would have, on the whole, allowed that argument. And if Clement had
answered, that such was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being,
and that therefore the goodness of their Absolute Good, careless of the
degradation and misery around it, must be something very different from
his notions of human goodness; the Neoplatonists would have answered--
indeed they did answer--"After all, why not? Why should the Absolute
Goodness be like our human goodness?" This is Plotinus's own belief.
It is a question with him, it was still more a question with those who
came after him, whether virtues could be predicated of the Divine
nature; courage, for instance, of one who had nothing to fear; self-
restraint, of one who had nothing to desire. And thus, by setting up a
different standard of morality for the divine and for the human,
Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, that virtue is not the
end, but the means; not the Divine nature itself, as the Christian
schools held, but only the purgative process by which man was to ascend
into heaven, and which was necessary to arrive at that nature--that
nature itself being--what?

And how to answer that last question was the abysmal problem of the
whole of Neoplatonic philosophy, in searching for which it wearied
itself out, generation after generation, till tired equally of seeking
and of speaking, it fairly lay down and died. In proportion as it
refused to acknowledge a common divine nature with the degraded mass, it
deserted its first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual
world is identical with the moral world, with right, love, justice; it
tried to find new definitions for the spiritual; it conceived it to be
identical with the intellectual. That did not satisfy its heart. It
had to repeople the spiritual world, which it had emptied of its proper
denizens, with ghosts; to reinvent the old daemonologies and
polytheisms--from thence to descend into lower depths, of which we will