Eclecticism. The eclectic is a philosopher who, treading underfoot prejudice, tradition, age, universal agreement, authority, in short everything that subjugates the mass of minds, dares to think for himself, to go back to the clearest general principles, to examine them, discuss them, and admit nothing except on the testimony of his experience and his reason, and from all the philosophies which he has analysed without deference or partiality, creates an individual and private philosophy which is his own. I say an individual and private philosophy because the ambition of the eclectic is less to be the preceptor of humankind than its disciple; less to reform others than reform himself; to know the truth rather than to teach it. He is not a man who plants or sows; he is a man who gathers and sifts. He would peacefully enjoy the harvest he has reaped, he would live happily and die unknown, if enthusiasm, vanity or perhaps a more noble sentiment did not make him abandon that role.

The sectarian is a man who has embraced a philosopher’s doctrine; the eclectic, on the contrary, is one who recognizes no master. So when we say that the Eclectics were a sect of philosophers, we bring together two contradictory ideas, unless we also mean by the term sect a collection of a certain number of men who have but one common principle: that of not subjecting their understanding to anyone, of seeing with their own eyes, and of doubting something true rather than exposing themselves, for failure to examine, to accepting something false.

Eclectics and Sceptics have been alike in that they agreed with no one; the latter because they conceded nothing, the former because they conceded only a few points. If the Eclectics found in scepticism truths that they had to recognize, which even the Sceptics contested; on the other hand, the Sceptics were not divided amongst themselves, whereas an eclectic adopting fairly commonly from a philosopher what another eclectic rejected, his sect was like those religious sects where no two individuals have precisely the same way of thinking.

Sceptics and Eclectics could have taken for their common motto nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri ; [1] but the Eclectics, who, being less difficult than the Sceptics, took advantage of many ideas which the Sceptics disdained, would have added this further remark, by which they would have done justice to their adversaries without sacrificing the freedom of thought they so prized: nullum philosophum tam fuisse inanem qui non viderit ex vero aliquid . [2] If we reflect a little on these two kinds of philosophers, we will see how natural it was to compare them; we will see that, Scepticism being the touchstone of Eclecticism , the eclectic should always walk alongside the sceptic to pick up everything his companion did not reduce to useless dust by the severity of his attempts.

It follows from what precedes that Eclecticism was not, strictly speaking, a new philosophy, since there is no leader of a sect who has not been more or less eclectic; and since consequently Eclectics are among philosophers what sovereigns are on the face of the earth, the only ones who have remained in the state of nature where everything belonged to everyone. To form his system, Pythagoras got help from the theologians of Egypt, the gymnosophists of India, the artists of Phoenicia, and the philosophers of Greece. Plato enriched himself with the castoffs of Socrates, Heraclites, and Anaxagoras; Zeno pillaged Pythagorism, Platonism, Heraclitism, and Cynicism. All of them undertook long journeys. Now what was the purpose of these journeys, if not to ask questions of different peoples, to collect the truths scattered across the surface of the earth, and to return to their homelands filled with the wisdom of all nations? But as it is almost impossible for a man who, travelling through many countries, has encountered many religions, not to waver in his own, it is very difficult for a man of judgment who frequents several schools of philosophy to attach himself exclusively to some party and not to fall into either Eclecticism or Scepticism.

Eclecticism must not be confused with Syncretism. The syncretist is a true sectarian; he has enrolled beneath banners from which he hardly dares stray. He has a leader, whose name he bears: it might be, for example, Plato, or Aristotle, or Descartes, or Newton: no matter. The only freedom he reserves to himself is to modify the opinions of his master, to restrict or expand the ideas that he has received from him, to borrow others from elsewhere, and to prop up the system when it threatens ruin. If you imagine a poor, insolent individual who, unhappy with the rags that cover him, falls upon the best-dressed passers-by, ripping off the cloak of one, the overcoat of another, makes from these remnants a bizarre mixture of every color and piece, you will have a fairly precise symbol of the syncretist. Luther, the man I would willingly call magnus autoritatis contemptor osorque , was a true syncretist in matters of religion. It remains to be seen whether Syncretism of this sort is a virtuous action or a crime, and whether it is wise to abandon indistinctly the objects of reason and faith to the judgment of any mind.

Syncretism is at most an apprenticeship for Eclecticism . Cardan and Jordanus Brunus went no farther;  [3] if one had been more sensible, and the other bolder, they would have been the founders of modern Eclecticism . Chancellor Bacon had this honor because he felt, and dared say to himself, that nature had not been stingier to him than to Socrates, Epicurus, and Democritus, and that it had also given him a head. Nothing is so common as Syncretists; nothing is so rare as Eclectics. Someone who receives the system from another eclectic at once loses the name of eclectic . A few true eclectics have appeared from time to time; but the number of them has never been great enough to form a sect, and I can assure you that in the multitude of philosophers who have worn this name, one will count barely five or six who have deserved it. See the articles Aristotelianism, Platonism, Epicureanism, Baconism, etc.

The eclectic does not gather truths at random; he does not leave them in isolation; even less does he stubbornly try to make them square with some pre-determined plan. When he has examined and admitted a principle, the proposition that he looks into immediately afterwards is either evidently linked to that principle, or not at all, or is opposed to it. In the first case, he considers it true; in the second, he suspends judgment until intermediate notions that separate the proposition he is examining from the principle he has accepted show him its connection or opposition with that principle. In the latter case, he rejects it as false. That is the eclectic method. That is how he succeeds in shaping a solid whole, which is truly his own work, from a large number of parts he has assembled and which belong to others: from which we can see that Descartes, among the moderns, was a great eclectic.

Eclecticism , which had been the philosophy of fine minds since the birth of the world, only became a school with its own name towards the end of the second century and the beginning of the third. The only reason we can give for this is that until then the schools had, so to speak, succeeded in tolerating each other, and Eclecticism could hardly emerge except from their conflict, which took place when the Christian religion began to alarm all the others with the speed of its progress, and to repel them through an intolerance of which there was no example until then. Up to then, one had been Pyrrhonist, Skeptic, Cynic, Stoic, Platonist, or Epicurean without consequence. What a sensation must have been produced in the midst of these peaceful philosophers by a new school which set down as its first principle that outside its bosom there was no probity in this world or salvation in the next, because its morality was the only true morality, and its God the only true God! The rebellion of priests, the people, and philosophers would have been general, were it not for a small number of cold men, such as are found in every society, who long remain indifferent spectators, who listen, who weigh, who join no party, and who end up by creating a conciliatory system to which they flatter themselves that most will return.

Such was more or less the origin of Eclecticism . But by what inconceivable blunder did it happen that, by sharing a principle as wise as that of assembling from all the philosophers, Tros, Rutulusve fuat , [4] what could be found most compatible with reason, they neglected everything that should be chosen, chose everything that should be neglected, and formed the most monstrous system imaginable of extravagances, a system that lasted for over four hundred years, that even further flooded the surface of the earth with superstitious practices, traces of which remain that will perhaps be observed eternally in the popular prejudices of almost all nations. That is the singular phenomenon that we are about to analyse.

A general overview of Eclectic philosophy

Eclectic philosophy, which is also called reformed Platonism and Alexandrine philosophy , was born in Alexandria in Egypt, in other words at the center of superstitions. It was at first only syncretism of religious practices, adopted by the priests of Egypt, who being no less credulous under the reign of Tiberius than in the time of Herodotus, because the character of spirit that is imposed by the climate changes with difficulty, still had the ambition of possessing the most complete system of extravagances that existed in this genre. From there, this syncretism passed into ethics and the other parts of philosophy. The philosophers, enlightened enough to sense the weakness of different ancient systems, but too timid to give them up, sought only to reform them to suit the discoveries of the day, or rather to disfigure them to fit current prejudices: that is what was called to platonize, to pythagorize , etc.

Meanwhile Christianity was spreading, the gods of paganism were decried, and the ethics of philosophers was becoming suspect. People came in droves to the assemblies of the new religion; even the disciples of Plato and Aristotle let themselves sometimes be drawn in. Syncretic philosophers were aghast, their eyes turned with indignation and jealousy to the cause of a revolution that left their schools less frequented; a common interest united them with the priests of paganism, whose temples were emptier by the day. First they wrote against the person of Jesus Christ, his life, his conduct, his doctrine, and his miracles; but in this general line each invoked principles that were his own. One granted what the other denied; and it was easy for the Christians to place the philosophers in contradiction with each other and divide them: which did not fail to happen. The purely philosophical objects were then entirely abandoned; all minds aligned on the side of theological matters; an internecine war broke out in the bosom of philosophy. Christianity was not at peace within itself; a frenzy of applying philosophical notions to mysterious doctrines that did not permit their use, a frenzy conceived in the disputes of the schools, spawned a flood of heresies that tore the church apart. Meanwhile the blood of martyrs continued to bear fruit, the Christian religion to spread despite the obstacles, and philosophy constantly to lose credit. What decision did the philosophers then make? They introduced Syncretism into pagan theology, and to parody a religion that they could not snuff out. Christians recognized only one God; the Syncretists, who then called themselves Eclectics , admire only a first principle. The God of the Christians was in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Eclectics also had their Trinity: the first principle, divine understanding, and the soul of the intelligible world. The world was eternal, if one were to believe Aristotle; Plato said it had been engendered; according to the Christians, God had created it. The Eclectics made of it an emanation of the first principle; an idea that reconciled the three systems, and did not prevent them from claiming as before that nothing could be made from nothing. Christianity had angels, archangels, demons, saints, souls, bodies, etc. The Eclectics, from emanation to emanation, drew from the first principle as many corresponding beings as those: gods, demons, heroes, souls, and bodies; which they encapsulated in this memorable verse:

From there springs up an infinite abundance of beings of every kind . The Christians acknowledged the distinction of moral good and evil, the immortality of the soul, an afterlife, and punishments and rewards to come. The Eclectics conformed to their doctrine in all these points. Epicureanism was banished by common agreement, and the Eclectics retained from Plato the intelligible world, the sensible world, and the great revolution of souls through different bodies according to the good and bad use they had made of their faculties in the one they were leaving. According to them, the sensible world was but a painted canvas that separated us from the intelligible world; at death, the canvas fell, the soul took a step on its orbit, and found itself at a point nearer or farther from the first principle, into the bosom of which it entered in the end, when it had made itself worthy through theurgical and rational purifications. The idealists of our day are far from having pushed their extravagance as far as the Eclectics of the third and fourth centuries: the latter had come to accept exactly the existence of everything that is not, and to deny the existence of everything that is. Let the reader judge from these last words of the discussion between Eusebius and Julian: ὡς τα τα εἴη τὰ ὄντως ὄντα, αἱδὲ τὴν αἴσθησιν ἀπατ σαι μαγγανε αι καὶ γοητεύουσαι, θαυματοποι ν ἔργα : The only thing real is what exists by itself (or ideas); everything that strikes the senses is mere false appearance and the work of witchcraft, miracle, and imposture . The Christians had various cults. The Eclectics imagined the two theurgies; they supposed miracles; they had trances; they conferred enthusiasm as Christians conferred the Holy Spirit;  [5] they believed in visions, apparitions, exorcisms, and revelations, as the Christians believed in them; they practiced exterior ceremonies, such as there were in the Church; they allied the priesthood with philosophy; they addressed prayers to the gods; they invoked them, made sacrifices to them; they gave themselves up to all sorts of practices, which were only at first weird and extravagant, but did not take long to become criminal. When superstition seeks out the darkness and retreats to underground places to spill the blood of animals, it is not far from spilling more precious blood; when one has believed one could read the future in the entrails of a lamb, one soon convinces oneself that it is carved much more clearly in the heart of a man. This is what happened to the practical Theurgists; their minds went amok, their souls became fierce and their hands bloody. These excesses produced two opposite effects. Some Christians, seduced by the similarity between their religion and modern philosophy, misled by the lies the Eclectics told about the efficacy and the spells of their rites, but led on above all to this kind of superstition by a pusillanimous, curious, uneasy, ardent, hopeful, sad, and melancholic temperament, looked upon the doctors of the Church as ignorant in comparison to these, and rushed to their schools. Some Eclectics, on the contrary, who had a sound judgment, to whom all practical theurgy appeared as nothing more than a blend of absurdities and crimes, who saw nothing in the rational theurgy that was not forbidden in a much clearer, reasonable, and precise way in Christian ethics, and who, when they came to comparing the rest of speculative Eclecticism with the doctrines of our religion, did not think more favorably of the emanations of the theurgies, renounced that philosophy, and were baptized. Some convert, others became apostates and the assemblies of Christians and the schools of Paganism fill with renegades. The philosophy of the Eclectics gained less by it than the theology of the Christians lost: the latter became involved with sophistic ideas that were not easily banned by the authority that keeps watch unceasingly in the Church so that the purity of the doctrine should remain unalterable. Once the emperors had embraced Christianity, and public profession of pagan religion was forbidden, and the schools of Eclectic philosophy were closed, the fear of persecution was a further reason for the philosophers to bring their doctrine still closer to that of the Christians; they spared nothing to mislead both the Church Fathers and the rulers of the state with respect to their sentiments. They first gave the impression that the apostles had altered the principles of their leader; that despite this alteration, they differed less on the issues than on the way of stating them: Christum nescio quid aliud scripsisse, quam Christiani docebant, nihilque sensisse contra deos suos, sed eos potius magico ritu coluisse : [6] that Jesus Christ was certainly a great philosopher, and that it was not impossible that, initiated into all the mysteries of theurgy, he had performed the wonders that were related about him, since this extraordinary gift had not been refused to most of the Eclectics of the first order. Porphyry said: Sunt spiritus terreni minimi, loco quodam malorum daemonum subjecti potestati; ab his sapientes Hebraeorum quorum unus etiam iste Jesus fuit , [7] etc. They attributed this oracle to Apollo, questioned about Jesus Christ: θνητὸς ἔην κατὰ σάρκα, σοφὸς τερατώδεσιν ἔργοις : Mortalis erat, secundum carnem philosophus ille miraculosis operibus clarus . Severus Alexander placed Abraham, Orpheus, Apollonius, and Jesus among the number of individuals who were most respectable by their saintliness, inter animas sanctiores . Others never ceased to exclaim: Discipulos ejus de illo fuisse revera mentitos, dicendo illum Deum, per quem facta sunt omnia, cum nihil aliud quam homo fuerit, quamvis excellentissimae sapientiae . They added: Ipse vero pius, and in coelum sicut pii, concessit; ita hunc quidem non blasphemabis; misereberis autem hominum dementiam . [8] Porphyry was wrong: what inspires great pity in a philosopher is an eclectic such as Porphyry who is reduced to such extremities. Nevertheless, the eclectics succeeded by these oblique paths in misleading the Christians, and in obtaining a little more freedom from the government; the Church itself did not hesitate to raise Synesius, who openly recognized the notorious Hypatia as his philosophical mistress, to the episcopacy; in short, there was a time when the Eclectics had almost managed to pass themselves off as Christians, and when the Christians were not far from admitting they were Eclectics. It was then that Saint Augustine said of the philosophers: Si hanc vitam illi Philosophi rursus agere potuissent, viderent profecto cujus autoritate facilius consuleretur hominibus, et paucis mutatis verbis, Christiani fierent, sicut plerique recentiorum nostrorum que temporum Platoici fecerunt . [9] The illusion lasted all the longer since the Eclectics, pressed by the Christians, and wrapping themselves up in the distinctions of a highly subtle metaphysics to which they were accustomed, nothing was more difficult than to make them enter completely into the Church or to keep them clearly separate from it. They had so drawn out the quintessence of pagan theology that, prostrated at the feet of idols, they could not be convicted of idolatry; there was nothing they could not counter with their emanations. Were they or were they not materialists? That is something it is not so easy to decide even today. Is there anything more like Leibniz’s monads than the small intelligent spheres they called yunges : νοούμεναι ἴυγγες πατρόθεν νοέουσι καὶ αὐταὶ; βουλα ς ἀφθέγκτοις κινούμεναι, ὥστε νο σαι : Intellectae yunges a patre, intelligunt et ipsae, consiliis ineffabilibus motae, ut intelligant . That is the symbol of the elements of beings, according to the Eclectics; that is what everything is made of: the intelligible world, the sensible world, created spirits, and bodies. The definition they give of death has so much in common with Leibniz’s system of pre-established harmony that M. Brucker could not refuse to agree with it.  [10] Plotinus says: Man dies, or the soul is separated from the body, when there is no force left in the soul that attaches it to the body ; and this instant arrives, perdita harmonia quam olim habens, habebat et anima . And M. Brucker adds: en vero harmoniam praestabilitam inter animam et corpus jam Plotinuso ex parte notam .

