which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to
give him altogether a freer and more loving conception, if not a
consistent or accurate one, of the wondrous harmony of that mysterious
analogy between the physical and the spiritual, which alone makes poetry
(and I had almost said philosophy also) possible, and have taught him to
behold alike in suns and planets, in flowers and insects, in man and in
beings higher than man, one glorious order of love and wisdom, linking
them all to Him from whom they all proceed, rays from His cloudless
sunlight, mirrors of His eternal glory.

But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own fertility, gave place
to the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran through much the same changes. It was
good for us, after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans,
unphilosophical as they were, swept it away. One feels in reading the
later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, even Cudworth (valuable as he
is), that the old accursed distinction between the philosopher, the
scholar, the illuminate, and the plain righteous man, was growing up
again very fast. The school from which the "Religio Medici" issued was
not likely to make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise.

Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote poor old Proclus as an
irrefragable authority, and believing that he, forsooth, represented the
sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but little chance
in the world. Bacon had been right in his dislike of Platonism years
before, though he was unjust to Plato himself. It was Proclus whom he
was really reviling; Proclus as Plato's commentator and representative.
The lion had for once got into the ass's skin, and was treated
accordingly. The true Platonic method, that dialectic which the
Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be tried, both in
England and in Germany; and I am much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it