himself
with locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of
affectations, almost like one of those light women there, dropped a
veil as it were, and appeared, though still permitting the play of a
certain element of theatrical interest in his bizarre tenets, to be
ready to explain and defend his position reasonably. For a moment his
fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal [87] vision seemed
to fall into some intelligible congruity with each other. In truth, it
was the Platonic Idealism, as he conceived it, which for him literally
animated, and gave him so lively an interest in, this world of the
purely outward aspects of men and things.--Did material things, such
things as they had had around them all that evening, really need
apology for being there, to interest one, at all? Were not all visible
objects--the whole material world indeed, according to the consistent
testimony of philosophy in many forms--"full of souls"? embarrassed
perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls? Certainly, the
contemplative philosophy of Plato, with its figurative imagery and
apologue, its manifold aesthetic colouring, its measured eloquence, its
music for the outward ear, had been, like Plato's old master himself, a
two-sided or two-coloured thing. Apuleius was a Platonist: only, for
him, the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of logical abstraction, but
in very truth informing souls, in every type and variety of sensible
things. Those noises in the house all supper-time, sounding through
the tables and along the walls:--were they only startings in the old
rafters, at the impact of the music and laughter; or rather
importunities of the secondary selves, the true unseen selves, of the
persons, nay! of the very things around, essaying to break through
their frivolous, merely transitory surfaces, to remind one of abiding
essentials beyond them, [88] which might have their say, their judgment
to give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and drinks at life's
table would be over? And was not this the true significance of the
Platonic doctrine?--a hierarchy of divine beings, associating
themselves with particular things and places, for the purpose of
mediating between God and man--man, who does but need due attention on
his part to become aware of his celestial company, filling the air
about him, thick as motes in the sunbeam, for the glance of sympathetic
intelligence he casts through it.

"Two kinds there