Page:Life of plotinus by porphyry.pdf/20

 The two last were the most accomplished scholars of their time, Ammonius especially being unapproached in breadth of learning; but neither produced any systematic work; we have from them merely verses and duty-speeches; and these I cannot think to have been preserved with their consent; they did not concern themselves about formal statement of their doctrine, and it is not likely they would wish to be known in after times by compositions of so trivial a nature.

To return to the writers; some of them, like Euclides, Democritus and Proclinus, confined themselves to the mere compilation and transcription of passages from earlier authorities. Others diligently worked over various minor points in the investigations of the ancients, and put together books dealing with the same subjects. Such were Annius, Medius and Phoibion, the last especially choosing to be distinguished for style rather than for systematic thinking. In the same class must be ranked Heliodorus; his writings contribute nothing to the organisation of the thought which he found to his hand in the teaching of earlier workers.

Plotinus and Gentilianus Amelius alone display the true spirit of authorship; they treat of a great number of questions and they bring a method of their own to the treatment.

Plotinus, it would seem, set the principles of Pythagoras and of Plato in a clearer light than anyone before him; on the same subjects, Numenius, Cronius, Moderatus and Thrasyllus fall far short of him in precision and fulness. Amelius set himself to walk in Plotinus' steps and adopted most of Plotinus' opinions; his method, however, was diffuse and, unlike his friend, he indulges in an extravagance of explanation.

Only these two seem to me worth study. What profit can anyone expect from troubling the works of any of the others to the neglect of the originals on which they drew? Content with setting side by side the most generally adopted theories and marking off the better from the worse, they bring us nothing of their own, not even a novel argument, much less a leading idea.

My own method has been different; as for example when I replied to Gentilianus upon Plato's treatment of Justice and in a review I under-