in an Intelligible and pure nature ; he shall then behold his own intellect contemplating not any sensible thing, but eternal things, with that which is eternal, that is, with itself, looking into the intellectual world, being itself made all lucid, intellectual, and shining with Sun-beams of eternal Truth, borrowed from the First Good, which perpetually rayeth forth his Truth upon all intellectual beings. One thus qualified may seem without any arrogance to take up that saying of Empedocles, χαίρετ', ἐγὼ δ ̓ ὑμῖν θεὸς ἄμβροτος-Farewell all earthly allies, I am henceforth no mortal wight, but an immortal angel, ascending up into Divinity, and reflecting upon that likeness of it which I find in myself. When true Sanctity and Purity shall ground him in the knowledge of divine things, then shall the inward sciences that arise from the bottom of his own Soul display themselves; which, indeed, are the only true sciences; for the Soul runs not out of itself to behold Temperance and Justice abroad, but its own light sees them in the contemplation of its own being and that divine essence which was before enshrined within itself." 1

tậ

So much for Smith's presentation of the "Idea of Soul"; it owes its main features to the doctrine of ἔρως and ἀνάμνησις set forth in the Phaedrus Myth; and the "regulative" value of the "Idea" is finely appreciated. The regulative value of the "Idea of God" is as finely appreciated in the Discourse of

1 o.c. pp. 99-105.

2

1

the Existence and Nature of God, where he says, "God is not better defined to us by our understandings than by our wills and affections," and notes the pre-eminence, in Platonism, of τὸ ἀγαθόν, which begets in us τὸ ἐρωτικὸν πάθος. Similarly, in his Discourse of the Jewish Notion of a Legal Righteousness, he contrasts the doctrine of Works set forth by the rabbinical writers with the Christian doctrine of Faith, and shows that the latter amounts to a doctrine of "divine grace and bounty as the only source of righteousness and happiness." St. Paul's doctrine of " Justification by Faith" is to be explained platonically as óuoiwσis To Bew. It is the justification of a sanctified nature-a nature which, by the grace of God, has been made a partaker of His life and strength. In Faith there is a true conjunction and union of the Souls of men with God, whereby they are made capable of true blessedness. "The Law is merely an external thing consisting in precepts which have only an outward administration"—it is the diakovía yρáμμатos Kai Oaváтov: but "the administration of the Gospel is intrinsical and vital in living impressions upon the Souls of men" -it is the Staкovía πveúμaтos.3 "By which," he argues in a significant passage, "the Apostle (2 Cor. iii. 6, 7) cannot mean the History of the Gospel, or those credenda propounded to us to believe; for this would make the Gospel itself as much an external thing as the Law was, and according to the external administration as much a killing or dead letter as the Law was. . . . But, indeed, he means a vital efflux from God upon the Souls of men, whereby they are made partakers of Life and Strength from Him."

4

I doubt we are too nice Logicians sometimes in distinguishing between the Glory of God and our own Salvation. We cannot in a true sense seek our own Salvation more than the Glory of God, which triumphs most and discovers itself most effectually in the salvation of Souls; for indeed this salvation is nothing else but a true participation of the Divine Nature. Heaven is not a thing without us, nor is Happiness anything distinct from a true conjunction of the mind with God in a secret feeling of his goodness and reciprocation of affection to him, wherein the Divine Glory most unfolds itself. . . . To love God above ourselves is not indeed so properly to love him above the salvation of our Souls, as if these

were distinct things; but it is to love him above all our own sinful affections, and above our particular Beings. . . . We cannot be completely blessed till the Idea boni, or the Ipsum Bonum, which is God, exercise its sovereignty over all the faculties of our Souls, rendering them as like to itself as may consist with their proper capacity.1

I have quoted Smith at considerable length, that the reader may appreciate the place of the Platonist doctrine, or rather aσknois, of " ecstasy" in the Life and Philosophy of the Cambridge school. It would be easy to quote similar passages from Cudworth, More, and Norris; but Smith seems to me to keep his head" better than the others in the intoxicating Neo-Platonic atmosphere, and, moreover, to present "ecstasy in a form which can be more easily recognised as connecting link between the doctrine of epws and áváμvnois set forth in the Phaedrus Myth and the doctrine of the "Presence of the Eternal Consciousness in my Consciousness," which meets us in the Epistemology and Ethics of T. H. Green and his school.

Leaving the learning of the Cambridge Platonists, let us now look at their science. Their science was Cartesian-that is, it was physics and astronomy treated mathematically, according to mechanical principles, the application of which by Copernicus and Galileo, in the latter branch, had already overthrown the Aristotelian tradition, and produced an intellectual revolution, which can be compared only with that which Darwinism has produced in our own day. Natural science has always been influential in England in giving impulse to Philosophy, and even to Theology. Locke's Essay was occasioned and inspired by the activity of the Royal Society; Berkeley's Idealism found expression in a monograph on the physiology of vision; and it was not by mere accident that the University of Newton was the alma mater of the English Platonists.

They received the new astronomy with enthusiasm. They were inspired by it. Like Xenophanes, they looked up at the Heavens and said, "The One is God." 2 "One great Order" and "Infinite Space" are the scientific ideas which dominate

"2

1 o.c. pp. 410, 411, from "Discourse of the Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion.

2 Arist. Met. Α 5. 986 b 24, εἰς τὸν ὅλον οὐρανὸν ἀποβλέψας τὸ ἓν εἶναί φησι τὸν θεόν.