to what is akin to it.  This is the leading conception of the two great mystical dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus.  In the former, Socrates, in the words of the stranger prophetess Diotima, traces the path along which the soul must travel, and points out the steps of the ladder to be climbed in order to attain to union with the Divine.  From beauty of form and body we rise to beauty of mind and spirit, and so to the Beauty of God Himself.

He who under the influence of true love rising upward from these begins to see that beauty, is not far from the end.  And the true order of going or being led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.  This ... is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.[4]

That is a passage whose music re-echoes through many pages of English literature, especially in the poems of Spenser, Shelley, and Keats.

Plato may therefore be regarded as the source of speculative mysticism in Europe, but it is Plotinus, his disciple, the Neo-platonist, who is the father of European mysticism in its full sense, practical as well as speculative, and who is also its most profound exponent.  Plotinus (A.D. 204-270), who was an Egyptian by birth, lived and studied under Ammonius Sakkas in Alexandria at a time when it was the centre of the intellectual world, seething with speculation and schools, teachers and philosophies of all kinds, Platonic and Oriental, Egyptian and Christian.  Later, from the age of forty, he taught in Rome, where he was surrounded by many eager adherents.  He drew the form of his thought both from Plato and from Hermetic philosophy (his conception of Emanation), but its real inspiration was his own experience, for his biographer Porphyry has recorded that during the six years he lived with Plotinus the latter attained four times to ecstatic union with “the One.”  Plotinus combined, in unusual measure, the intellect of the metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason.  His sixth Ennead, “On the Good or the One,” is one of the great philosophic treatises of the world, and it sums up in matchless words the whole mystic position and experience.  There are two statements in it which contain the centre of the writer’s thought.  “God is not external to any one, but is present in all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.”  “God is not in a certain place, but wherever anything is able to come into contact with him there he is present” (Enn. vi.