shadow made of that shadow." He refused animal food, abstained from
baths, declined medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 A.D.

It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the
weakness of his conceptions comes out. Plotinus was an earnest thinker,
slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an
infallible oracle, with a "He says," as if there were but one he in the
universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived
to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down. His dialectic is
far superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come
after him. He is a seeker. His followers are not. The great work
which marks the second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but a
justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theurgies
and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind which the world
has ever seen; that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an
inverted pyramid, not of speculation, but of dogmatic assertion, patched
together from all accessible rags and bones of the dead world. Some
here will, perhaps, guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of
Iamblichus and Proclus.

Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to
him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to
Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell
back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational,
though more hopeless, school of Porphyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with
all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions--a dislike
intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common
herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common herd--
did not believe a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat
unphilosophical. From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying to crush