Or is it, as Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the
Christians held, something independent of him, without him, a Logos or
Word speaking to his reason and conscience? With this question Plotinus
grapples, earnestly, shrewdly, fairly. If you wish to see how he does
it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead,
especially if you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book,
Taylor's faithful though crabbed translation.

Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory. He enters
into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul. Whether it is one
or many. How it can be both one and many. He has the strongest
perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, "Time and Space
are no gods." He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world
of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet,
after he has wrestled with the two Titans, through page after page, and
apparently conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the battle-
field, the moment his back is turned. He denies that the one Reason has
parts--it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet he
cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by saying
that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest,
receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing. Ritter has worked
out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred
contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions
which I suspect to be inseparable from any philosophy starting from his
grounds. Is he not looking for the spiritual in a region where it does
not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which
are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we
express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his
Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as
nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that