Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/85

No. 1.] Before closing this review, which has already surpassed ordinary space limits, it may not be inappropriate to remark that the writer is conscious that possibly it is somewhat unfair to oppose in a book review a radically different standpoint to a position developed at length in a treatise of such a comprehensive nature as Mr. Taylor's volume enjoys. By those who find themselves in fundamental agreement with the author's tenets, the work doubtless will be greeted as an important restatement of their own views. But however approached, it would seem, in the opinion of one reader at least, that the discussion is marred by a fatal gift of a certain kind of "cleverness," and also by a tortuous mode of treatment which becomes wearisome in its repetitions and qualifications.

The fashion of tracing everything that is significant in the intellectual life of Greece, whether in religion, art, or philosophy, to an Oriental or Egyptian origin became obsolescent with the dawn of modern historical criticism. The two German writers who made valiant attempts to rehabilitate the old way of looking at things gained some notoriety, but scarcely even a serious hearing of their claims. With respect to classical Greece, at least, the pendulum has swung to the extreme, and cautious writers are even chary in admitting that the tales of the travels of the philosophers have any foundation in fact. Neo-Platonism, however, has longest withstood this tendency. The reasons are obvious. The similarity of the mysticism, in which that philosophy culminates, with the mysticism of the East is most striking. An acquaintance, on the part of its representative thinkers, with the philosophies of the East was not only possible but highly probable. We know, at least, that Plotinus while living in Alexandria had heard enough about the philosophies of India and Persia to make him desirous of acquiring a more accurate and first-hand knowledge of them, and that, with that end in view, he joined the ill-fated expedition of the Emperor Gordian against Persia. We know that Plotinus's famous disciple Porphyry belonged to the Semitic race, and was a Greek only by adoption. Moreover, the attitude of resignation and detachment from the world required, in the full acceptance of mysticism and all that it logically implies, is foreign to the character of the independent, cheerful, freedom-loving