414 CONSTITUTION OF THE INTELLECT. [CHAP. XXII. 



accordance with the Greek mind is preserved in the great Pla- 

 tonic antithesis of " being and non-being," the connexion of the 

 former with whatsoever is good and true, with the eternal ideas, 

 and the archetypal world : of the latter with evil, with error, 

 with the perishable phenomena of the present scene. The two 

 forms of speculation which we have considered were here blended 

 together ; nor was it during the youth and maturity of Greek 

 philosophy alone that the tendencies of thought above described 

 were manifested. Ages of imitation caught up and adopted as 

 their own the same spirit. Especially wherever the genius of 

 Plato exercised sway was this influence felt. The unity of all 

 real being, its identity with truth and goodness considered 

 as to their essence ; the illusion, the profound unreality, of all 

 merely phaenomenal existence ; such were the views, such the 

 dispositions of thought, which it chiefly tended to foster. Hence 

 that strong tendency to mysticism which, when the days of re- 

 nown, whether on the field of intellectual or on that of social en- 

 terprise, had ended in Greece, became prevalent in her schools 

 of philosophy, and reached their culminating point among the 

 Alexandrian Platonists. The supposititious treatises of Dionysius 

 the Areopagite served to convey the same influence, much modi- 

 fied by its contact with Aristotelian doctrines, to the scholastic 

 disputants of the middle ages. It can furnish no just ground of 

 controversy to say, that the tone of thought thus encouraged was 

 as little consistent with genuine devotion as with a sober phi- 

 losophy. That kindly influence of human affections, that homely 

 intercourse with the common things of life, which form so large 

 a part of the true, because intended, discipline of our nature, 

 would be ill replaced by the contemplation even of the highest 

 object of thought, viewed by an excessive abstraction as some- 

 thing concerning which not a single intelligible proposition could 

 either be affirmed or denied.* I would but slightly allude to 

 those connected speculations on the Divine Nature which ascribed 



ties "warm," and "dry," and their contraries. It is characteristic that Plato 

 connects their generation with mathematical principles. Timceus, cap. xi. 



* Awroc Kai vTTtp Qkvw karl ical atyaiptatv.Dion. Areop. De Divinis No- 

 minibus, cap. ii. 



