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between the homoousian Trinity and the earth.[1] The moment Neoplatonism became obsolete as a visible creed, the Greek fathers did not recoil from giving a welcome acceptance to this gorgeous fabric, which in due time travelled westwards to be promulgated among the Gallic churches by the famous Scotus Erigena. Throughout the Middle Ages the spirit of the Alexandrian School was rife among the German mystics,[2] and later even among English Platonists.[3] Nor scarcely was it repressed in the nineteenth century until the growth of physical science and evolutionary philosophy gave a deathblow to the belief that knowledge could be drawn from our inner consciousness by processes of mental incubation in the closet.
- ↑ See Bigg's Neoplatonism, Lond., 1892, for a tabulated synopsis. There were also earthly triads, which included the sacraments and the various orders of priests, etc.
- ↑ Simon and Zeller stop short at the fall of the school of Athens, but Vacherot has devoted a third volume to tracing out the diffusion of Neoplatonic ideas in Western thought throughout the Middle Ages until recent times. Mystics such as Jacob Boehme, Molinos, Madame Guyon, etc. (Quietists), are connected with this stage of the fantasy.
- ↑ Cudworth, one of the "Cambridge Platonists," is the central figure of this group. In his True Intellectual System of the Universe (pp. 900, fol., 1678, an inceptive fragment of a larger(!) work never completed) he appears as a modern Plotinus labouring in the realm of metaphysics under the obsession of Hebrew and Orthodox mythology in which he had been nurtured, but in verbosity and expansiveness he well out-*distances his prototype. He is inclined to believe in ghosts, and thence to draw a theistic proof of the existence of a "supreme ghost," i.e. the Deity. See Tulloch's Rational Theology in England in 17th Century, 1874, ii, p. 240 et seq.
