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Updated: September 26, 2025
The Neoplatonists were no wiser, and Greek legend tells a well-known story of a married mystic whose suspended animation began at last to bore his wife. "Dear Hermotimus" that was his name, if we have not forgotten it "is quite the most absent of men," his spouse would say, when her husband's soul left his body and took its walks abroad.
If these men framed their profoundest thought in this way, that is only because they lived in an age when men had all their thoughts of this sort in a form which we can historically trace. For Platonists and Neoplatonists, such as the makers of the creeds and some portions of the Scripture show this influence, as well the divine, the ideal, was always thought of as eternal.
The reverence for classic antiquity, you must understand, which sprang up at the renaissance in the fifteenth century, was as indiscriminating as it was earnest. Men caught the trash as well as the jewels. They put the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, or Proclus, on the same level as the sound dialectic philosophy of Plato himself.
The experiment of Hilarius with the 'confounded little table' led to a massacre of Neoplatonists, martyrs of Psychical Research! In Hilarius's confession we omit a set of ritual invocations; as unessential as the mystic rites used by savages in making curari.
But we are still at a loss for a 'round' and satisfactory hypothesis which will colligate all the alleged facts, and explain their historical continuity. We merely state that continuity as a historical fact. Marvels of savages, Neoplatonists, saints of Church or Covenant, 'spontaneous' phenomena, Mediumistic phenomena, all hang together in some ways. Of this the Church has her own explanation.
The doctrine of the Logos brought Christianity into direct affinity with both Platonism and Stoicism, and the Second Person of the Trinity was invested with the same attributes as the Nous of the Neoplatonists.
We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for attributing these strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see some who ought to know better doing the same thing now; and others, who more wisely believe them to be strictly physical and nervous, so utterly unable to give reasons for them, that they feel it expedient to ignore them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena which can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to some sort of inductive law.
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