One will be all the less surprised by these resemblances that one knows better the disorderly advance and the aberrations of poetic Genius, of Enthusiasm, of Metaphysics, and of the Spirit of system. What is talent for fiction in a poet if not the art of finding imaginary causes for real and specific effects, or imaginary effects for real and specific causes? What is the effect of enthusiasm in a man who is transported by it, if it is not to allow him to perceive relations between distant beings that no one has ever seen or supposed to be there? Where can a metaphysician not arrive who, giving himself up entirely to meditation, devotes himself profoundly to God, to nature, to space and time? To what result will a philosopher not be led who pursues the explanation of a natural phenomenon through a long string of conjectures? Who knows all the immensity of the terrain that these different minds have pounded, the infinite multitude of singular suppositions that they have made, the flood of ideas that have presented themselves to their understanding, which they have compared, and which they have striven to connect? I have heard one of our premier philosophers tell several times how, having long devoted himself to a natural phenomenon, he had been led by a very long succession of conjectures to such an extravagant and complicated systematic explanation of that phenomenon that he was long been persuaded that no other human mind had ever imagined anything comparable. He chanced, however, to find in Aristotle exactly the same result of ideas and reflections, the same system of unreason. If these encounters between Moderns and Ancients, between Poets both ancient and modern and Philosophers, and between Poets, and among the Philosophers themselves, are already so frequent, how much more common would examples not be if we had not lost any of the productions of antiquity, or if somewhere on earth there were a magic book we could still consult and in which all of men’s thoughts were engraved at the moment they existed in the understanding? The resemblance of the Eclectics’ ideas to those of Leibniz is therefore not a phenomenon that should be admitted without precaution, nor rejected without examination; and the only fair consequence that can be drawn from it, supposing this resemblance to be real, is that the men of one century differ little from the men of another century, that the same circumstances bring almost necessarily the same discoveries, and that those who came before us had seen many more things that we are generally disposed to believe.

After this general overview of Eclecticism , we shall now present an historical summary of the life and behavior of the principal philosophers of this school, and from there we will move on to a presentation of the fundamental points of their system.

History of Eclecticism

Eclectic philosophy was without a leader and without a name ( ἀκέφαλος καὶ ἀνώνυμος ) until Potamo of Alexandria. The story of Potamo is very confused; we are very uncertain about the time when he appeared, we know nothing of his life, and we know very little about his philosophy. Three writers have spoken of him: Diogenes Laertius, Suidas, and Porphyry. The latter says, speaking of Plotinus: His house was full of boys and girls. They were children of the most highly considered citizens by their birth and fortune. Such was the confidence they had in the intelligence and virtue of this philosopher that they all believed they could not do better in dying than to recommend to him the most precious thing they left behind on earth ; of this number was Potamo, whom he enjoyed listening to about a philosophy whose foundations he was casting, or a philosophy consisting of fusing several systems into one . ( Διὸ καὶ ἐπεπλήρωτο αὐτ ἡ οἰκία, παίδων κὰι παρθένων. ἐν τούτοις καὶ ν ὁ Ποτάμων, ο τ ς παιδεύσεως φροντίζων πολλάκις ἓν καὶ μεταποιο ντος ἠκροάσατο ). This passage of Porphyry is a logogryph: of this number ( ἐν τούτοις ) was Potamo. We do not know whether this relates to the fathers or to the children. If it is the fathers we should understand here, Potamo was a contemporary of Plotinus. If it was the children, he came after him. The rest of the passage presents no fewer difficulties: some read πολλάκις ἓν καὶ , which makes no sense; others, πολλάκις μὲν ou πολλὰ εἰς ἕν , which we have translated as whom he enjoyed listening to about a philosophy whose foundations he was casting, or a philosophy consisting of fusing several systems into one . Suidas says of his Potamo that he lived before and under the reign of Augustus ( πρὸ καὶ μετὰ Αὐγούστου ). In that case, either the author was mistaken on this occasion, as on many others, or the Potamo of whom he speaks is not the founder of the eclectic school, for Diogenes Laertius says of him that he had taken from each philosophy what he liked; that he had formed his philosophy, and that this eclecticism was quite new ( τι δὲ πρὸ ὀλίγου καὶ ἐκλεκτική τις αἵρεσις εἰσήχθη ὑπὸ ποτάμωνος το λεξανδρέως, ἐκλεξαμένου τὰ ἀρέσκοντα ἐξ ἑκάστης τ ν αἱρέσεων ). This is the passage we should rely on; it wins in clarity over that of Porphyry, and in authority over that of Suidas. Whence it follows that Potamo was born during the reign of Severus Alexander, and that his philosophy spread at the end of the second century and the beginning of the third. Indeed, if Eclecticism were prior to this period, how could it be that Galien, Sextus Empiricus, and above all Plutarch, who mentioned the most obscure of schools, say nothing about this one?

Potamo may have had as much sense as it took to cast the first foundations of Eclecticism , but he lacked both the impartiality necessary to making a good choice among the principles of the other philosophers, and personal qualities such as enthusiasm, eloquence, wit, and even a prepossessing appearance, without which it can be difficult to attract a large audience. He had, moreover, a predilection for Platonism that was incompatible with his system. He restricted himself entirely to purely philosophical matters; and thanks to the quarrels of the Christians and pagans, which were then more violent than they have ever been, religious matters alone were in vogue. Such were the main causes of the oblivion into which Potamo’s philosophy fell, and of how little progress it made.

Potamo maintained, in Metaphysics , that we have in our intellectual faculties a sure means of knowing the truth, and that self-evidence is the distinctive character of true things; in Physics , that there are two principles of the general production of beings, one passive, or matter; the other active, or any efficient cause that includes it. He distinguished, in natural bodies, between place and qualities, and he inquired of a substance, whatever it may be, what its cause was, what its elements were, what its constitution and its form were, and in what place it had been produced. He reduced all ethics to making man’s life as virtuous as possible, which, according to him, excluded the abuse, but not the use, of possessions and pleasures.

Ammonius Saccas, disciple and successor to Potamo, was from Alexandria. He professed the eclectic philosophy in the reign of Emperor Commodus. His education was Christian, but a decided taste for the reigning philosophy soon attracted him into the pagan schools. He had hardly taken his first lessons in Eclecticism than he felt that a religion like his was incompatible with this system. Christianity indeed suffers no exceptions. To reject one of its dogmas is to accept none of them. Ammonius became an apostate, and returned to the religion sanctioned by the laws, what they called τὴν κατὰ νόμος πολιτείαν , which is to say that precisely speaking he had none; for whoever when asked What is your religion , replies, the prince’s religion shows himself more courtier than monk. Ammonius the eclectic did not write, which sets him apart from Ammonius of Eusebius. He imposed utter silence on his followers about the nature and object of his teaching. He feared lest disputes which would not fail to arise between his disciples and the other philosophers increase the contempt for philosophy and the scandal of small minds, which conforms perfectly with what we read of him in Hierocles: Cum hactenus magnæ inter platoicos et aristotlelicos, caeterosque philosophos exstitissent contentiones, quorum in sania eo usque erat provecta, ut scripta quoque præceptorum suorum depravarent, quo magis viros hos inter se pugnantes sisterent, æstu quodam raptus ad philosophiam Ammonius, vir θεοδίδακτος , rejectis, quæ philosophiæ contemtui erant and opprobrio, opinionum dissentionibus , perpurgatisque and resectis, quæ utrinque excreverant nugis, in præcipuis quibusque et maxime necessariis doctrinetibus concordem esse Platonis et Aristotlelis philosophiam demonstravit, sicque philosophiam a contentionibus liberam suis discipulis tradidit . Ammonius therefore said to his disciples: “Let us first separate ourselves from those idle listeners from whom we can expect no help in the search for truth; they have entertained themselves long enough with Aristotle and Plato; let us meditate in silence on those preceptors of humankind. Let us devote ourselves particularly to what can extend the mind, purify the soul, raise man above his condition, and make him more like the immortals. May these fecund sources of doctrine make us neither scorn nor neglect others from whom we would hope to draw one more drop of solid instruction. Everything good that men have produced is ours. If the intolerant sect that persecutes us today can procure for us some insight about God, about the origin of the world, the soul, its present condition, its state to come, about moral good and evil, let us profit from them. Would we be shy to accept principles that would tend to make us better because they were contained in the books of our enemies? But above all, let us commit to revealing our philosophy to those men whom the torrent of new superstition sweeps along only when they are capable of benefitting from it. Let us so swear in the face of heaven.” This conciliatory, peaceful, and secret philosophy, which imposed a rigorous silence upon itself, and which was always ready to listen and learn, was extremely congenial to reasonable men. It was also favored by the government, which asked nothing better than to see minds gravitate in this direction: not that it was very much concerned about one sect prevailing over some other one, but it was not unaware that all who entered into the school of Ammonius were lost to the school of Jesus. Ammonius had a large number of disciples. They maintained, at least during their master’s life, such religious silence about his doctrine such that we could only speak of it by conjecture. Yet as Ammonius intended to give Eclecticism all possible favor, it is certain that he had some indulgence for the dominant taste of his times, and that his teachings were admixed with theology and philosophy. This monstrous mixture subsequently produced the worst possible effects. Under Ammonius’s successors Eclecticism degenerated into an abominable theurgy. It was no longer anything but an extravagant ritual of exorcisms, incantations, evocations, and nocturnal, superstitious, underground, and magical operations; and his disciples were less philosophers than sorcerers.

Dionysius Longinus, that famous rhetorician who left us a treaty on the sublime, was one of the philosophers of the school of Ammonius. Longinus travelled; his travels were much in the spirit of the Eclectic school. He consulted orators, philosophers, grammarians, and all who in his time had some reputation in letters. He would have been known as a great philosopher if he had not been the world’s first philologist; but he so excelled in letters that no one speaks of him as a philosopher. Eunapius still presents him to us as a man profoundly versed in history. He calls him βιϐλιοθήκην τινὰ ἔμψυχον, living library , praise that has since been given to so many others. Among his disciples were Porphyry and Zenobia, queen of the Orient. The honor of teaching philosophy and letters to a queen cost him his life. Zenobia, sole mistress of the throne of the Palmyrenes after the murder of her husband Odaenathus, invaded Egypt and several provinces of the empire. Aurelian marched against her, defeated her, and took her prisoner. Longinus, suspected of having given Zenobia bad counsel, was condemned to death by the emperor. He learned the order of his execution stolidly, and made use of the art in which he excelled to lift the courage of his accomplices and detach them from life. He had written a good deal; the fragments of his treatise on the sublime that have come down to us are enough to show us the temper of his mind.

Herennius and Origen are the two Eclectics of the school of Ammonius whom the history of the school provides to us immediately after Longinus. Of Herennius we know only one thing, which is that he was the first to violate the secret that he had sworn to Ammonius, and led Origen and Plotinus by his example to divulge the eclectic philosophy. This Origen [11] is not the same as the Origen of the Christians. The eclectic died at the age of seventy, soon before the end of the reign of the emperors Gallus and Volusianus.

And now to one of the most famous defenders of the Ammonian school, Plotinus. Porphyry, his co-disciple and friend, left us his life. But what faith can we put in the story of a man whose purpose was to treat Plotinus in parallel with Jesus Christ, and who was so unphilosophical as to imagine that he would put them at the same level in the memory of men by attributing miracles to Plotinus? If we did justice to Porphyry over this miserable fraud, far from giving credence to Plotinus’s miracles, we would see his historian, despite all the violence which we know him to have unleashed against the Christian religion, as not at all persuaded of the falsity of the miracles of Jesus Christ. Plotinus was born in one of the two cities in Egypt called Lycopolis, in the thirteenth year of the reign of Severus Alexander, and committed himself to the study of philosophy at the age of twenty-eight. He followed the most famous teachers in Alexandria; but he left their schools greatly unsatisfied. He was a melancholic and superstitious man; and as the philosophers he had listened to attached little importance to the mysteries of his country, he regarded them as men who promised wisdom without possessing it. His disappointment in their principles led him to the school of Ammonius. Hardly had he heard him discoursing on the great principle and its emanations than he cried out: This is the man I was looking for . He studied under Ammonius for eleven years. He decided to leave his school only to travel in India and Persia, and to learn in greater depth about the mystic reveries and theurgical operations of the Magi and the Gymnosophists, for he took these things as the only real science. A circumstance that he looked upon as favorable to his purpose was the departure of the emperor Gordian on his expedition against the Parthians; but Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia, and our philosopher risked losing his life several times before he got back to Antioch. From Antioch he went to Rome. He was then forty years old. He found himself on a grand stage; nothing prevented him from appearing on it except the oath he had sworn to Ammonius. The indiscretion of Herennius lifted this obstacle; Plotinus, believing himself freed from his oath by Herennius’s betrayal, publicly professed Eclecticism for ten years, but only aloud, without dictating a thing. He was questioned and he responded. With this manner of philosophizing becoming more boisterous by the day, because of the disputes it provoked among his disciples, and more wearisome for him because of the need it created for him to reply to the same questions at every moment, he decided he would write. He began in the first year of Galian, and by the tenth he had composed twenty-one works on various subjects. They could not easily be obtained: in order to preserve still some vestiges of the philosophic discipline of Ammonius, they were communicated only to well-tested students, only to eclectics of sound judgment and advanced age. It was, as we shall see later, everything that can be the most torturous and obscure in Metaphysics and most subtle and arduous in Dialectics, a little bit of ethics and a good deal of fanaticism and theurgy. But if there is little danger in reading Plotinus, there was much in listening to him. The presence of a large audience raised his spirit; his bile flared up; he saw things on a grand scale; people let themselves be led on gradually and enthralled by the power of the ideas and images he deployed in abundance; they shared his enthusiasm; and as they judged the truth and beauty of what they had just heard by the violence of the emotion it had given them, they came home convinced that Plotinus was the greatest man in the world. And indeed his was a mind of the caliber of our Cardans, our Kirchers, and our Malbranches, of those men less useful than rare: Quorum ingenium miro ardore in flammatum, et nescio qua ambitione ductum, sese judicii habenis coerceri ægre fert et indignatur; qui objectorum magnitudine capti et abrepti sibi sæpe ipsi non sunt præsentes; ex horum numero qui non quid dicant sentiantve perpendunt, sed cogitationum vividissimarum fertilissimarumque fluctibus obvoluti, amplectuntur, quidquid æstuanti imaginationi occurrit altum, singulare et ab aliis diversum, fundamento fulciatur aliquo vel nullo, dummodo mentilus aliorum attonitis offeratur aliquid portentosum et enorme . [12] That is what Plotinus possessed to a surprising degree; his mien also was imposing and noble. All the movements of his soul were painted on his face, and when he spoke there emanated from his gaze, from his gesture, from his action and from his whole person a persuasion that was difficult to resist, especially by someone who already had some natural disposition to enthusiasm. That is what happened to a certain Rogatian: the speeches of Plotinus so went to his head that he abandoned all care for his affairs, dismissed his servants, scorned the dignities for which he was destined, and fell into an appalling poverty, but in the midst of which he had the good fortune to maintain his frenzy.

With such qualities as history concedes to Plotinus, one does not want for disciples. He indeed had many, among whom some women are named. His virtues brought him the consideration of the most distinguished citizens; on their death beds they entrusted to him their wealth and the education of their children. For twenty-six years he lived in Rome, and was the arbiter of a great number of disputes, which he resolved with such equity that even those he condemned became his friends. He was honored by the great. The emperor Galian and his wife Salonina made him very special. He never asked them for anything but one favor which he did not obtain, which was sovereignty over a small town in Campania that had been ruined, and the small territory in its dependency. The town was to be called Platonopolis or the city of Plato . Plotinus pledged to withdraw there with his friends and there to realize Plato’s republic. But what happened then still would happen today: the courtiers ridiculed the project, described Plotinus as a kind of madman, disparaged him to the emperor and prevented a very interesting experiment from being attempted.

