to time only and not to eternity.

While Origen was working out his great system of ecclesiastical
dogmatic, his younger contemporary Plotinus, outside the Christian
pale, was laying the coping-stone on the edifice of Greek philosophy
by a scheme of idealism which must always remain one of the greatest
achievements of the human mind.[125] In the history of Mysticism he
holds a more undisputed place than Plato; for some of the most
characteristic doctrines of Mysticism, which in Plato are only thrown
out tentatively, are in Plotinus welded into a compact whole. Among
the doctrines which first receive a clear exposition in his writings
are, his theory of the Absolute, whom he calls the One, or the Good;
and his theory of the Ideas, which differs from Plato's; for Plato
represents the mind of the World-Artist as immanent in the Idea of the
Good, while Plotinus makes the Ideas immanent in the universal mind;
in other words, the real world (which he calls the "intelligible
world," the sphere of the Ideas) is in the mind of God. He also, in
his doctrine of Vision, attaches an importance to _revelation_ which
was new in Greek philosophy. But his psychology is really the centre
of his system, and it is here that the Christian Church and Christian
Mysticism, in particular, is most indebted to him.

The _soul_ is with him the meeting-point of the intelligible and the
phenomenal. It is diffused everywhere.[126] Animals and vegetables
participate in it;[127] and the earth has a soul which sees and
hears.[128] The soul is immaterial and immortal, for it belongs to the
world of real existence, and nothing that _is_ can cease to be.[129]
The body is in the soul, rather than the soul in the body. The soul
creates the body by imposing form on matter, which in itself is
No-thing, pure indetermination, and next door to absolute