Kcti irafiirav . . . yiyvtoffKotev S' civ icai ra Trap' a\\t)~ Xiov iv ovvetTEi, Enn. iv, iii, 18). There is something of the same inspiration by contact and association which quickens and assimilates the eager intellect, and enables us to divine and appropriate rather than to understand the mystic communications of Plotinus. He seems himself to have been fully aware of the vagueness and unintelligibility of his compositions. They were bursts of sudden revelation, gushing out in hasty, spontaneous expression. The weakness of his sight, and the fever- ish impatience of his overteeming mind, prevented him from recasting what he had once committed to parch- ment. He. therefore, intrusted to Porphyry, a rheto- rician trained in the school of Longinus, the onerous task of collecting, revising, and co-ordinating his works. Porphyry undertook the office with reverence, and dis- charged it with affectionate fidelity. Plotinus had already produced and disseminated among his acolytes twenty-one books, when Porphyry came to Pome and attached himself to him: he added twenty-four during the six years that Porphyry attended his instructions, and he sent nine for revision to Porphyry, in his Si- cilian retreat, during the last period of his life. It is probable that these books did not embrace all the phil- osophical lucubrations of the master, but that there were other treatises or essays in various stages of de- velopment, which were left behind, or were preserved as notes or memoranda in the hands of the disciples— like the college notes of the lectures of Niebuhr, Sir William Hamilton, and many others, which have been expanded and published to complete or to extend the lessons of the preceptors. Of such materials there are ample evi- dences in the surviving remains of Plotinus, the greater part of which appears as brief and undeveloped jottings, often as bare hints, while numerous passages have been elaborated with great care, and are expressed with ad- equate precision, fulness, and accesses of rugged grace. Porphyry collected fifty-four essays of various dimen- sions, which, in imitation of the Platonic Trilogies and Tetralogies, be arranged in six series of nine each, to which he gave the name of Enneads; being guided in their combination and disposition by the agreement or affinity of their topics, and in their succession by the ascending progress from human observation and expe- rience, through the constituent principles of abstract nature, to ontology and theology. This is not the line of systematic exposition, nor is it, in its execution, the strict order of discovery. The whole body is irregular and confused; incomplete and often incoherent in its members; undeveloped and fragmentary in the expo- sition of the several parts. There are a few sufficiently thorough discussions : On Beauty (Enn. i, vi) ; On Nat- ure and the < >ne (Enn. iii, viii) ; On Psychical Problems (Enn. iv. iii-v); On the Species of Existence (Enn. iv, i-iii) ; and On Unity and Multiformity (Enn. vi. iv-v) ; to which may be added On the Essential Good (Enn. vi, vii and ix). That there was a definite system in the mind of Plotinus may be readily admitted, for there. is a general congruity of thought pervading the whole collection, and his characteristic principles were enter- tained from the first. This system might possibly be reproduced in its substantial integrity by a liberal em- ployment of conjecture and logical evolution. Such a system may have been propounded by Plotinus in his oral course — though, from his remains and from the tes- timony of antiquity, we may safely conclude that even the instructions to the school were marked by the ab- sence of method, consecution, perspicuity, and propor- tion. The written expansions of his doctrine appear to have been determined by transitory contingencies — the doubts of his scholars, the cavils of opponents, the ap- parent urgency of particular questions, as in the papers Against the Gnostics (Enn. ii, ix). Yet even what was written in this disconnected manner was composed at various times, in diverse moods, and left in different degrees of completion. None of the books can be re- garded as a just, rounded, and complete essay. They
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arc, for the most part, a collection of remarks upon dis- continuous points, associated with a common subjecl of inquiry, thus resembling the Pensees, lik( Pascal, which were for a long time a favorite bu( imperfect form of enunciation with French thinkers. This, however, does nol exhausl the impediments to any coherenl an. I satisfactory ordination ol the produc- tions of Plotinus. There i- no reason to suppose thai all hi- writti 11 remains were in a condition to be made available. There i- reason t>> believe that other ma- terials besides those employed l>\ Porphyry, either in his form of Bynoptical abridgments or <>( formal trac- tates, were in the hands of other disciples. In view "f all the difficulties of his position, so far as they can now l«- ascertained ami appreciated, there is a concert of opinion among scholars ami critics that the procedure of Porphyry was judicious, ami that no better plan of arrangement could have been adopted than tie- aggre- gation of the fragmentary materials in accordance with i!n- loose bond of coherence supplied by similarity of Bubject, although this plan utterly disregards the chron- ological order of their production, and shuffles con- fusedly together the writings of very distinct periods. i nee would result from this disorder, if