break down the strength of Platonism, and to strip all philosophy of its assured conviction that it had reached the ultimately real. It was necessary, therefore, to shift the around of the absolutely true from the thing thought of to the thought itself of the thing. This was what Plotinus did, and it is in this respect that the Alexandrian scheme differs from all the systems which preceded it. They placed the absolute truth in something which thought embraced. This system placed it in the thought itself by which this something is taken hold of.
10. III.—Such appears to be the leading position occupied by Plotinus when the mists of his system are blown aside. He was led to it by the inconsequence of which Scepticism had convicted all antecedent systems. A paralogism or fallacy might be involved in the assertion that the contents of any thought must be a truth for all intellect; but no paralogism could be involved in the assertion that thought itself is the truth for all intellect, because thought and intellect are one. Here, to speak the language of modern philosophy, the object thought of and the thinking subject are the same, and that interval between the two does not exist which Scepticism represents as an impassable gulf separating reason from the truth.
11. Thought, then, is the truth, the unity in all things, the only absolute and assured reality in the
