s from darkness to the brightest light, by
advancing from places moderately enlightened, to such as are the
most luminous of all. It is necessary therefore, that we should
become very familiar with the most abstract contemplations; and
that our intellectual eye should be strongly irradiated with the light
of ideas which precedes the splendours of the beautiful itself, like
the brightness which is seen on the summit of mountains previous to
the rising of the sun. Nor ought it to seem strange, if it should be
some time before even the liberal soul can recognize the beautiful
progeny of intellect as its kindred and allies; for, from its union with
body, it has drunk deep of the cup of oblivion, and all its energetic
powers are stupefied by the intoxicating draught; so that the
intelligible world, on its first appearance, is utterly unknown by us,
and our recollection of its inhabitants entirely lost; and we become
familiar to Ulysses on his first entrance into Ithaca, of whom Homer
says,

"Yet had his mind, thro' tedious absence lost
The dear remembrance of his native coast".[2]

For,

"Now all the land another prospect bore,
Another port appeared, another shore,
And long-continued ways, and winding floods
And unknown mountains crowned with unknown woods":

until the goddess of wisdom purges our eyes from the mists of sense
and says to each of us, as she did to Ulysses,

"Now lift thy longing eyes, while I restore
The pleasing prospect of thy native shore."

For then will

" . . . . the prospect clear,
The mists disperse, and all the coast appear."

Let us then, humbly supplicate the irradiations of wisdom, and
follow Plotinus as our divine guide to the beatific vision of the
Beautiful itself; for in this alone can we find perfect repose, and
repair those destructive clefts and chinks of the soul which its
departure from the light of good, and its lapse into a corporeal nature,
have introduced.

But before I conclude, I think it necessary to caution the reader not
to mix any modern enthusiastic opinions with the doctrines
contained in the following discourse; for there is not a greater
difference between substance and shade than between ancient and
modern enthusiasm. The object of the former was the highest good
and supreme beauty; but that of the latter is nothing more than a
phantom raised by bewildered imaginations, floating on the unstable
ocean of o