was explained and reconciled for ever.

And Proclus's prayer, on the other hand, was the outcome of the
Neoplatonists' metaphysic, the end of all their search after the One,
the Indivisible, the Absolute, this cry to all manner of innumerable
phantoms, ghosts of ideas, ghosts of traditions, neither things nor
persons, but thoughts, to give the philosopher each something or other,
according to the nature of each. Not that he very clearly defines what
each is to give him; but still he feels himself in want of all manner of
things, and it is as well to have as many friends at court as possible--
Noetic Gods, Noeric Gods, rulers, angels, daemons, heroes--to enable him
to do what? To understand Plato's most mystical and far-seeing
speculations. The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has vanished
further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a supreme
Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of the
abyss a Primaeval One. But even that has a predicate, for it is one; it
is not pure essence. Must there not be something beyond that again,
which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What
an abyss! How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, in
the vast nowhere between it and the object of its search? The search
after the One issues in a wail to the innumerable; and kind gods,
angels, and heroes, not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to
satisfy at least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have
done since, and may do again; and so, as Mr. Carlyle has it, "the
bottomless pit got roofed over," as it may be again ere long.

Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure? That Alexandria,
during four centuries of profound and earnest thought, added nothing?
Heaven forbid that we should say so of a philosophy which has exercised
on European thought, at the crisis of its noblest life and action, an