This philosopher had a hard life, as befitted a man who considered himself in exile in this world and his body as the prison of his soul. He professed philosophy unrelentingly; he abused his health too much to be well, and cared about it too little to call the physician when he was not well. He died from an inflammation of the chest at the age of 66, in the second year of the reign of the emperor Claudius. He said as he was dying: Equidem jam enitor quod in nobis divinum est, ad divinum ipsum quod viget in universo, adjungere : “I strive to return to the soul of the world the divine particle that I hold separated from it.” He accepted metempsychosis as a means of purifying oneself, but he died convinced that his soul had become so pure through the constant study of Philosophy that it was going to re-enter the bosom of God without undergoing any further trial. His philosophy was generally adopted, and the school of Alexandria saw him as its leader, although Ammonius and Potamo were his predecessors.

Amelius, successor of Plotinus, had spent his early years under the tutorship of the Stoic Lysimachus. He then joined with Plotinus. He labored for twenty-four years at untangling the chaos of half-philosophical, half-theurgical ideas of that virtuous and singular fanatic. He wrote a good deal, and had his works served only to reconcile Porphyry with the Eclecticism of Plotinus, they would have contributed something to the school’s progress.

Porphyry, that famous enemy of the name of Christian, was born in Tyre in the twelfth year of the reign of Severus Alexander; 233 years after the birth of Jesus he became an apostate for a beating given him unadvisedly by some Christians. He studied in Athens under Longinus, who called him Porphyry ; Malchus, his surname, seemed too harsh to the rhetor’s ear. Malchus or Porphyry was then 18 years old; he was already highly versed in philosophy and letters. At the age of 20, he came to Rome to study philosophy under Plotinus. Extreme sobriety, late nights, and continual disputes overheated him and turned his mind toward enthusiasm and melancholy. I will observe here in passing that in poetry, painting, eloquence, or music it is impossible to produce anything sublime without enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a violent movement of the soul by which we are transported into the midst of the objects that we have to represent; then we see an entire scene unfold in our imagination, as if it were outside us: that is indeed where it is, for as long as that illusion lasts, all present beings disappear, and our ideas are realized in their place; it is our ideas alone we perceive, yet our hands touch bodies, our eyes see animated beings, our ears hear voices. If this state is not madness, it is very close to it. That is the reason one needs great good sense to counterbalance enthusiasm. Enthusiasm only exerts its attraction when minds have been prepared and subjected by the force of reason; it is a principle which poets must never lose sight of in their inventions, and which eloquent men have always observed in their oratorical movements. If enthusiasm predominates in a work, it extends over all its parts something gigantic, incredible, and enormous. If it is the habitual attitude of the soul, and the acquired or natural tendency of the character, one’s discourse is alternately demented and sublime; one is capable of acts of strange heroism, signs all at once of the grandeur, force, and disorder of the soul. Enthusiasm takes a thousand different forms: one person sees the heavens open overhead, another the underworld open underfoot; another thinks he is in the midst of celestial spirits, hears their divine concerts, and is transported by them; another speaks to the Furies, sees their lighted torches, and is struck by their cries; they pursue him; he flees in terror before them. Porphyry was not far from this enchanted or fearsome state when Plotinus, who was following his tracks, caught up to him. He was seated at the point of the promontory of Marsala. He was weeping; his chest was heaving deep sighs; his eyes were fixed on the waters; he refused the food that was offered to him; he feared a man’s approach; he wanted to die. He was having an attack of enthusiasm, which magnified the miseries of human nature in his imagination, and represented death as the greatest happiness of a being that thinks, feels, and is unhappy enough to be alive. Thereupon, another enthusiast: it’s Plotinus, who, strongly struck by the danger in which he saw his disciple and friend, experienced on the spot another attack of enthusiasm that saved Porphyry from the tranquil and dull fury that possessed him. What is strange is that Porphyry thought himself a sensible man; listen to him: Studium nunc istud, o Porphyri, tuum, non sanae mentis est, sed animi atrabile furentis . [13] Would a third person who had been the dispassionate witness to the bizarre action and bombastic tone of Plotinus not have been tempted to echo his apostrophe to him, and to say, imitating his action and bombast: Studium nunc istud, o Plotinuse, tuum, honestæ revera mentis est, sed animi splendida bile furentis ? Besides, if a fit of enthusiasm can be repressed, it is by another fit of enthusiasm. True eloquence in such a case would be weak and cold and have no effect; it takes a more violent shock, and being shaken by a more analogous voice. Porphyry, madly persuaded that Christianity makes men wicked and miserable (wicked, he said, by endlessly multiplying duties and by perverting the priority order of duties; miserable, by filling their souls with remorse and terror), wrote fifteen books to undeceive them. I do fear that Theodosius did them too much honor with the edict that suppressed them, and I would almost dare assert, based on the fragments still extant of the Fathers who refuted him, that there was much more eloquence and enthusiasm than good sense and philosophy in them. It has seemed to me that enthusiasm was an epidemic illness peculiar to those times, which had not entirely spared the men most respectable for their talent, their knowledge, their station, and their conduct. A person thought he had replied to Porphyry when he had said to him that he was the intimate friend of the devil ; another adopted, without realising it, Porphyry’s tone in calling him impious, a blasphemer, mad, a libeller, impudent , and sycophantic . The cause of Christianity was too good, and the Fathers had too many reasons to store up so many offenses. This will not be the only place in this article where we will be called on to note, for the consolation of weak souls and our own, that in the greatest saints, man always shows through somewhere. Porphyry lived much longer than could be expected of a man of his character: he reached the age of 72 and did not die until 305 CE.

Iamblichus, disciple of Porphyry, was one of the leading lights of the Alexandria school. Paganism was everywhere threatened with ruin when this theurgist philosopher appeared; he fought for his gods, and did not fight without success. The almost universal aversion of Eclectic philosophers for Christianity, and their stubborn attachment to idolatry, is a remarkable thing. Could there be a more ridiculous system than that of mythology? If it was natural for the sacrifice required in the Christian religion — of the mind of man by mysteries, of his body by fasts and mortification, of his heart by a complete abnegation of himself — to estrange carnal men and proud reasoners; was it natural for a Potamo, an Ammonius, a Longinus, a Plotinus, a Iamblichus, to close their eyes to the absurdities of the Jupiter story, or not to notice them? Iamblichus was from Chalcis, a city in Coele-Syria; he was descended from an illustrious family: his tutor was Anatolius, a philosopher of a merit scarcely inferior to Porphyry. He had a mild character, a little reserved, opening up only to his disciples; less eloquent than Porphyry, and eloquence must not have counted lightly in schools where one particularly professed theurgy, a system to which it was impossible to land some seductive colors without the help of the sublime and enthusiasm. Still he did not lack an audience, but he owed it less to his knowledge than to his affability. He was light-hearted with his friends and had the same effect on them; those who had once felt the charm of his society could no longer do without it. History has told us nothing about our mystics that we do not find in the history of Iamblichus. He had trances, his body rose above the ground during his conversations with the gods; his clothes glowed with light, he predicted the future, he commanded demons, he called up genies from the depths of the waters. Iamblichus wrote much; he left us the life of Pythagoras, an exposition of his theological system, exhortations to the study of Eclecticism , a treatise on the mathematical sciences, a commentary on the arithmetical institutions of Nicomachus, an exposition of the Egyptian mysteries. Among these works were many in which one would have difficulty recognizing a presumptive miracle-worker; but who would recognise Newton in a commentary on the Revelation? And who would believe that that man who gathered all of London into a church to witness resurrections that he seriously promised to perform is the geometer Fatio? [14] Iamblichus died in 333 CE during the reign of Constantine. The conversion of this prince to the Christian religion was a fatal event for Philosophy: the temples of paganism were overturned, the doors of the Eclectic schools closed, the philosophers dispersed; it even cost the lives of some of those who dared to brave the conjunctures.

Such was the fate of Sopater, disciple of Iamblichus. He was from Apamea, a city in Syria; Eunapius speaks of him as man who was eloquent in his writings and speech. He adds that the breadth of his knowledge had earned him among the Greeks the reputation of major philosopher of his time ( τὸν ἐπισημότατον τότε παρ’ λλησιν ἐπὶ παιδεύσει γεγενημένον ). That is the fact such as we read it in Eunapius. In ancient times, Constantinople or Byzantium (since it is the same city with two different names) supplied Attica with food, and it is incredible the amount of grain that this Greek province obtained from it; but it happened in those times that the vessels that came laden from Egypt, and all the provisions they got from Syria, from Phoenicia, from all of Asia, and from a multitude of other regions that fed the empire, could not meet the needs of the innumerable mass of prisoners that the emperor had gathered in Byzantium, and this for the puerile vanity of gleaning greater applause at the theatre: and of what sort, and from what people? From a population full of wine, from men whose drunkenness did not allow them either to speak or to stand upright, from barbarians and foreigners who scarcely knew how to pronounce his name. But such was the situation of the port of Constantinople that, surrounded by mountains, there was only one wind that favored entrance; and that wind, having ceased to blow, and suspended for too long the arrival of foodstuffs in a conjuncture in which the city, which overflowed with inhabitants, had a pressing need of it, famine made its appearance. People went hungry to the theatre, and as there were hardly any people drunk, there was little applause, to the great surprise of the emperor, who had not assembled so many mouths to have them remain silent. The enemies of Sopater and the philosophers, keen to seize every opportunity to do them disservice and bring about their ruin, believed they had found a highly favorable one in this contretemps: It’s that Sopater , they said to the credulous emperor, this man on whom you have showered so many benefits, and who has managed by his politics to sit beside you on the throne; he is the one who, through the secrets of his malicious philosophy, holds the winds enchained, and opposes your triumph and your glory, while he seduces you by the false praise that he lavishes on you . The irritated emperor ordered the death of Sopater, and the unfortunate philosopher fell on the spot from the blow of an axe. Alas, he had come to court for the purpose of defending the cause of the philosophers, and to halt, if possible, the persecution being exercised against them. He had presumed some success from the force of his eloquence and the uprightness of his intentions, and indeed he had succeeded beyond his expectations: the emperor had admitted him to his circle of favorites, and the philosophers were beginning to win some credit at court, the courtiers to take alarm at it, and the intolerant to complain. These had apparently already made themselves fearsome to the prince himself, whom they had won over to their views, since it seems that Sopater was a victim he sacrificed despite himself in order to quell the murmurs that were beginning to mount. “To dissipate the suspicions they could have that he who had favorably welcomed a hierophant, a theurgist, was an equivocal neophyte, he decided (says Suidas) to have the philosopher Sopater put to death,” ut fideri faceret se non amplius religioni gentili addictum esse . Ablabius, a vile courtier of no birth, no soul, no virtues, one of those men made to capture the favor of the great by all manner of means, and then to dishonor them with the poor advice they give in exchange for the benefits they receive from them, had become jealous of Sopater, and it was this jealousy that accelerated the philosopher’s doom. Why must it be that so many kings are always commanding, and never reading!

Aedesius was from Cappadocia; his family, though it had standing, was not opulent. He devoted himself to the study of philosophy in Athens, where he had been sent to learn some lucrative art: it was as poor a fulfillment as possible of his parents’ intentions, who would have traded every book of Plato’s Republic for a gold coin. Yet his wisdom, his moderation, his respect, his patience, and his discourse ultimately reconciled his father to philosophy; the good fellow accepted at last that a science that made his son happy without wealth was preferable to wealth that had never brought anyone happiness without that science. The reputation of Iamblichus attracted Aedesius to Syria; Iamblichus cherished him, taught him, and gave him the great gift, the gift par excellence: the gift of enthusiasm. The Theurgists could not give better evidence of their immense consideration for the Christian religion than to make a point of copying it in everything. The Apostles had conferred the Holy Spirit, or that divine quality by virtue of which one powerfully persuades others of something of which one is powerfully persuaded; the Eclectics parodied these effects with their enthusiasm. Meanwhile the persecution that the emperor was exercising against philosophers increased by the day. Aedesius, appalled, had recourse to the operations of theurgy to be enlightened about his fate: the gods promised him either the greatest reputation if he remained in society, or a wisdom making him equal to gods if he withdrew from the company of men. Aedesius was prepared to choose the latter path, when his disciples assembled in tumult, surrounded him, pleaded with him, begged him, threatened him, and prevented him from going, by fear unworthy of a philosopher, to retreat to the depths of a forest, and deprive men of the examples of his virtue and the precepts of his philosophy at a time when superstition, they said, was advancing rapidly and taking with it the multitude of minds. Aedesius set up his school in Pergamon. Julian consulted him, honored him with his esteem, and lavished gifts on him. The promise of the gods he had consulted was fulfilled: his name spread throughout Greece; people came to Pergamon from all the surrounding regions. He had a particular talent for humiliating proud and transcendent minds and encouraging weak and timid ones. Artists’ workshops were the places he preferred to frequent when his school let out, which proves that enthusiasm and theurgy had not quenched in him the taste for useful knowledge. He professed philosophy into very old age.

Eustathius, disciple of Iamblichus and Aedesius, was an eloquent and gentle man about whom much foolishness has been uttered. The same goes for Sosipatra. Some old men asked her father for her, and proved to him by miracles that he could not in all conscience refuse to give her up; the father let the girl go, the old men took her over, initiated her into all the mysteries of Eclecticism and theurgy, conferred on her the gift of enthusiasm, and disappeared, without anyone ever knowing what became of them. The same goes for Antoninus, Sosipatra’s son: I will note about him only that he performed no miracles, because the emperor did not like for philosophers to do that. There was a moment when his fear came close to doing what should have been expected from common sense, which was to separate Philosophy from Theurgy, and to relegate the latter to fortune-tellers, street artists, petty thieves, and magicians. Eusebius of Myndus in Caria, who then appeared on the scene, distinguished the two kinds of purifications that Eclectic philosophy recommended equally: one he called theurgical , and the other rational , and undertook seriously to decry the first; but minds were too infected with it; it was too fine a thing to communicate with the gods, to have devils at one’s command, to summon them with incantations, or to rise to their level in a trance, for anyone to undeceive men easily of a science that claimed such marvellous prerogatives. If there was a man then with whom Eusebius’s philosophy should have succeeded, it was the emperor Julian; yet that did not happen: Julian left this sensible philosopher to give himself over to the two most violent theurgists that the eclectic movement had yet produced, Maximus of Ephesus and Chrysanthius.

Maximus of Ephesus was born of noble and wealthy parents; he therefore had to dash the most flattering expectations in order to devote himself to Philosophy: that is courage too rare for us not to give him credit for it. No one was ever more obviously called to Theurgy and Eclecticism if we regard eloquence as characteristic of the vocation. Maximus always appeared stirred by the presence of some inner demon; he put such force into his thought, so much energy into his expression, so much nobility and grandeur into his images, ineffably striking and sublime, even in his unreason, that he stifled his listeners’ freedom to contradict him: he was Apollo on his tripod, mastering souls and commanding minds. He was a scholar; deep and varied knowledge furnished inexhaustible sustenance to his enthusiasm. His master was Aedesius, and Julian his disciple. He accompanied Julian on his Persian expedition: Julian perished, and Maximus fell into a deplorable state, but his soul always showed itself superior to adversity. Valentinian and Valens, stirred up by the Christians, had him bound in chains and thrown into a dank cell; he was taken out only to be displayed at the theatre, where he appeared with steadfastness. He was charged; he replied without losing his respect for the emperor or his self-respect. They tried to make him responsible for everything that was reproached in Julian’s conduct; he induced the emperor himself to reject this accusation: If it is allowed , he said, to accuse a subject of all the evil his sovereign may have done, why should he not be praised for all the good he has done? They wanted him undone, but surprisingly they did not manage it. Since he could not be convicted, he was set free; but as they were persuaded he had used his influence with Julian to amass wealth, he was sentenced to an exorbitant fine that was reduced to very little, since those who were charged with pursuing payment found nothing belonging to our philosopher except his knapsack and his staff. The presence of a man who had been so wronged was too nagging to be suffered; Maximus was relegated to the heart of Asia, where greater misfortunes awaited him. The implacable hatred of his enemies followed him there; he had hardly arrived at his place of exile than he was seized, imprisoned and delivered to the inhumanity of those men justice employs to torture the guilty, and who, bribed by his persecutors, invented new trials for him: they made him the object by turns of their brutality and their fury. Maximus, weary of life, asked his wife for poison; she did not hesitate to bring him some, but before handing it to him she took most of it herself and fell dead; Maximus survived her. When we read the life of this philosopher, we look for the cause of his new misfortunes, and find none other than his having displeased the defenders of certain dominant opinions: an awesome lesson for philosophers, reasoning people who have been and will be suspect to them at all times. Providence, which seemed to have forgotten Maximus since the death of Julian, finally looked with pity on this wretched man. Clearchus, a good man, whom by chance Valens had named a prefect in Asia, on his arrival in his province found the philosopher exposed on a trestle, and about to die in anguish. He flew to his rescue, liberated him, obtained for him all the care that it was urgent to give him in the deplorable state to which he had been reduced; he welcomed him, admitted him to his table, reconciled him with the emperor, and subjected his enemies to the same sufferings inflicted on him. He re-established him on what little fortune he owed to the commiseration of his friends and family; to that he added gifts, and sent him back in triumph to Constantinople, where the general consideration of the people and of the great seemed to assure him of at least some tranquillity for the last years of his life; but it was not to be. Malcontents formed a conspiracy against Valens; Maximus was not of their number, but he had unfortunately had old ties to most of them. He was suspected of having known of their plan; his enemies whispered to the emperor that he had been consulted in his capacity as theurgist, and the proconsul Festus was ordered to arrest him and put him to death, which was done. Such was the tragic end of one of the most able and honest men of his times, who could be reproached only for his enthusiasm and his theurgy. Festus did not long survive him: his mind was touched; he thought he saw Maximus in a dream dragging him by the hair before the judges of the underworld. That dream followed him everywhere; he lost his mind completely, and died insane. The people, forgetting the cruel downfalls to which the gods had abandoned Maximus during his life, looked upon the death of Festus as an impressive example of their justice. Festus was odious; Maximus was no longer; the veneration in which he was held became all the greater: how could the people fail to see something supernatural about the proconsul’s dream, and a sudden death that strikes him without any visible cause in the midst of his prosperity? We are not generally well enough informed to know that a man threatened with sudden death senses from afar the warning signals of that event; these are dull attacks, which he neglects because he neither foresees nor fears what follows; there are passing shivers, vague apprehensions, weariness, agitation, spells of faintheartedness. If in the midst of these secret approaches a superstitious and wicked man should have his conscience laden with some atrocious and recent crime, he sees their objects, he is possessed by them; he takes this obsession as the cause of his ill feeling; and instead of calling the physician, he addresses the gods; meanwhile the seeds of death that he was carrying within him develop and kill him, and the imbecilic people proclaim a wonder. It is to insult the supreme being, it is even to expose oneself to doubting his existence, to seek in the afflictions and the prosperity of this world signs of justice or divine goodness. The wicked can have everything, except the favor of heaven.

Priscus, friend and fellow disciple of Maximus, was from Thesprotia. He had long studied the philosophy of the Ancients; he was in agreement with Eusebius of Myndus in looking upon theurgy as the shame of Eclecticism ; but born taciturn, introverted, an enemy of scholastic disputes, having of the common folk the opinion that one should have, which is to say not caring enough about them to tell them the truth, he was a man little apt to attract disciples to himself and to disseminate his opinions. This tranquil and retiring way of philosophizing cast on him a salutary obscurity; the enemies of philosophy forgot him. The other eclectics were reduced either to putting themselves to death or to being tortured to death; Priscus, unnoticed, tranquilly lived out his life in the empty temples of Paganism.

Chrysanthius, disciple of Aedesius and preceptor of Julian, combined the study of the art of oratory and that of philosophy. It is enough for oneself , he would say, to know the truth; but for others one must know how to state it and to make it appealing. Philanthropy is the distinctive character of the good man; he must not simply be good, but strive to make his fellow men better. Virtue does not dominate him powerfully enough if he can contain it within himself; when virtue has become a man’s passion, it fills his soul with a happiness he cannot hide and which the wicked cannot feign. It is the role of virtue to make genuine enthusiasts; virtue alone knows the value of possession, of dignities, and of life, since it alone knows when it is better to lose or to preserve them . The theurgy so fatal to Maximus served Chrysanthius usefully: he clung firmly to inspection of the victims and the rules of divination, which predicted the greatest misfortunes for him were he to quit his retreat; neither the insistence of Maximus nor the repeated invitations of the emperor, nor express deputations, nor the entreaties of a wife whom he dearly loved, nor the honors he was offered, nor the happiness he could expect could overcome those sinister premonitions and attract him to Julian’s court. Maximus left, determined , he said, to do violence to nature and to the fates . Julian took revenge on Chrysanthius’s refusal by granting him the pontificate of Lydia, where he exhorted him to restore the altars of the gods and to call back to their temples the peoples whom the zeal of his predecessors had driven off. Chrysanthius, philosopher and pontiff, conducted himself with such discretion in his delicate function that he did not arouse even the murmur of the intolerant, and thus he did not become enveloped in the troubles that followed Julian’s death. He remained isolated but in peace amidst the ruins of the Eclectic school and of paganism; he was even protected by the Christian emperors. He withdrew to Athens, where he showed that it was easier for a man like him to bear adversity than for most men to make good use of happiness. He spent his days honoring the gods, reading the ancient authors, inspiring interest in theurgy, Eclecticism , and enthusiasm in a small number of chosen disciples, and in writing works of philosophy. The tendons of his fingers had tensed from too much writing. Walking was his only relaxation; he would stroll along the spacious streets, slowly, gravely, while talking with his friends. He avoided the society of the great, not from contempt but from taste. He brought so much gentility and amenity to his intercourse with men that he was suspected of somewhat affecting these qualities. He spoke well; he was praised above all for knowing the proper tone to adopt. If he opened his mouth, everyone else held their peace. He was firm in his sentiments: those who did not know him well enough easily exposed themselves to contradicting him, but they were not long in sensing what kind of man they were dealing with. We would be surprised that, with these qualities of heart and mind, Chrysanthius should be one of paganism’s greatest defenders if we did not know how much the mystery of the Cross is a strange madness for arrogant minds. At the age of eighty he enjoyed such vigorous health that he had to be bled as a precautionary measure. [15] Eunapius was his physician; yet one of those bloodlettings imprudently performed in the absence of Eunapius cost him his life: he was seized with a cold and a languor in all his limbs, which Oribasius temporarily dissipated with warm compresses, but they soon returned and spirited him off.

Julian, the scourge of Christianity, the honor of Eclecticism , and one of the most extraordinary men of his era, was raised under the wing of the emperor Constantius. He learned grammar from Nicocles, and the art of oratory from Eubolius: his first masters were all Christians, and the eunuch Mardonius was their overseer. We are not concerned here with either the conqueror or the politician, but the philosopher. We will simply caution those who would like to form an accurate notion of his qualities, of his flaws, his projects, his break with Constantius, his expeditions against the Parthians, the Gauls, and the Germans; his return to the religion of his ancestors, his premature death, and the events of his life, to be equally wary of the praise that flattery has lavished on him in secular history, and of the calumnies that resentment has spewed against him in Church history. Here it is particularly important to follow a rule of criticism which in a multitude of other conjunctures would lead to the truth more surely than any testimony, which is to set aside what authors have written in the service of their passions and prejudices, and to examine by our own experience what is plausible. In order to judge with indulgence or severity Julian’s outlandish taste for the ceremonies of Paganism or Theurgy, it is not with the eyes of our own times that we must consider such things; we must instead transport ourselves to the emperor’s times, and to the midst of a crowd of great men, all enamored of these superstitious doctrines; to probe oneself and see impartially into one’s heart, whether one would have been wiser than he was. It was early feared that he would abandon the Christian religion; but they were far from foreseeing that the mediocrity of his masters would infallibly bring about his apostasy. Indeed, when the assiduous exercise of his natural talents had put him above his teachers, curiosity took him to the schools of the philosophers. His masters, tired of a pupil who burdened them, did not answer scrupulously enough to the confidence of Constantius. In Nicomedia he frequented that Libanius with whom the emperor had so expressly forbidden him to speak, and complained so bitterly about an interdiction that did not allow him, he said, to sow a single grain of good seed in a precious soil, the cultivation of which was being abandoned to a miserable rhetor because he had the petty, common talent of speaking ill of the gods . The disputes of the Catholics among themselves and with the Arians ultimately snuffed out in his heart what little Christianity the teaching of Libanius had not purged from it. He saw the philosopher Maximus. It is claimed that the emperor was not unaware of these ill-advised events, but that, Julian’s superior qualities beginning to worry him, he imagined, by a premonition that was only too accurate, that for the tranquillity of the empire and his own it was better for this ambitious mind to turn in the direction of Letters and Philosophy rather than government and public affairs. Julian embraced Eclecticism . How could he have resisted enthusiasm, with a bilious and melancholy temperament, an impetuous and overheated character, and the most spontaneous and ardent imagination? How could he have sensed all the puerilities of Theurgy and Divination when sacrifices, conjurations, and all the marvels of these sorts of doctrines never ceased to promise him sovereignty? It is indeed difficult to cast doubt on the principles of an art that calls us to rule an empire; and those who reflect carefully on the character of Julian, on that of his enemies, on the circumstances he was in, on the men around him, will perhaps be more surprised by his tolerance than by his superstition. Despite the fury of Paganism that possessed him, he did not spill a drop of Christian blood; and he would be beyond all reproach if, for a prince who commands men who think differently from him when it comes to religion, it had been enough for him to have none of them killed. The Christians asked Julian for full exercise of their religion, the freedom of their assemblies and their schools, participation in all the honors of society, of which they were useful and loyal members; and in this they were quite right. The Christians did not demand that he compel the pagans to give up the false gods by force; they were careful not to grant him that right; they reproached him, on the contrary, if not for violence, at least for the indirect and hidden paths he used to make Christians decide to renounce Jesus. Leave the work of God to itself, they would tell him; the laws of our Church are not the laws of the empire, nor are the laws of the empire the laws of our Church. Punish us if we should ever break those laws, but do not impose any yoke on our consciences. Put yourself in the place of one of your pagan subjects, and suppose in your place a Christian prince: what would you think of him if he used all the political resources to attract you into our temples? You do too much if equity does not authorize you; you do not do enough, if you have that authority behind you. However that might be, if Julian had reflected on what had happened to himself, he would have been convinced that instead of forbidding Christians to study, the best thing he could do was to open to them the schools of Eclecticism : they would infallibly have been attracted to them by the extreme conformity of the principles of that sect with the dogmas of Christianity; but it was not granted to him to set such a dangerous trap for Religion. The Providence that spread this spirit of darkness over its enemy protected Christianity in a no less striking way than when it brought out of the entrails of the earth the whirlwinds of flames that devoured the Jews whom he employed to dig the foundations of Jerusalem, whose temple and walls he proposed to raise again. Julian, again deceived in the malice of his projects, fulfilled the prophecy that he hoped to make false, and his hardening was his punishment and that of his accomplices. He persevered in his apostasy; the Jews he had assembled dispersed as before; Ammianus-Marcellinus, who passed this fact on to us, did not abjure paganism; and God so willed it that one of the greatest and most certain miracles ever to occur, which confounds the unhappy dialectic of the philosophers of our times, and which filled their unbelieving souls with anxiety, converted no one at the time it took place. A story is told about this superstitious emperor that, attending a conjuring of demons one day, he was so frightened at their apparition that he made the sign of the cross, and at once the demons vanished. I would be happy to ask a Christian whether he believes this fact or not; if he denies it, I will ask him again whether it is because he does not believe in demons, or because he does not believe in the efficaciousness of the sign of the cross, or because he does not believe in the efficaciousness of conjurations; but [if] he believes in demons, he cannot be sufficiently convinced of the efficaciousness of the sign of the cross; and why should he doubt the efficaciousness of conjurations, whereas the holy books give him several examples of it? He therefore cannot refuse to admit this fact about Julian, and consequently most of the marvels of Theurgy. And what reason would he have to deny these marvels? I confess, for myself, that I would not accuse a good dialectician well-informed of the facts of having too much confidence in his own abilities if he committed himself with Father Balthus [16] to demonstrating to the author of oracles, and to all those who think as he does, that one must either plunge into a general pyrrhonism about all supernatural facts, or concede the truth of several theurgical operations. We will not go on further about the history of Julian; what we could add of interest would be outside our subject. Julian died at the age of thirty-three. We must remember when reading his story that a great natural quality takes the name of a great vice or a great virtue depending on the good or bad use that has been made of it; and it is only for men without prejudices, without self-interest, and without partiality, to pronounce on these important topics.

Eunapius flourished in the time of Theodosius, a disciple of Maximus and Chrysanthius: these are the masters under whom he had studied the art of oratory and Alexandrine philosophy. The emperors were then exercising the keenest persecution against the philosophers. This point might raise a singular problem to be resolved here, which is why persecution caused Christianity to flourish, and snuffed out Eclecticism . The theurgist philosophers were enthusiasts; how did it happen that they were not made to be martyrs? Were they believed to be less convinced of the truth of theurgy than the Christians were of the truth of the resurrection? Doubtless, yes. Moreover, what difference is there between a public belief and a system of philosophy? Between a temple and a school? Between a people and a small number of the elect? Between the work of God and the projects of men? Theurgy and Eclecticism have passed away; the Christian religion endures and will endure for all time. If a system of human knowledge is false, sooner or later it comes up against a fact, an observation, that overturns it. The same is not true for notions that relate to nothing that happens on earth. No phenomenon is encountered in nature to contradict them; they take root in minds almost without any effort, and they endure there by decree. The only revolution they experience is to undergo a multitude of metamorphoses, among which only one can ever expose them: the one which, making them assume a natural form, would bring them too close to the limits of our poor reason, and submit them unfortunately to our scrutiny. All is lost, both when theology degenerates into philosophy, and when philosophy degenerates into theology; a composite of both is a ridiculous monster. And such was philosophy in those times: a system of theurgical and rational purifications, which Horace could not have represented better, if he had had it in mind, at the beginning of his Ars poetica : was it not indeed a man’s head, a horse’s neck, feathers of all kinds, limbs of all sorts of animals, undique ecllatis ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem, mulier formasa superne ? [17] Eunapius spent time in Athens, travelled to Egypt, and went wherever he thought he could see some light, like a man lost in the darkness, who directs his steps towards where far-away noises and some intermittent lights indicate the presence of men; he became a physician, naturalist, orator, philosopher, and historian. He left us a commentary on the lives of the Sophists, which must be read with caution.

Hierocles succeeded Eunapius; he taught Alexandrine philosophy in Athens, at about the time of the reign of Theodosius the younger. His head was a chaos of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian ideas, and his notebooks proved only one thing clearly: that true Eclecticism required more judgment that many people had. It was under Hierocles that this philosophy passed from Alexandria to Athens. Plutarch, the son of Nestorius, taught it there publicly after the death of Hierocles. It was again a mixture of dialectics, ethics, enthusiasm, and theurgy: humanum caput et cervix equina . [18] At his death, Plutarch left his chair to Syrianus, whose successor was Hermes or Hermeas, a good man if ever there was one; it was he who proved one day to a dying Egyptian that the soul was mortal, using an argument rather similar to that of a poorly-educated Lutheran, who would say to a Catholic or to a Protestant, whom he intended to get to believe in impanation, [19] We both accept the existence of the devil; and so, my dear friend, may the devil take me if what I tell you is not true . Hermeas had a brother who was not as upright a man as he was, but who had more wit. Hermeas taught Eclecticism to Edesia, his wife, to the arithmetician Domninus, and to Proclus, the most insane of all the Eclectics. He had filled his head with gymnosophism, hermetic, Homeric, Orpheic, Pythagorian, Platonic, and Aristotelian notions; he had studied mathematics, grammar, and the art of oratory; to all this acquired knowledge he added a strong dose of natural enthusiasm. Consequently, no one had had more assiduous commerce with the gods, nor told so many wondrous and sublime things, nor had performed such marvels. Only enthusiasm could compare such disparate ideas as those that filled the head of Proclus, and make them eloquent without recourse to connections. When the things are great, the lack of linkages only makes them more elevated. It is inconceivable how many reveries, lies, and puerilities the philosophers of those times were made to tell with the aim of balancing the miracles of Christianity with other miracles. An eclectic philosopher saw himself as a universal pontiff, which is to say the biggest liar in the world: Dicere philosophum , wrote the sophist Marinus, non unius cujusdam civitatis, neque caeterarum tantum gentium institutorum ac rituum curam egere, sed esse in universum totius mundi sacrorum antistitem . This is the personage that Proclus claimed to represent; he also made it rain when he chose, by means of a yunge , or small, round sphere; he summoned the devil; he made illnesses go away: what could he not do? Quae omnia eum habuerunt finem ut purgatus defœcatusque, et nativitatis suæ victor, ipse adyta sapientiæ feliciter penetraret; et contemplator factus beatorum ac revera existentium spectaculorum, non amplius protixis dissertionibusindigeret ad colligendam sibi earum rerum sapientiam; sed simpliti intuitu fruens et mentis actu spectans exemplar mentis divinæ, assequeretur virtutem quam nemo prudentiam dixerit, sed sapientiam . I have quoted word for word this long passage, in which are found the same absurd pretentions, the same extravagances, the same visions, and the same language, as in our mystics and quietists; in order to demonstrate that human understanding is a simpler instrument than we imagine it, and that the succession of eras brings back to the surface of the earth the very same follies, and their language.

