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In all this we may distinguish the germ of that doctrine of the relation of man and universe, microcosm and macrocosm, which, suppressed as irrelevant in the Hippocratic works, reappears in the Platonic and especially in the Neoplatonic writings, and forms a very important dogma in later medicine.
It is therefore no wonder that, from the days of the Ionian school onwards, the view that the universe was the result of such a process should have maintained itself as a leading dogma of philosophy. The emanistic theories which played so great a part in Neoplatonic philosophy and Gnostic theology are forms of evolution.
The Gnostic and the Neoplatonic sects maintained, and the writings of Plotinus and Proclus still exhibit, many principles the same in substance with those which have been recently revived in Continental Europe.
The logical process which converted this prince is not a very obvious one. Why do we quote all these old monkish and neoplatonic legends? For some the evidence is obviously nil; to other anecdotes many witnesses bear testimony; but then, we know that an infectious schwarmerei can persuade people that the lion now removed from Northumberland House wagged his tail.
He accepted the doctrine of Iamblichus, Ablavius, and the other Neoplatonic philosophers, which to my poor understanding seemed either superhumanly profound or else debasingly foolish; nevertheless my memory retains many of his sayings, which I have learned to understand here in my loneliness.
As a philosopher Porphyry was chiefly important as the immediate successor of Plotinus in the neoplatonic school at Rome, but his "Isagoge" had extraordinary weight among the medieval logicians. Anselm of Laon was born somewhere about 1040, and is said to have studied under the famous St. Anselm, later archbishop of Canterbury, at the monastery of Bec.
This corruption had a renewal in the Neoplatonic philosophy; but it sprang from the Oriental philosophy of Brahmanism, and blends with its magic and enchantments. Theosophy is no more allied to Christian Science than the odor of the upas-tree is to the sweet breath of springtide, or the brilliant coruscations of the northern sky are to solar heat and light.
Gradually philosophic Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste Syntaxis which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, by which it was so long known during the Middle Ages. But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or mystic element in their commentaries.
Mathematics, not being a phenomenal study, suited better the Neoplatonic mood and continued to advance, carrying astronomy with it for a while astronomy that affected the life of man and that soon became the handmaid of astrology; medicine, too, that determined the conditions of man's life was also cherished, though often mistakenly, but pure science was doomed.
Some of us have in addition a Greek philosopher or man of letters in us; some a neoplatonic mystic, some a mediaeval monk, all of whom have learned to make terms with their older playfellows. Before retracing the way in which the mind as we now find it in so-called intelligent people has been accumulated, we may take time to try to see what civilization is and why man alone can become civilized.
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