possesses divinity for it has a form, a figure, a design marked and
impressed with divine spirit. Finally, matter without form is the most
distant of the emanations from God, and the lowest of the descending stages
of God. God _is_ in Himself; He thinks in pure thought in spirit; He
thinks in mixed and confused thought in the soul; He feels in the body; He
sleeps in unformed matter. The object of unformed matter is to acquire
form, that is a body; and the object of a body is to have a soul; and the
aim of a soul is to be united in spirit, and the aim of spirit is to be
absorbed into God.

Souls not united to bodies contemplate spirit and enjoy absolute
happiness. Other souls not united to bodies, but solicited by a certain
instinct to unite themselves to bodies, are of ambiguous but still very
exalted nature. Souls united to bodies (our own) have descended far, but
can raise themselves and be purified by contemplation of the eternal
intelligence, and by relative union with it. This contemplation has
several degrees, so to speak, of intensity, degrees which Plotinus termed
hypostases. By perception we obtain a glimpse of ideas, by dialectics we
penetrate them; by a final hypostasis, which is ecstasy, we can sometimes
unite ourselves directly to God and live in Him.

THE PUPILS OF PLOTINUS.--Plotinus had as pupils and successors,
amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves little except
the exposition of the doctrine of his master, and shows originality only as
a logician. Iamblichus and his school made a most interesting effort to
revive exhausted and expiring paganism and to constitute a philosophic
paganism. The philosophers of the school of Iamblichus are, by the way,
magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men as antipositivist as
possible. Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with
Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential