as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the
school will try to make the spiritual something real, or, at least,
something conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter,
and talking of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or
electricity, or force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the
accidents of brute matter, and a part of that nature which is born to
die.

The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus. The
unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and
Iamblichus, has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her
doctrine by that of her instructors and her pupils. Proclus was taught
by the men who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the
Platonic succession descended from her to him. His throne, however, was
at Athens, not at Alexandria. After the murder of the maiden
philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece. But Proclus is
so essentially the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass
him over. Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly informed, he
is the Greek philosopher; the flower and crown of all its schools; in
whom, says the learned Frenchman, "are combined, and from whom shine
forth, in no irregular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato,
Aristotle, Zeno, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus;" and who "had so
comprehended all religions in his mind, and paid them such equal
reverence, that he was, as it were, the priest of the whole universe!"

I have not the honour of knowing much of M. Cousin's works. I never
came across them but on one small matter of fact, and on that I found
him copying at second hand an anachronism which one would have conceived
palpable to any reader of the original authorities. This is all I know
of him, saving these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted