What is the source of this strange aspiration to rise above Reason and
Intelligence, which is for Plotinus the highest category of Being, and
to come out "on the other side of Being" [Greek: epekeina tês
ousias]? Plotinus says himself elsewhere that "he who would rise above
Reason, falls outside it"; and yet he regards it as the highest
reward of the philosopher-saint to converse with the hypostatised
Abstraction who transcends all distinctions. The vision of the One is
no part of his philosophy, but is a mischievous accretion. For though
the "superessential Absolute" may be a logical necessity, we cannot
make it, even in the most transcendental manner, an object of sense,
without depriving it of its Absoluteness. What is really apprehended
is not the Absolute, but a kind of "form of formlessness," an idea not
of the Infinite, but of the Indefinite.[147] It is then impossible to
distinguish "the One," who is said to be above all distinctions, from
undifferentiated matter, the formless No-thing, which Plotinus puts at
the lowest end of the scale.

I believe that the Neoplatonic "vision" owes its place in the system
to two very different causes. First, there was the direct influence of
Oriental philosophy of the Indian type, which tries to reach the
universal by wiping out all the boundary-lines of the particular, and
to gain infinity by reducing self and the world to zero. Of this we
shall say more when we come to Dionysius. And, secondly, the blank
trance was a real psychical experience, quite different from the
"visions" which we have already mentioned. Evidence is abundant; but I
will content myself with one quotation.[148] In Amiel's _Journal_[149]
we have the following record of such a trance: "Like a dream which
trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my
present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the