The successor of Proclus was his disciple Marinus, whose successors and disciples were Hegias, Isidore, and Zenodotus, whose disciple and successor was Damascius, who closed the great Platonic chain. We know nothing of importance about Marinus. Theurgy displeased Hegias, who saw it as a sorcerer’s pedantry. Zenodotus claimed to be an eclectic without taking the trouble to read: All these books , he said, give you many opinions and almost no knowledge . As for Damascius, here is the portrait that Photius left us: Fuisse Damascium summe impium quoad religionem , in other words, he had the misfortune of not being a Christian; et novis atque anilibus fabulis scriptionem suam replevisse , in other words, he had filled his philosophy with revelations, trances, healings of illnesses, apparitions, and other theurgical foolishness: Sanctamque fidem nostram, quamvis timide tecteque, allatravisse . The pagans insulted the Christians; the Christians sometimes responded in kind. The cause of the former was too bad; and the latter were too bitter for the woes that had been inflicted on them, for those on either side to contain themselves within the narrow bounds of moderation. If the temples of Paganism were overturned, its altars destroyed, and its gods broken to pieces, the earth was still soaked and smoking with Christian blood: Eis etiam, quos ob eruditionem summis laudibus extulerat, rursus detraxisse ; it was then the same as now. They only spoke good to make others believe evil: Seque eorum judicem constituendo, nullum non perstrinxisse; in singulis quos laudarat aliquid desiderando, et quos in cœlum evexerat, humi rursus allidendo . This is how he behaved with his good friends. I do not think he had so much moderation with others.

The Eclectics also counted women among their disciples. We will not speak about all of them, but we would deserve the most rightful reproaches from the part of the human race we fear most to displease if we failed to mention the name of the famous and too unfortunate Hypatia. Hypatia was born in Alexandria, in the reign of Theodosius the Younger; she was the daughter of Theon, the contemporary of his friend Pappus, and his equal in mathematics. Nature had given to no one a more elevated soul nor a finer genius than to Theon’s daughter. Education made a wonder of her. From her father she learned geometry and astronomy; from conversation and the schools of the famous philosophers who flourished at that time in Alexandria she drew the fundamental principles of the other sciences. What cannot be achieved with a keen understanding and a passion for study? The prodigious knowledge that the open profession of eclectic philosophy required did not scare Hypatia; she plunged full-time into the study of Aristotle and Plato, and soon there was no one in Alexandria who understood those two philosophers as she did. No sooner had she delved into their works than she undertook the exploration of other philosophical systems; meanwhile she cultivated the fine arts and the art of oratory. All the knowledge it was possible for the human mind to acquire, combined in this woman with an enchanting eloquence, made of her a surprising phenomenon, I do not say for the ordinary people who admire everything, but even for philosophers who are hard to surprise. A whole crowd of foreigners came to Alexandria from all the regions of Greece and Asia to see and hear her. We might not have brought up her countenance and appearance if we did not have to say was that she combined the purest virtue with the most affecting beauty. Although there was no woman in the capital to equal her in beauty, and the philosophers and mathematicians of her time were greatly inferior to her in merit, she was modesty itself. She enjoyed such a wide reputation, and there was such a high opinion of her virtue, that although she inspired great passions and assembled at her house the men the most distinguished by talent, opulence, and dignities, in a city split into two factions, never did calumny dare cast suspicion on her morality or attack her reputation. The Christians and the Pagans who have given us her story and her misfortunes speak with one voice about her beauty, her knowledge, and her virtue; and such unanimity prevails in their praise, despite the opposition of their beliefs, that it would be impossible to know by comparing their versions what Hypatia’s religion was if we did not know from elsewhere that she was a pagan. Providence had put so much care into forming this woman that we would perhaps accuse it for not taking enough to preserve her, if a thousand experiences did not teach us to respect the mystery of its designs. That very reputation she enjoyed so deservedly among her fellow-citizens brought about her loss.

The person who then occupied the patriarchal seat of Alexandria was an imperious and violent man. This man, impelled by a misguided zeal for his religion, or rather jealous to increase his authority in Alexandria, had thought about exiling the Jews. A dispute which had arisen between them and the Christians on the occasion of the public spectacles seemed to him a situation apt to serve his ambitious views; he had no difficulty stirring up a populace naturally on the verge of revolt. The prefect, whom the state had put in charge of the city’s police, investigated the matter, and had one of the most seditious partisans of the patriarch arrested and interrogated under torture; the patriarch, enraged by the offense he thought done to his public role and his dignity, and by the kind of protection the magistrate seemed to be granting to the Jews, sent for the leaders of the synagogue, and called on them to give up their projects, or run the risk of bearing all the weight of his indignation. The Jews, far from fearing his threats, stirred up new disorders, in which there were even some citizens massacred. The patriarch, beside himself, summoned a large number of Christians, marched directly to the synagogues, took them over, expelled the Jews from a city where they had been established since the reign of Alexander the Great, and gave their houses up to pillage. One will easily surmise that the prefect did not react calmly to an attack committed clearly against his functions, and the city deprived of a host of wealthy inhabitants. This magistrate and the patriarch put the matter simultaneously before the emperor, the patriarch complaining of the Jews’ excesses, and the prefect of those of the patriarch. Whereupon 500 monks from the Mount of Nitria, persuaded that the life of their leader was being threatened and that plans were afoot to destroy their religion, arrived in a rage, attacked the prefect in the streets; and not content with showering insults on him, gave him a head wound with a stone. The indignant populace gathered in tumult, put the monks to flight, seized the man who had cast the stone, and delivered him to the prefect, who had him tortured to death. The patriarch took away the body, ordered a funeral, and was not ashamed to deliver a panegyric in honor of a seditious monk, in which he raised him to the rank of martyrs. Such conduct was not generally approved; the most sensible of the Christians sensed and reproached all his indiscretion. But the patriarch had gone too far to stop at that. He had taken some steps to reconcile himself with the prefect; these attempts had borne no fruit, and he carried within himself the keenest resentment against those he suspected of having harmed him in this matter. He became particularly obsessed with Hypatia. The patriarch could not forgive her for close relations with the prefect, nor perhaps for the esteem in which she was held by all the upright citizens; he stirred up the populace against her. A certain Peter, a reader in the church of Alexandria, doubtless one of the base slaves of whom men in power have unfortunately only too many about them, who wait impatiently and always joyously seize the opportunity to commit some great crime that will win them the favor of their superior: this man, therefore, whipped up a band of scoundrels, and, leading them, waited for Hypatia at her door, fell on her when she was preparing to go inside, seized her, dragged her to the church called the Caesarean , stripped her, murdered her, cut her body to pieces, and reduced them to ashes. Such was the fate of Hypatia, the honor of her sex and the wonder of ours.

The emperor would have had the perpetrators of this murder sought out and punished if favor and intrigue had not got involved in it; the historian Socrates and the wise M. Fleury, [20] who will easily be believed, say that this violent act, unworthy of people who bear the name Christian and who profess our faith, covered the church of Alexandria and its patriarch with dishonor. I will not pronounce [a verdict], adds M. Brucker in his critical history of philosophy, [21] on whether all the horror of it should be heaped on this man. I know there are historians who have preferred to blame an inflamed populace; but those who are familiar with the arrogance of the impetuous patriarch will believe they are treating him favorably enough if they agree that, if he did not dip his hands in the innocent Hypatia’s blood, at least he was not entirely unaware of their intention to spill it. M. Brucker opposes rather strong presumptions to the patriarch’s innocence, such as public rumors, the man’s impetuous character, the turbulent role that he played in his time, the canonization of the monk of Nitria, and the impunity of the reader Peter. These events took place during the reign of Theodosius the younger, in the year 415 CE.

The ancient Eclectic school ended with the death of Hypatia; this is a very sad era. The philosophy had spread successively to Syria, Egypt, and Greece. To the number of these reformed Platonists we could further add Macrobius, Chalcidius, Ammianus Marcelinus, Dexippus, Themistius, Simplicius, Olympiodorus, and a few others; but in considering Olympiodorus, Simplicius, Themistius and Dexippus more attentively, we see that they belong to the Peripatetic school, Macrobius to Platonism, and Chalcidius to the Christian religion.

Eclecticism , such a reasonable philosophy, which had been practiced by the greatest geniuses long before it had a name, remained forgotten until the end of the sixteenth century. Then nature, which had so long remained dull and seemingly exhausted, made an effort, and finally produced some men jealous of the finest prerogative of humanity, the freedom to think for oneself, and eclectic philosophy was reborn under Jordanus Brunus of Nola; Gerlamo Cardano ( see Philosophy of Cardan at the article Cardan); Francis Bacon ( see the article Baconism); Thomas Campanella ( see the article Philosophy of Campanella , at the article Campanella); Thomas Hobbes ( see the article Hobbesism); René Descartes ( see the article Cartesianism); Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ( see the article Leibnizianism), Christian Thomasius ( see the article Philosophy of Thomasius at the word Thomasius); Nicolas Hieronymus Gundling, Franz Budde, Andreas Rudiger, Johann Jacob Syrbius, Jean Leclerc, Malebranche, etc.

We would never have done if we undertook to lay out here the works of these great men, follow the history of their thought, and point out what they have done for the progress of philosophy in general and for the progress of modern eclectic philosophy in particular. We prefer to refer what concerns them to the articles under their names, limiting ourselves to sketching out in a few words an overview of the renewal of eclectic philosophy.

The progress of human knowledge is a well-known path, [22] from which it is almost impossible for the human mind to depart. Each century has its genre and its kind of great men. Woe to those who, destined by their natural talents to stand out in this genre, are born in the following century, and swept up in the torrent of the reigning studies into literary occupations for which they have not received the same aptitude: they would have worked with success and ease; they would have made a name for themselves; but they labor with little fruit and without glory, and die in obscurity. If it happens that nature, which has brought them too late into the world, brings them back by chance to this exhausted genre in which there is no longer any reputation to be made, we can see by the things in which they succeed that they would have equaled the best men in that genre had they been their contemporaries. We have no Academy collection that fails to offer in a hundred places the proof of what I am asserting. What happened then at the renewal of letters among us? [23] No one thought of composing new works: it was not natural when so many had been written which no one understood; thus did minds turn towards the grammatical art, erudition, criticism, antiquities, and literature. When they were capable of understanding the Ancient writers, they undertook to imitate them, and wrote oratorical discourses and all kinds of verse. The reading of Philosophers also produced its own kind of emulation: they argued, they built systems, about which disputes soon revealed the strength and the weakness; it was then that they sensed the impossibility of accepting or rejecting any one of them entirely. The efforts they made to revive the one to which they were attached by repairing what daily experience was destroying, gave birth to Syncretism. The necessity of abandoning finally a fortress that was falling to ruins all around, of plunging into another that soon suffered the same fate, and next to pass from there into a third, which time was again destroying, finally prompted other constructors (not to abandon my comparison) to set off into the countryside to build there, from the materials of so many ruined fortresses which seemed reasonably solid, a durable and eternal city, capable of standing against the attacks that had destroyed all the others: these new builders called themselves eclectics . They had barely laid down the first foundations when they realized they were missing a multitude of materials, that they were forced to reject the finest stones for want of the ones that were to integrate them into the building; and they said to each other: But these materials that we are missing are in nature, so let us search for them. They began to search in the open air, in the bowels of the earth, and at the bottom of the sea, and this is what was called cultivating experimental philosophy . But before giving up the project of building and leaving the materials scattered over the earth like so many toothing-stones, they had to make sure by means of combination that it was absolutely impossible to make a solid and regular edifice from them on the model of the universe that they had before their eyes: for these men intended nothing less than to find the portfolio of the great Architect and the lost plans of this universe; but the number of combinations is infinite. They have already tried a good number of them with relatively little success, yet they still go on with their combinations: we could call them systematic eclectics .

Those who, convinced not only that we lack materials, but that nothing good will ever be done with those we have in their present state, are constantly busy gathering up new ones; those who think on the contrary that we are ready to begin some part of the great edifice do not tire of combining them, and they manage by dint of time and labor to suspect the quarries which could supply some of the stones they need. Such is the state of things in philosophy, where they will remain for a long time yet, and where the circle we have traced would necessarily bring them back if, by some event we can scarcely conceive, the earth were to be covered with long, dense shadows, and the labors of every king were suspended for a few centuries.

Whence we see that there are two kinds of Eclecticism : one experimental, consisting in gathering known truths and given facts, and increasing their number through the study of nature; and the other systematic, which works at comparing among themselves the known truths and combining the given facts to derive from them either the explanation of a phenomenon or the idea of an experiment. Experimental Eclecticism is the lot of hard-working men; systematic Eclecticism is that of men of genius. He who can combine them will see his name placed among the names of Democritus, Aristotle, and Bacon.

Two causes have delayed the progress of this Eclecticism : one necessary, unavoidable, and based in the nature of things; the other accidental and consequent to events that time could either not have brought, or at least could not have brought in less unfavorable circumstances. I am conforming in this distinction to the common way of looking at things, and I am setting aside a system that would all too easily induce a man who thinks with depth and precision to believe that all the events of which I shall speak are equally necessary. The first cause of the slow growth of modern Eclecticism is the path that the human mind naturally follows in its advance, and which unavoidably keeps him occupied for entire centuries with knowledge that has been and always will be anterior to the study of philosophy. The human mind has its childhood and its manhood; heaven forbid it should also have its decline, its old age, and its decrepitude. Erudition, literature, language, antiquities, and the fine arts are the occupations of its earliest years and adolescence; philosophy can only be the occupation of its manhood, and the consolation or sadness of its old age. This depends on the use of time and character: now the human species has its own, and very well perceives the empty intervals in its global history, and those that are filled with transactions that honor it or humiliate it. As for the causes of the slow progress of Eclectic philosophy, of which we form another class, it is enough to list them. These are religious disputes that occupy so many good minds: the intolerance of the superstition that persecutes and discourages so many others; the poverty that tosses a man of genius to the side opposite to the one to which nature was calling him; ill-placed rewards that irritate him and make the pen fall from his hands; the indifference of the government which, in its political calculations, counts as infinitely less than it is worth the brilliance that the nation acquires from letters and the arts of adornment, and which, neglecting the progress of the useful arts, cannot sacrifice a sum to the attempts of a man of genius who dies with his projects in his head, without one having to imagine that nature may never make up this loss. For in the whole succession of individuals of the human species that have existed and will exist, it is impossible there be two who are exactly alike; hence it follows for those who can reason, that every time a useful discovery attached to the specific difference that distinguished one particular individual from all the others, and which constituted him as he was, either will not have been done, or will not have been published, it will not be done again: it is so much lost for the progress of the sciences and the arts, and for the happiness and glory of the species. I invite those who will be tempted to see this consideration as too subtle to ask some of our illustrious contemporaries about it; I will yield to their judgment. I also invite them to have a look at original productions, both ancient and modern, in any genre at all; to reflect a moment on what originality is, and to tell me if there are two originals that are alike, I do not say exactly, but with only small differences. Finally I will add ill-placed patronage, which abandons the men of the nation, those who represent it with dignity among present nations, those to whom it will owe its rank among the peoples to come, those it reveres in its bosom, and who are discussed admiringly in far-off lands, to poor blokes condemned to the role they play either by the nature that made them mediocre and mean, or by a depravation of character they owe to circumstances such as poor education, bad company, debauchery, self-interest, and the pettiness of certain fainthearted men who are fearful of them, flatter them, annoy them perhaps, and who are ashamed to be their declared protectors, but whom the public, which misses nothing, ends up counting among their protégés. It seems that one behaves in the literary republic with the same cruel policy that reigned in ancient democracies, where every citizen who became too powerful was exterminated. This comparison is all the more pertinent since when a few good men had been sacrificed by ostracism, this law began to dishonor those it spared. I was writing these reflections on 11 February 1755 as I was returning from the funeral of one of our greatest men, sorrowing for the loss the nation and letters suffered in his person, and deeply indignant at the persecutions he had suffered. The veneration I felt for his memory engraved on his tomb these words which I had intended some time before to serve as the inscription to his great work, de l’Esprit des lois : Alto quæsivit cœlo lucem, ingemuitque reperta . [24] May they come down to posterity, and teach it that, alarmed by the muttering of enemies he feared, and sensitive to periodic insults which he would doubtless have scorned were it not for the seal of Authority they seemed to enjoy, the loss of tranquility of this man who was born sensitive was the sorry reward for the honor he had just done France, and the important service he had just rendered to the whole world!

Up to now we have applied Eclecticism to hardly any but philosophical matters, but it is not difficult to foresee from the fermentation of minds that it will become more general. I do not believe, perhaps it is not even desirable, that its first effects will be rapid, because those who are versed in the practice of the arts do not reason enough, and those who are in the habit of reasoning are neither learned enough, nor disposed to learn, about the mechanical part. If we reform too precipitously, it could easily happen that by trying to correct everything we will spoil everything. The first inclination is to go to extremes. I invite philosophers to beware: if they are careful, they will resign themselves to becoming disciples in many genres before trying to be masters; they will venture some conjectures before laying down principles. May they be aware that they are dealing with kinds of robots to which one must communicate an impulsion all the more restrained that the most estimable among them are the least able to resist it. Would it not be reasonable first to study the resources of the art before presuming to extend or shrink its limits? It is for want of this initiation that one is unable either to admire or to correct. False art-lovers corrupt artists, half-connoisseurs discourage them; I speak of the liberal arts. But while light, which is pressing in all directions, will reach everywhere, and while the spirit of the century will advance the revolution it has begun, the mechanical arts will stall where they are if the government disdains to take an interest in their progress in a more useful way. Would it not be desirable for them to have their own academy? [25] Does anyone believe that the fifty thousand francs the government would use annually to found and maintain it would be badly used? As for me, it is obvious to me that in twenty years’ time it will have produced fifty volumes in quarto , in which scarcely fifty lines would be found to be of no utility; the inventions we already have would be improved; the communication of enlightenment would necessarily engender new ones and recover older ones that have been lost, and the state would offer forty [26] unfortunate citizens who have worn themselves out by work and who have hardly enough bread for themselves and their children an honorable resource and the means of continuing perhaps still greater services to society than those they have already rendered by recording in their papers the precious observations that they have made over the course of a great many years. What a great advantage would it not be for those who, intending to enter the same career, to do so with all the experience of those who leave it only after their hair has turned gray? But for want of the institution that I am proposing, all those observations are lost, all that experience vanishes, the centuries go by, the world grows older, and the mechanical arts remain forever in their childhood.

After this brief history of the lives of the principal Eclectics, it remains for us to set out the fundamental points of their philosophy. This is the task we have set ourselves in the rest of this article. Despite the care we have taken to set aside everything that seemed to us unintelligible (although it might not be so for others), we are far from having been able to throw such light as some readers might wish for on what we have kept. Also, we advise those to whom the jargon of scholastic philosophy is unfamiliar to restrict themselves to the above, and those who have the necessary knowledge to understand what follows not to think more highly of themselves for it.

Philosophy of the Eclectics

Principles of the Eclectics’ dialectics . This part of their philosophy is not without obscurity; these are Aristotelian ideas so boiled down to their essence and refined that common sense has evaporated from them, and we find ourselves at every moment contained within the verbiage; besides, that is where we are almost sure to end up any time we put no sobriety into our argumentation, and push it as far as it can go. Such was one of the ruses of Skepticism. If you followed the skeptic, he would lead you into inextricable darkness; if you refused to follow him, he would draw quite plausible inferences from your pusillanimity, both against your thesis in particular and against dogmatic philosophy in general. The Eclectics said:

1. We can truly call being only that which excludes absolutely the quality most contrary to entity, the privation of entity .

2. There are in the first being qualities that have unity as their principle; but as unity does not count among the genera, it does not prevent the first being from being first, although it is said of it that it is one.

3. It is because everything that is one is neither the same nor similar that unity does not prevent the first being from being the first genus, the supreme genus .

4. What we first perceive is existence, action, and state; they are one in the subject, in themselves they are three.

These are the foundations on which Plotinus builds his system of dialectic. He adds:

5. Number, quantity, quality are not first beings among beings; they are posterior to essence, since first something must be possible.

6. Selfness or the self, quiddity or the it, identity, and diversity or alterity, are not, properly speaking, the qualities of the being; but they are its properties, necessary concomitants of actual existence.

7. Relation, place, time, state, habit, action are not first genera; they are accidents that designate composition or flaw.

8. The return of understanding to its first act offers it number, that is, singular and plural; force, intensity, remission, power, grandeur, infinity, quantity, quality, quiddity, similarity, difference, diversity, etc., from which derive an infinite number of other notions. The action of the understanding is going from itself to objects, and by returning from objects to itself.

9. Understanding occupied with its ideas, or intelligence, is inherent in something more general than itself.

10. After understanding, I descend to the soul which is one in itself, and in each part of itself infinitely. Intelligence is one of its qualities; it is its pure act of one in itself or of one in each part of itself ad infinitum .

11. There are five genera analogous to each other, both in the intelligible world and in the corporeal world.

12. One must not confuse essence with corporality or materiality; the latter contains the notion of flux, and one would more precisely call it generation .

13. The five genera of the corporeal world, which we could reduce to three, are substance; accident which is in substance; accident in which is substance, motion, and relation. Accident is meant clearly here as mode; and the accident in which is substance is, according to all appearances, place .

14. Substance is a sort of base, a foundation; it is by itself and not by another; it is a whole or a part: if it is a part, it is the part of a composite which it can complete, and which it completes, and it completes so long as the whole is whole.

15. It is essential for a substance that we cannot say of it only that it is a subject. Subject is taken here logically .

16. We would be led to the division of the generic substances into species by senses or by the consideration of simple or complex qualities, by forms, figures, and places.

17. It is number and size that constitute quantity; it is relation that constitutes time and space. These beings must not be counted among the quantities.

18. Quality must be considered in itself in its motion and in its subject.

19. Motion will or will not be a genus, depending on the way in which it is envisaged; it is a progression of being, the nature of the being remaining the same or changing.

20. The idea of progression common to all motion entails the idea of exercise of a power or force.

21. Motion in bodies is a tendency of one body towards another, which must be solicited by it to motion. One must not confuse this tendency with bodies moved.

22. To find the real distribution of motions, it is better to examine their inner differences than their outer differences, and to distinguish forces between animate and inanimate forces or better still between forces animated by art or by sensation.

23. Rest is a privation, unless it is eternal.

24. Active and passive qualities are only different manners of moving.

25. As for relation, it supposes plurality of beings considered by some quality that arises essentially from plurality.

This is the system of genera or predicaments which the eclectic sect adopted. You will not disagree, if you take the trouble to read it attentively, that across many obscure and puerile notions there are some that are powerful and very philosophical.

Principles of Eclectic metaphysics. Another labyrinth of sophistic ideas, where Plotinus himself loses his way, and the reader will kindly forgive us for sometimes also losing our way. The Eclectics said:

1. There are things and their principle; the principle is above things; without the principle, things would not exist. Everything proceeds from the being principle; however, it is without motion, division, or multiplication of itself. This is the source of eclectic emanations.

2. This principle is the author of essence and being; it is first; it is one; it is simple; that is the cause of intelligible existence. Everything emanates from it, both motion and rest, yet it needs neither of them. Motion is not in it and there is nothing in which it can rest.

3. It is indefinable. It is called infinite, because it is one; because the idea of limit is in no way analogous to it, and there is nothing at which it arrives. But its infinitude has nothing in common with that of matter.

4. As there is nothing better than the principle of all that is, it follows that what is best, is.

5. It is of the nature of the excellent to suffice unto itself. What shall we call excellent, if not what was before there was anything, that is, before there was evil.

6. The excellent is the source of beauty; it is its extreme limit, it must be its end.

7. That which has only one reason to act does not for that act any less freely: for the unity of motive does not offer the idea of privation, when that unity emanates from the nature of the being; it is a corollary of its excellence. The first principle is therefore free.

8. The freedom of the first principle has nothing like it in the beings emanated from it. The same must be said of the other attributes.

9. If nothing is above what was before everything, one must not go beyond it; one must stop at this first principle, remain silent about its nature, and turn all research onto what has been emanated from it.

10. What is identical with the essence predominates without taking away freedom; the act is essential, without being constrained.

11. When we say of the first principle that it is just, excellent, merciful, etc., that means that its nature is always one and the same.

12. The first principle being posited, other causes are superfluous; one must descend from this principle to understanding, or to what conceives, and from the understanding to the soul: that is the natural order of beings. The intelligible genus is limited to these objects; it contains no more, no fewer. There are no fewer because there is diversity among them. There are no more because reason shows that the enumeration is complete. The first principle such as we allow it cannot be simplified; and the understanding is, but simply, that is, without our being able to say that it is either at rest or in motion. From the idea of understanding to the idea of reason, and from it to the idea of soul, there is uninterrupted progression; one can conceive of no intermediate nature between the soul and the understanding. Plotinus lists these notions with infinite subtlety, and directs them against the Gnostics, all of whose eons and divine families he disrupts. But that was only the half of his purpose; from them he also deduces a hypostatic trinity, which he opposes to that of the Christians.

13. There is a common center among the divine attributes: these attributes are so many rays that emanate from it; they form a sphere, beyond the limits of which nothing is luminous; everything wants to be illuminated.

14. Only the simple being, first and immobile, can explain how everything has emanated from it; one must address it to learn more, not by a spoken prayer, but by repeated outpourings that carry the soul beyond the dark spaces that separate it from the eternal principle from which it has emanated. This is the foundation of eclectic enthusiasm.

15. When one applies the term generation to the production of the divine principles, the idea of time must be set aside. These are transactions that have taken place in eternity.

16. What emanates from the first principle emanates from it without motion. If there were motion in the first principle, the emanated being would be the third being moved, and not the second. This emanation occurs without their being either repugnance or consent in the first principle.

17. The first principle is at the center of the beings that emanate from it; at rest, like the sun at the center of light and of the world.

18. Whatever is fecund and perfect engenders from all eternity.

19. The order of perfection follows the order of emanation; the being of the first emanation is the most perfect being after the principle: this being was the understanding, νοῦς.

20. Every emanation tends towards its principle; it is a center where it was necessary for it to rest for the entire duration, where there was no being but itself and its principle; then they were joined, but distinct, for one was not the other.

21. The first emanation is the most perfect image of the first principle; it is from it, without intermediary.

22. It is from this emanation, the first, the purest, the most worthy of the first principle, which could be born from that principle, which is its living image, which resembles it more than light does the luminous body, that all beings, all the sublimity of ideas, and all the intelligible gods are emanated.

23. The first principle from which everything has emanated reabsorbs everything; it is by recalling the emanations into its bosom that it prevents them from degenerating into matter.

24. The understanding or the first emanation cannot be sterile if it is perfect. What has it then engendered? The soul, second emanation less perfect than the first, more perfect that all the emanations that followed it.

25. The soul is a hypostasis of the first principle; it is inherent in it, it is illuminated by it, it represents it; it is fecund in its turn, and infinitely pours forth beings.

26. That which understands is different from that which is understood; but since the one understands, and the other is understood, without being identical, they are co-existent; and the one that understands has in itself all the resemblance and analogy it can with what it understands: hence it follows:

27. That there is something ineffably supreme which understands nothing, a first emanation which understands, a second which is understood, and which consequently is not without resemblance and affinity with that which understands.

28. Where there is intelligence there is multitude. The intelligent can be what is first, simple, and one.

29. The intelligent applies to itself and to its nature; if it turns inwardly and consummates its action, there shall flow from it the notion of duity, of plurality, and that of all the numbers.

30. The objects of the senses are something; they are the images of beings; the understanding knows both what is in itself and what is outside itself; and it knows that things exist, otherwise there would be no images.

31. The intelligibles differ from the sensibles as understanding differs from the senses.

32. The understanding is at the same time an infinite number of things, from which it is distinguished.

33. As many as the world has of different principles of fecundity, so many different souls it has, and so many ideas there are in the divine understanding.

34. What one understands becomes intimate; a sort of unity is instituted between the understanding and the thing understood.

35. Ideas are first in the understanding; the understanding in act or intelligence applies to ideas. The nature of the understanding and of ideas is thus one; if we divide them, if we make essentially different beings of them, that it is a consequence of the way our minds work and the manner in which we acquire our knowledge. This is the principal foundation of the doctrine of innate ideas.

36. Divine understanding acts on matter through its ideas: not with an exterior and mechanical action, but with an interior and general action, which still is not identical with matter nor separate from it.

37. The ideas of irrational beings are in the divine understanding, but they are not in an irrational form.

38. There are two species of gods in the incorporeal heaven, some intelligible, the others intelligent. The latter are the ideas, the former understandings beatified by the contemplation of the ideas.

39. The third principle emanated from the first is the soul of the world.

40. There are two Venuses, the one daughter of heaven, the other daughter of Jupiter and Dione. The latter presides over the loves of men; the other had no mother, and was born before any corporeal union, for none occur in the heavens. This celestial Venus is a divine spirit; she is a soul as incorruptible as the being from which she emanated; she resides above the sensible sphere; she disdains to touch it with her foot, nay, she has no body, she is a pure spirit, a quintessence of what is most subtle, inferior but co-existent with her principle. That living principle produced her; she was its simple act; it was before her; it has loved her from all eternity; it dotes on her, its happiness is to contemplate her.

41. Others have emanated from that divine soul, although she is one; the souls which have emanated from her are parts of herself that are present in everything.

42. She rests in herself; nothing stirs or distracts her; she is ever one, whole, and everywhere.

43. There was no time when the soul was lacking in this universe; it could not last without it; it has always been what it is. The existence of an unformed mass is not conceivable.

44. If there were no body, there would be no soul. A body is the only place where a soul can exist; without it, the soul has no progressive motion. It moves, degenerates, and takes a body as it moves away from its principle, like a fire lit atop a high mountain, whose brilliance fades until the shadows begin.

45. The world is a great edifice, co-existent with the architect; but the architect and the edifice are not one, although there is not a molecule of the edifice where the architect is not present. It was necessary that the world be; it was necessary that it be beautiful; it was necessary that it should be as beautiful as possible.

46. The world is animated, but it is rather in its soul than its soul is in it; it contains it; it is intimate to it; there is no point in it where the soul is not applied and which it does not inform.

47. That soul, so great by its nature, follows the world everywhere; it is everywhere the world is.

48. The perfection of beings to which the soul of the world is present is proportional to the distance of the first principle.

49. The beauty of beings is proportional to the energy of the soul in each point; they are only what the soul makes them.

50. It is as if the soul is sleeping in inanimate beings; but what allies itself with another tends to assimilate it unto itself; that is how the soul vivifies as much as it can what in itself is not living.

51. The soul allows itself to be directed effortlessly; one captures it by offering it anything it can bear, and which constrains it to yield a portion of itself; it is not particular about what is exposed to it, a mirror does not more indiscriminately accept the representation of objects.

Universal nature contains in itself the reason for an infinite number of phenomena, and produces them when one knows how to provoke it.

These are the principles from which Plotinus and the Eclectics would deduce their enthusiasm, their trinity, and their speculative and practical theurgy; such is the labyrinth in which they lose themselves. If one wishes to follow all its meanders, one will agree that with much less effort they could have found truth.

Principles of Eclectic psychology . What was taught about the nature of the soul in the Alexandrine school was neither less obscure nor more solid than what was recounted there about the nature of the first principle, the divine understanding, and the soul of the world.

1. The soul of man and the soul of the world have the same nature; they are like two sisters.

2. Nevertheless, the souls of men are not to the soul of the world what the parts are to the whole; otherwise the soul of the world, divided, would not be whole everywhere.

3. There is but one soul in the world, but each man has his own. These souls differ, because they have not flowed out from the universal soul. They simply reposed there, awaiting bodies; and bodies have since been distributed to them in time by the universal soul that dominates them all.

4. True essences reside only in the intelligible world; it is also the sojourn of souls; it is thence that they pass into our world; here they are joined with bodies; there, they await them and have none yet.

5. The understanding is the most important of the true essences. It is neither divided nor discrete. Souls are co-existent with it in the intelligible world; no interval separates them either from it or from each other. If souls experience a sort of division, it is only in this world, where their union with bodies makes them susceptible of motion. They are present, absent, distant, extended; the space they occupy has its dimensions: parts there are distinguished, but they are indivisible.

6. Souls have other differences than those that result from the diversity of bodies. Each of them has its own way of sensing, acting, and thinking. These are the vestiges of former lives. This does not prevent they from having preserved analogies which impel them toward each other. These analogies are also in the sensations, actions, passions, thoughts, tastes, desires, etc.

7. The soul is neither material nor composite, otherwise neither life nor intelligence could be attributed to it.

8. There are good souls, and there are bad souls. They form a chain of different orders. There are souls of the first, second, third order, etc.; this inequality is part original, part accidental.

9. The soul is not in the body as water is in a vase. The body is not its subject, nor is it a whole of which the soul is a part; we know only that it is present, since it animates.

10. To speak precisely, the soul is less in the body than the body is in the soul. Among the functions of man, the faculty of sensing and growing belongs to the body, the faculty of perceiving and reflecting to the soul.

11. The powers of the soul are all in each part of the body, but the exercise in every point is analogous to the nature of the organ.

12. The soul separate from the body does not remain here, where there is no place for it; it returns to the principle from which it emanated; places are not indifferent there: reason and justice distribute them.

13. The soul does not assume the forms of bodies; they suffer nothing from objects. If an impression is made on the body, it perceives it, and to perceive is to act.

14. The soul is the final cause of things of the intelligible world, and the first cause of things in this one. Alternately citizen of both, it is only remembering once more what occurred in one when it thinks it is learning what occurs in the other.

15. It is the soul that constitutes the body. The body does not live, it dissolves. Life and indissolubility are only of the soul.

16. The commerce of the soul with the body raises to existence some being which is neither the body nor the soul, which lives in us, which was not created, which does not perish, and through which everything perseveres and endures.

17. This being is the principle of motion. It is what constitutes the life of the body, by a quality that is essential to it, which it gets from itself, and does not lose. The Platonists called it αὐτοκινησία , antoquinesia .

18. Souls are allied by the same eternal and divine principle which is common to them.

19. Vice and virtue are accidental to them. He who has a pure soul does not doubt its immortality.

20. There reigns among souls the same harmony as in the universe. They have their revolutions, as the stars have their apogee and perigee. They descend from the intelligible world into the material world, and rise back from the material world into the intelligible world: hence their destinies can be read in the sky.

21. Their periodic revolution is a chain of transformations through which they pass in a sometimes accelerated and sometimes slowed motion. They descend from the bosom of the first principle into raw matter and rise again from raw matter to the first principle.

22. At the highest point of their orbit, they retain something of the tendency to descend; at the lowest point they retain that to rise again. In the first case, it is the character of emanation that can never be destroyed; in the second it is the character of divine emanation that can never be erased.

23. The soul, as a created being, suffers and deteriorates; as an eternal being, it remains the same, without suffering, improving, or deteriorating. It is different or the same, depending on whether it is considered at a distinct point in its periodic revolution, or relative to its full revolution; it deteriorates in descending from the first principle towards the lowest point of its orbit, and improves as it rises from that point toward the first principle.

24. At its perigee, it is as if dead. The body which it informs is a sort of sepulcher where it barely preserves the memory of its origin. Its first glances toward the intelligible world it has lost sight of, and from which it is separated by immense spaces, declare that its stationary state is about to end.

25. Freedom ends when the violence of sensation or passion takes away all use of reason; it is recovered as the sensation or passion loses its strength. One is perfectly free when passion and sensation hold their peace and reason alone speaks: this is the state of contemplation, when man perceives, judges, accuses, absolves, and reforms himself over everything he observes in his understanding. Thus virtue is nothing other than an habitual obeisance of the will to enlightenment and to the counsels of the understanding.

26. Every free act changes the state of the soul, for good or evil, by the addition of a new mode. The new added mode always degrades the soul when it descends in its revolution, distancing itself from the first principle, attaching itself to what it encounters, preserving its simulacrum in itself. Thus, in the contemplation which improves it and brings it back to the first principle, there must be abstraction of the body and of everything analogous to it. It is the opposite in every act of the will which alters the original and primary purity of the soul, which flees the intelligible and delivers itself to the corporeal; it materializes itself more and more; it plunges deeper into the tomb; the energy of pure understanding and of contemplative habit disappears; the soul loses itself in a chain of metamorphoses that disfigure it more and more, and from which it would never return if its essence were not indestructible. There remains this living essence, and with it a sort of memory or consciousness; these seeds of contemplation bloom in time, and begin to withdraw the soul from the abyss of darkness where it has plunged and launches it toward the source of its emanation or toward God.

27. It is neither through natural intelligence, nor by application, nor by any of the ways of perceiving the things of this world, that we raise ourselves to awareness and participation with God; it is by the intimate presence of this being to our soul, a light far superior to any other. We speak of God, we discuss him, write about him: these exercises excite the soul, direct it, prepare it to sense the presence of God; but it is something else that communicates it to the soul.

28. God is present to all, although he seems absent from all. His presence is sensible only to the souls which have established between themselves and that excellent being some analogy, some similitude, and which by reiterated purifications have restored themselves to the original and primary purity which they had at the moment of emanation; then they see God, insofar as he is by his nature visible.

29. Then the veils which envelop them are rent, the simulacra which besieged them and kept them from the divine presence have vanished. They retain no shadow that can prevent the eternal light from illuminating and filling them.

30. The worthiest occupation of man is therefore to separate his soul from all sensible things, to gather it profoundly into itself, isolate it, and lose it in contemplation until the entire eclipse of itself and everything it knows. Quietism is, as we see, very ancient . [27]

31. That profound contemplation is not our natural state, but it is the only one where we attain the end of our desires and that delightful repose where all the dissonances cease that surround us and prevent us from tasting the divine harmony of intelligible things. We are then at the source of life, the essence of understanding, the origin of being, the region of truths, the center of all good, the ocean whence souls endlessly rise with those eternal emanations exhausting it, for God is not a mass. It is there that man is truly happy; it is there that his passions, his ignorance, and his disquiets end; it is there that he lives and hears, that he is free, and loves; it is there that we must hasten our return, treading under foot all the obstacles that hold us back, scattering all those deceitful phantoms that lead us astray and toy with us, and blessing the happy moment that rejoins us with our principle and restores its emanation to the eternal all.

32. But we must await that moment. He who, bearing a violent hand against his body, would accelerate it, would at least have one passion; he would bear off with him some vain simulacrum. The philosopher will therefore not dismiss his soul; he will wait for it to leave, which will happen when, its domicile wasting away, the harmony constituted from all eternity between it and himself will cease. Here we find vestiges of Leibnizianism .

33. The soul separated from the body remains in its revolutions through the heavens what it has most been during this life, whether rational, or sensitive, or vegetal. The function that was dominating it in the corporeal world still dominates it in the intelligible world; it keeps its other powers inert, numb, and captive. The bad does not annihilate the good, but they co-exist subordinate.

34. Therefore let us exercise our soul in this world to rise to the intelligible things if we do not want that, accompanied in the other by vicious simulacra, it should be cast out again from the center of emanations, condemned to the sensible life, animal or vegetal, and subjected to the brutal functions of engendering and growth.

35. He who has respected the dignity of the human species in himself will be reborn a man; he who has degraded it will be reborn an animal; he who has vilified it will be reborn a plant. The dominant vice will determine the species. The tyrant will soar through the air in the form of some bird of prey.

Principles of Eclectic cosmology . Here are the clearest points one can deduce from our highly unintelligible philosopher Plotinus.

1. Matter is the base and the foundation of the various modifications. This notion has been until now common to all philosophers, hence it follows that there is matter even in the intelligible world, for there are ideas which are modified. Now every mode supposes a subject. Besides, the intelligible world being but a copy of the sensible world, matter must have its representation in the one, since it has its existence in the other, and that representation supposes a material canvas to which it can be attached.

2. Bodies themselves have in this sensible world a subject which cannot be body; indeed, their transmutations do not suppose diminution, or else essences would reduce to nothing, for it is not more difficult to be reduced to nothing than to less; moreover, what is reborn cannot be reborn from something that is no longer.

3. Primary matter has nothing in common with bodies, neither shape, nor quality, nor size, nor color: whence it follows that only a negative definition of it can be given.

4. Matter in general is not a quantity; the ideas of size, unity, and plurality are not applicable to it, because it is indefinite; it is never at rest; it produces an infinite number of different species through an inner fermentation that last forever and is never sterile.

5. Place is posterior in origin to matter and the body; it is therefore not essential to it; [28] forms are therefore not necessary attributes of corporeal quantity.

6. We must not imagine on these principles that matter is a vain name: it is necessary; bodies are produced by it. It then becomes the subject of quality and size without losing its titles of invisible and indefinite.

7. It is to have neither sense nor understanding to relate essence and the production of the universe to chance.

8. The world has always been. The idea which was its model is prior to it only by a priority of origin and not of time. As it is very perfect, it is the most evident demonstration of the necessity and the existence of an intelligible world; and this intelligible world being only an idea, it is eternal, inalterable, incorruptible, one.

9. It is not by induction, it is by necessity that the universe exists. The understanding acted on matter, which obeyed it without effort, and all things were born.

10. There is no contradictory effect in the generation of a being by the development of its seed; there are simply a multitude of forces opposed to each other that react and balance out. Thus, in the universe, one part is the antagonist of another; the latter wills, the former refuses; they sometimes all disappear in this conflict to be reborn, clash, and again disappear; and an eternal chain is formed of generations and destructions for which one cannot reproach nature, because it would be folly to attack a whole in one of its parts.

11. The universe is perfect; it has all it can have; it is sufficient in itself; it is filled with gods, demons, righteous souls, men whose virtue makes them happy, animals, and plants. Righteous souls scattered through the vast expanse of the heavens give motion and life to the celestial bodies.

12. The universal soul is immutable. The state of everything that is worthy, after it, of our admiration and our homage is permanent. Souls circulate in bodies until, exalted and wafted out of the state of generation, they live with the universal soul. Bodies continually change form, and are alternately either animals or the plants that feed them.

13. There is no absolute evil: the unjust man leaves to the universe its goodness; he only takes it from his soul, which he degrades in the order of beings. This is the general law from which it is impossible to exempt oneself.

14. Let us therefore cease to complain about this universe; let us try to be good, pity the wicked, and leave to the universal cause things the matter of punishing them and deriving some advantage from their malice.

15. Men have the gods above them, and the animals beneath; they are free to rise to the state of gods through virtue, or to decline through vice to the condition of animals.

16. The universal cause of things has distributed to each soul all the goodness that befitted it. If it has placed some gods above demons, some demons above souls, some souls above men, and some men above animals, that is neither by choice nor by predilection: the nature of its work required it, as the enchaining and the necessity of transmutations demonstrate.

17. As the world contains everything that is possible, incapable of either losing or acquiring anything, it will last eternally as it is.

18. Heaven and all it contains is eternal. The stars shine with an inexhaustible, uniform, and tranquil fire. In nature there is no tie as strong as the soul, which binds all these things.

19. It is the soul of the heavens that peoples the earth with animals; it imprints the alluvium with a hint of life, and the alluvium senses, breathes, and moves.

20. In the heavens there is only fire; but that fire contains water, earth, and air, in a word all the qualities of the other elements.

21. Since it is in the nature of heat to rise, the source of the celestial fires will never be exhausted. Nothing of it can be dissipated without effort, and the circular motion brings back to it all that is dissipated.

22. The stars change in their appearances and their motion, but their nature never changes.

23. It is because the stars proclaim the future that their progress is measured, and that they bear the imprints of things. The universe is full of signs; the wise man knows them, and draws inferences from them: it is a necessary consequence of universal harmony.

24. The soul of the world is the principle of natural things, and it has scattered the breadth of the heavens with luminous bodies that embellish it and proclaim destinies.

25. The soul that distances itself from the first principle is subject to the law of the heavens in its different changes of domicile; such is not the case for the soul that draws nearer: it makes its own destiny.

26. The universe is a living being which has its body and its soul, and the soul of the universe, which is attached to no particular body, exerts a general influence on the souls attached to bodies.

27. Celestial influence does not engender things; it merely disposes matter to phenomena, and universal reason makes them bloom.

28. The universal reason of beings is not an intelligence but an inner and agitating force that operates without design, and which, exerting its energy from some central point, puts everything in motion, as we see undulations arise from one other in a fluid, and extend to infinity.

29. In the world we must distinguish between gods and demons. The gods are without passions; the demons have passions. They are eternal like the gods, but one degree lower; in the universal scale of beings, they occupy the middle between us and the gods.

30. There is no demon in the intelligible world; what are called demons there are gods.

31. Those that inhabit the region of the sensible world, which extends to the Moon, are visible gods, gods of the second order; they are to the intelligible gods what splendor is to the stars.

32. These demons are sympathies emanated from the soul which makes the good of the universe; it has engendered them so that each part should have in the whole the perfection and energy that befit it.

33. Demons are not corporeal beings, but they put the air, fire, and the elements into action; if they were corporeal, they would be sensible animals. [29]

34. We must suppose a general intelligible matter that is a vehicle, an intermediary between sensible matter and the beings to which it is subordinate.

35. There are no elements that the earth does not contain. The generation of animals and the vegetation of plants show that it is an animal; and as the portion of spirit it includes is great, one is well founded in taking it for a deity; it does not move by a motion of translation, but it is not incapable of motion. The earth can sense, because it has a soul, as the stars have one, as man has his.

Principles of eclectic Theology, such as they are dispersed in the works of Iamblicus, the sect’s theologian par excellence.

1. There are gods; we bear in ourselves the demonstration of this truth. Knowledge is innate to us: it consists in our understanding, prior to any induction, any prejudice, and any judgment. It is a simultaneous consciousness of the necessary union of our nature with its generating cause; it is an immediate consequence of the coexistence of that cause with our love of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

2. This kind of intimate contact of the soul and the deity is not subordinate to us; our will can neither alter, nor avoid, nor deny, nor prove it. It is necessary in us: we sense it, and it convinces us of the existence of the gods by what we are, whatever it may be that we are.

3. But the idea of immortal companions of the gods is neither less intimate, nor less innate, nor less perceptible to us than that of the gods. The natural knowledge we have of their existence is immutable, because their essence does not change. Nor is it a truth of consequence and induction; it is simple, pure, and primary notion, drawn from all eternity from the bosom of the deity, to which we have remained united in time by that indissoluble link.

4.There are gods, demons, and heroes, and these celestial beings are distributed into different classes. The resemblances and differences that distinguish and assimilate them are known to us only by analogy. Necessarily, for example, goodness must be a quality common to them, because it is essential to their nature. It is different for souls, who participate in this attribute only by communication.

5. Gods and souls are the two extremes of celestial things. Heroes constitute the intermediate order. They are superior in excellence, in nature, in power, in virtue, in beauty, in grandeur, and generally in every good quality, to the souls they immediately touch, and with which they have resemblance and sympathy through the life that was common to them. We must further allow a sort of genies subordinate to the gods, and ministers of their benevolence which they love, and which they imitate. They are the medium through which the celestial beings assume a form that makes them visible to us; the vehicle that brings things ineffable to our ears and incomprehensible to our understanding, the mirror that allows into our soul images that were not made to reach it without that assistance.

6. It is these two classes that form the link and the intercourse of gods and souls, which make the chain of celestial things indissoluble and continuous, which facilitate for the gods the means of descending among men, from men to the last beings in nature, and for those beings to rise back to the gods.

7. Unity, an existence more perfect than that of inferior beings, immutability, immobility, the power to move without losing immobility, and providence, are also common qualities of gods. One can conjecture by the difference of the extremes which quality is that of intermediaries. The acts of gods are excellent, those of souls imperfect. Gods can do anything, equally, without obstacle, and without delay. There are things that are impossible to souls; all the things they can do take some time; they execute them only separately, and with difficulty. Deity produces without effort, and governs; the soul anguishes to engender, and serves. Everything is subject to the gods, even the acts and existence of souls; they see the essences of things, and the end of the movements of nature. Souls pass from one effect to another, and rise by degrees. Deity is incomprehensible, incommensurable, unlimited. Souls experience all sorts of passions and forms. The intelligence that presides over everything, universal reason of beings, is present to the gods without cloud and without reserve, without argument and without induction, by a pure, simple, and invariable act. The soul is enlightened about them only imperfectly and by intervals. The gods have given the laws to the universe; souls follow the laws given by the gods.

8. It is the life which the soul received at the beginning, and the first movement of its will, which have determined the species of organic being it would inform, and the tendency it would have to improve or degrade itself.

