only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in Mr. Thomas
Carlyle's words, "What things men will worship, in their extreme need!"
Other moderns, however, have expressed their admiration of Proclus; and,
no doubt, many neat sayings may be found in him (for after all he was a
Greek), which will be both pleasing and useful to those who consider
philosophic method to consist in putting forth strings of brilliant
apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or coherence: but
of the method of Plato or Aristotle, any more than of that of Kant or
Mill, you will find nothing in him. He seems to my simplicity to be at
once the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of
declaimers. He can rave symbolism like Jacob Bohmen, but without an
atom of his originality and earnestness. He can develop an inverted
pyramid of daemonology, like Father Newman himself, but without an atom
of his art, his knowledge of human cravings. He combines all schools,
truly, Chaldee and Egyptian as well as Greek; but only scraps from their
mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and
conscience as little as they do the logical faculties. His Greek gods
and heroes, even his Alcibiades and Socrates, are "ideas;" that is,
symbols of certain notions or qualities: their flesh and bones, their
heart and brain, have been distilled away, till nothing is left but a
word, a notion, which may patch a hole in his huge heaven-and-earth-
embracing system. He, too, is a commentator and a deducer; all has been
discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more. Those who followed
him seem to have commented on his comments. With him Neoplatonism
properly ends. Is its last utterance a culmination or a fall? Have the
Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, "exhibiting," as Gibbon says
of them, "a deplorable instance of the senility of the human mind?"
Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves: but first contrive to finish
everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to any human
being. Life is short, and Art--at least the art of obtaining practical