Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/249

 the principle of activity and motion. God conceived as a perfect type of which the human soul is a copy, the infinite and universal Soul, is the third hypostasis. God conceived as absolute, eternal, simple, motionless Thought, superior to space and time, is the second hypostasis." But soul and thought and being are terms relative to the human mind. "God is above thought, above Being: He is, therefore, indivisible and inconceivable. He is the One, the Good, grasped by Ecstasy. This is the third hypostasis." M. Saisset continues: "Such are the three terms which compose this obscure and profound Trinity. Human reason, reason still imperfectly free from the meshes of sense, stops with the conception of the Universal Soul, the active principle of motion; the reason of the Philosophers rises higher, to the Motionless Intelligence, the depository of the essences and types of all things; it is love and ecstasy alone that can carry us to the conception of Absolute Unity."

Almost the only thing that is easy to understand in the Neo-Platonic theology is its adoption of the conceptions of various schools of Greek Philosophy. This Eclecticism has a superficial resemblance to that of Plutarch: but it is Eclecticism formally enumerating and classifying its results, not harmonizing and unifying them. The third hypostasis is the [Greek: logos ho en tê hylê] of the Stoics; the second hypostasis is the Intelligence, the eternal, absolute, and motionless [Greek: Nous] of Aristotle, while the first has striking affinities with the Pythagorean One. But, by a forced process of interpretation, all the three Hypostases are found in Plato. In