9. Excellent and universal things contain within them the reason of things less good and less general. That is the foundation of the revolutions of beings, of their emanations, of the eternity of their elementary principle, of their indelible relation with celestial things, of their depravation, their perfectibility, and of all the phenomena of human nature.

10. The gods are attached to no part of the universe: they are present even to the things of this world; they contain everything and nothing contains them; they are everywhere; everything is full of them. If the deity takes over some corporeal substance, heaven, the earth, a holy city, a woods, a statue, its influence and its presence spread outside, as light escapes from the sun in every direction. Substance is filled with it. It acts within and without, near and far, without diminution and without interruption. The gods have different domiciles here below, depending on their nature of fire, earth, air, and water. These distinctions and those of the gifts we must expect from them are the foundations of theurgy and evocations.

12. The soul is unsusceptible [ impassible ], but its presence in a body makes the composite being susceptible [ passible ]. If this is true of the soul, it is a fortiori true of heroes, demons, and gods.

11. [30] Demons and gods are not equally affected by all the parts of the sacrifice. There is the important point, the energetic and secret thing; neither are they equally sensible to all sorts of sacrifices. Some require symbols, others either victims or representations, or homages, or good deeds.

12. Prayers are superfluous. The beneficence of the gods, which knows our true needs, is attentive to anticipating our requests. Prayers are only a means of rising toward the gods and uniting one’s spirit with theirs. That is how the priest protects himself against passions, preserves his purity, etc.

13. If the idea of the anger of the gods were better known, we would not strive to appease it with sacrifices. Heavenly anger is not a resentment on the part of the gods, of which the creature must fear some ill effect; it is an aversion on its part for their beneficence. Holocausts are useful only when they are the sign of repentance. It is a step which the guilty being has taken towards the gods from whom he had strayed; the wicked flees the gods, but the gods do not pursue him: it is he alone who makes himself unhappy, and who damns himself through his wickedness.

14. It is pious to expect from the gods all the good that is imposed on them by their nature. It is impious to believe one inflicts violence on them. One must address the gods only to make oneself better. If expiations have removed some imminent calamities from over our heads, it was so that our souls should receive no blot from them.

15. It is not through organs that the gods hear us: that is because they have in themselves the reason and the effects of all the prayers of pious men, and especially of their ministers. They are present to these dedicated men, and we speak immediately to the gods through their intermission.

16. The heavenly bodies we call gods are substances very analogous to these immaterial beings, but it is these beings who must specially be addressed in the heavenly bodies they inform. They are all beneficent; from them flow indelible influences over bodies. There is no point in space where their virtues do not make their energy felt, but their action on parts of the universe is proportioned to the nature of those parts. Their energy spreads diversity, but it never produces any absolute evil.

17. It is not that what is excellent relative to the universal harmony cannot become harmful to some particular part.

18. The intelligible gods who preside over the celestial spheres are original beings of the intelligible world, and it is through the attention they give to their own ideas by enclosing on themselves that they govern the heavens.

19. The intelligible gods have been the paradigms of the sensible gods. These simulacra once engendered have preserved with no alteration the imprint of the divine beings of which they are the images.

20. It is this inalterable resemblance that we must view as the basis of the eternal intercourse that reigns between the gods of this world and the gods of the superior world. It is through this indestructible analogy that all that emanates from it returns to the unique being of which it is the emanation and is reabsorbed by it. It is identity that links the gods to one another in the intelligible world and in the sensible world; it is the similitude that establishes the intercourse of the gods of one world with the gods of the other.

21. Demons are not perceptible either to sight or to touch. Gods are stronger than any material obstacle. The gods govern heaven, the universe, and all the hidden powers contained therein. Demons have the administration of only some portions that were left to them by the gods. Demons are allied to and nearly inseparable from the beings that have been conceded to them. The gods direct bodies without being present to them. The gods command. The demons obey, but freely.

22. The generation of demons is the last effort of the power of the gods; heroes have emanated from them as a simple consequence of their living existence; the same goes for souls. Demons have the generative faculty; it is to them that the task of uniting souls to bodies has been entrusted. Heroes vivify, inspire, and direct, but do not engender.

23. It has been given to souls, by a special grace of the gods, to be able to rise to the sphere of the angels. Then they exceeded the limits that were prescribed to them by their nature. They lose it, and take on that of the new family into which they have passed.

24. Apparitions of the gods are analogous to their essences, powers, and operations. They always show themselves such as they are. They have their own signs, characteristics, and distinctive movements, and their particular fantastic forms; and the phantom of a god is not that of a demon, nor the phantom of a demon that of an angel, nor the phantom of an angel that of an archangel; and there are specters of souls of all sorts of characters. The appearance of gods is consoling; that of archangels, frightening; that of angels, less severe; that of heroes, attractive; that of demons, frightening. There is in these apparitions also an infinite number of other varieties relative to the rank of the being, its authority, its genius, its rapidity, its slowness, its size, its retinue, and its influence... Iamblicus details all these things with the most minute precision, and our naturalists have not better seen caterpillars, flies, and aphids than our eclectic philosopher the gods, the angels, the archangels, the demons, and the genies of all species that flit about the intelligible world and in the sensible world . If one commits some mistake in theurgical evocation, then one gets a different specter from the one being evoked. You count on a god, and it is a demon you get. Besides, it is not the knowledge of sacred things that sanctifies. Every man can sanctify himself, but it is given only to the Theurgists, the marvelous men who hold the secret of the two worlds in their hands, to evoke the gods.

25. Prescience comes to us from on high; there is nothing human or physical about it in itself. Such is not the case with revelation. It is a weak voice that makes itself heard by us, in the passage from being awake into sleep. That proves that the soul has two lives, one united with the body, the other separate. Besides, as its function is to contemplate, and it contains in itself the reason of all the possibles, it is not surprising that the future is known to it. It sees future things in their pre-existing reasons. If it has received from the gods a sublime perception, an exquisite anticipation, a long experience, the faculty of observing, discernment, and genius, nothing of what has been, is, or will be will escape its knowledge.

26. Here are the true characteristics of divine enthusiasm. He who experiences it is deprived of the common use of his senses; his wakening state is not like that of other men; his acts are extraordinary; he no longer possesses himself; he no longer thinks and no longer speaks for himself; the life around him is absent to him; he does not feel the action of fire, or is not put off by it; he neither sees nor fears the ax raised over his head; he is transported into inaccessible places; he walks through flames; he walks on water, etc.... This state is the effect of the deity that exerts all its influence on the soul of the enthusiast by the intermediary of the organs of the body; he is then the minister of a god that besieges him, agitates him, pursues him, torments him, draws voices from him, lives in him, has taken over his hands, his eyes, his mouth, and who keeps him elevated above common nature.

27. Poetry and music have been consecrated to the gods. Indeed, there is in song and versification all the variety it is appropriate to introduce into the anthems we destine for the evocation of the gods. Each god has its characteristic. Each evocation has its form and requires its melody. The soul had heard the harmony of the heavens before it was exiled in a body. If some accents analogous to divine accents, the memory of which it never loses entirely, come to strike it, it shudders, yields to them, and is transported by them. Iamblicus plunges here into all the different kinds of divinations, magnificent idiocies through which we have not the courage to follow him . One can see in this author or in M. Brucker’s critical history of philosophy all the reveries of theological eclecticism on the power of the gods, illumination, invocations, magic, priests, and the necessity of the action of the victims’ smoke on the gods, etc.

28. The justice of the gods is not the justice of men. Man defines justice by relations drawn from his actual life and his present state. The gods define it relative to his successive existences and to the universality of our lives.

29. Most men have no freedom, are enchained by destiny, etc.

Principles of eclectic Theogony .

1. There is a God of all nature, the principle of all generation, the cause of the elementary powers, superior to all the gods, in whom everything exists, immaterial, incorporeal, master of nature, subsisting from all eternity by himself, first, indivisible and undivided, all by himself, all in himself, prior to all things, even to the universal principals and general causes of beings, immobile, enclosed in the solitude of his unity, the source of ideas, of intelligibles, of possibilities, self-sufficient, father of essences and of the entity, prior to the intelligible principle. His name is Noetarchus.

2. Emeth comes after Noetarchus: he is the divine intelligence that knows itself, from which all intelligences have emanated, which returns them all to its bosom, as to an abyss. The Egyptians placed Eicton before Emeth: it was the first exemplary idea; they worshiped Eicton with silence.

3. After these gods come Amem, Ptha, and Osiris, who preside over the generation of apparent beings, the preserving gods of wisdom, and his ministers in times when it engendered beings and produced the secret force of causes.

4. There are four male powers and four female powers above the elements and their virtues. They reside in the sun. The one that conducts nature in its generative functions has its domicile in the moon.

5. Heaven is divided into two, or four, or thirty-six regions, and these regions into several others; each has its deity, and all are subordinate to a deity that is higher than they. From these principles one must descend to others until the entire universe is distributed to powers that emanate from each other and all from a primary one.

6. That primary power drew matter from essence, and abandoned it to the intelligence which from it fashioned incorruptible spheres. It used for this work what was purest; from the rest it made corruptible things and the universality of bodies.

7. Man has two souls: one which he got from the first intelligible, and the other which he received in the sensible world. Each has preserved distinctive characteristics of its origin. The soul of the intelligible world endlessly returns to its source, and the laws of fatality are powerless against it; the other serves the movements of the worlds.

8. Everyone has his demon, which pre-existed the union of the soul with the body. It is he who united it with a body. It guides and inspires it. It is always a good genie. Bad genies are without district.

9. This demon is not a faculty of the soul, it is a being distinct from it and of a superior order, etc.

Principles of the Eclectics’ moral philosophy . Here is what can be found as generally accepted by thumbing through the works of Porphyry and Iamblicus.

1. Nothing is made of nothing. Thus the soul is an emanation of some more noble principle.

2. Souls existed before being united with bodies. They are fallen, and exile was their punishment. Since their fall they have passed successively into different bodies, where they have been held as in prisons.

3. It is by a chain of crimes and impieties that they have made their slavery longer and harder. It is for philosophy to mollify it and make it end. It has two means: rational purification and theurgical purification, which raise souls successively to four different levels of perfection, the last of which is theopathy.

4. Each level of perfection has its virtues. There are four cardinal virtues: prudence, force, temperance, and justice; and each virtue has its levels.

5. The physical qualities which are only advantages of conformation, the most noble use of which would be to be employed as instruments to rise to the other qualities, are in the last rank.

6. Moral and political qualities are those of the sensible man who, superior to his passions, after working long to make himself happy through the practice of virtue, devotes himself to procuring the same happiness to his peers. These qualities are practical.

7. Speculative qualities are those that properly constitute the philosopher. He is not content to do good; he also descends into himself, encloses himself, and meditates so as to know the truth of the principles by which he conducts himself.

8. Expurgative or sanctifying qualities are all those that raise man above his condition by the privation of everything that is beyond the needs of the narrowest nature. In this state, man has sacrificed all that can attach him to this life; his body becomes an onerous burden to him; he wishes for its dissolution; he is philosophically dead. But the perfect philosophical death is the point of human perfection closest to the life of the gods.

9. Speculative qualities consist in the habitual contemplation of the first principle and in the closest imitation of its virtues.

10. Theurgical qualities are those by which one is worthy even in this world of intercourse with the Gods, demons, heroes, and free souls.

11. Man can with the help of the forces he has received from nature alone rise successively from the deepest degradation to the final level of perfection: for the law of necessity has no invincible influence over the energy of the divine principle which he bears in himself, and with which there is no obstacle he cannot surmount.

12. If the separation of soul and body has taken place before the soul has raised itself out of its state of abasement and taken with it hidden traces of depravation, it undergoes the punishment of the underworld by entering into a new body which becomes its prison, crueler than the body it has left, which takes it farther away from its first principle, and makes its great revolution longer and more difficult.

There you have what we have found most important and least obscure in the philosophy of the ancient Eclectics. To learn more extensively about it, you must go to the sources and peruse what has come down to us from Plotinus, Porphyry, Julian, Iamblicus, Ammianus Marcelinus, etc...., without forgetting M. Brucker’s critical history of philosophy, [31] and the host of ancient and modern authors which are cited in it.

1. “I am not bound to swear allegiance to the doctrines of any master.”

2. “No philosopher so vain as not to see something of the truth.” Lactantius, Institutiones divinae , book VIII, chap. 7.

3. Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600); see Cardan, philosophie de, by Abbé Jean Pestre, and Jordanus Brunus, Philosophie de, an unsigned article that has been attributed to Diderot.

4. “Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me” (Vergil, Aeneid, book 10, v. 108).

5. Enthusiasm : “A prophetic or poetic fury that transports the spirit, enflames and lifts the imagination, and which makes one say surprising and extraordinary things” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ). For a long discourse on this topic see the article Enthusiasm by Louis de Cahusac.

6. “[...] For their aim is to get Him credited with the writing of some other composition, I know not of what sort, which may be suitable to their inclinations, and with having indulged in no sentiments of

antagonism to their gods, but rather with having paid respect to them in a kind of magical worship.” Saint Augustine, De consensus evangelistarum, 52, trans. Philip Schaff.

7. “There are in a certain region, he says, very small earthly spirits, subject to the power of evil demons. The wise men of the Hebrews, among whom was also this Jesus.” Saint Augustine, City of God , book XIX, Loeb Classics, p. 225.

8. “He himself, however, was pious, and like other pious men, found his way to heaven. So you must not blaspheme him, but rather pity the folly of men.” Ibid., p. 221.

9. Ibid., book II.

10. Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770), Historia critica philosophiae a mundi incunabulis ad nostram usque aetatem deducta [A critical history of philosophy from the origin of the world up to our own times], 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1742–1744).

11. Called Origen the Pagan.

12. This quotation, and probably many others in this article, are taken not too exactly from Brucker’s history: see note 10.

13. Again, the immediate source of the quotation seems to be Brucker.

14. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753).

15. It was believed that an excess of blood upset the fluid balance in the body, and thus compromised health.

16. Jean-François Baltus (1667–1743), S.J., returned to this subject several times in Réponse à l’Histoire des oracles de M. Fontenelle (Strasbourg, 1707) ; Défense des SS. Pères accusés de platonisme (Paris, 1711), and Jugement des SS. Pères sur la morale de la philosophie païenne (Strasbourg, 1719).

17. “The siren ends in a fish’s tail.”

18. “A human head and an equine neck.”

19. “A term which theologians have used to explain the opinion of the Lutherans, who believe that after the consecration, the body of Our Savoir Jesus Christ remains in the Eucharist, with the substance of the bread, rather than that only the two species remain in it” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

20. Socrates of Constantinople, author of Historia ecclesiastica , written about 1439; Claude Fleury (1640–1723), gives his version of the story of Hypatia in his 37-volume Histoire ecclésiastique (Paris, 1691-1758), 5:434-35.

21. See note 10.

22. The obvious manifesto here, though implicit, is D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to volume I (1751) of the Encyclopédie itself.

23. I.e., in the Renaissance.

24. “He looked to high heaven for light, and found it, sighing” (Vergil, Aeneid , book 4, verse 692). The reference is to Montesquieu, who died on 10 February 1755; his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws , was published in 1748. Volume 5 of the Encyclopédie, in which this article is found, was published later in 1755. The editors considered this loss of such great importance that they placed a Eulogy for President Montesquieu, written by d’Alembert, at the beginning of the volume.

25. There were already several academies: the Académie Française, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (humanities), the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Académie de Musique, and the Académie d’Architecture. The Encyclopédie emerged in the wake of the demise of the Société des Arts, which had aspired to be just such an academy for enlightened artisans or artistes . On the importance of this society and of artistes more generally for the Encyclopédie , see Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). As Bertucci notes, the original editor for the project (before Diderot and d’Alembert), was Abbé Gua de Malves, one of the most active members of the Société des Arts. It was Gua de Malves who expanded the publishers’ vision of translation to include substantial new material concerning the mechanical arts and trades, and who envisioned the Encyclopédie as a collaborative project. (Bertucci, 209ff).

26. The number of members of the Académie française, known as the “forty” or the “immortals.”

27. See Jaucourt’s article Quietism, which was a religious movement of the seventeenth century, thus not ancient, but he also argues that “it was not a new idea.”

28. Matter and body, being taken as synonyms or aspects of the same thing, are referred to as a singular.

29. The numbering is off here in the original; there are two points numbered 32, such that the last three points in this section are 32, 33, 34. The translator has rectified the numbering so that they are now points 33, 34, 35.

30. This misnumbering is in the original.

31. See note 10.