A few words must be said about the doctrine of ecstasy in Plotinus.  He describes the conditions under which the vision is granted in exactly the same manner as some of the Christian mystics, e.g.  St. Juan of the Cross.  “The soul when possessed by intense love of Him divests herself of all form which she has, even of that which is derived from Intelligence; for it is impossible, when in conscious possession of any other attribute, either to behold or to be harmonised with Him.  Thus the soul must be neither good nor bad nor aught else, that she may receive Him only, Him alone, she alone.[146]” While she is in this state, the One suddenly appears, “with nothing between,” “and they are no more two but one; and the soul is no more conscious of the body or of the mind, but knows that she has what she desired, that she is where no deception can come, and that she would not exchange her bliss for all the heaven of heavens.”

What is the source of this strange aspiration to rise above Reason and Intelligence, which is for Plotinus the highest category of Being, and to come out “on the other side of Being” [Greek:  epekeina tes ousias]?  Plotinus says himself elsewhere that “he who would rise above Reason, falls outside it”; and yet he regards it as the highest reward of the philosopher-saint to converse with the hypostatised Abstraction who transcends all distinctions.  The vision of the One is no part of his philosophy, but is a mischievous accretion.  For though the “superessential Absolute” may be a logical necessity, we cannot make it, even in the most transcendental manner, an object of sense, without depriving it of its Absoluteness.  What is really apprehended is not the Absolute, but a kind of “form of formlessness,” an idea not of the Infinite, but of the Indefinite.[147] It is then impossible to distinguish “the One,” who is said to be above all distinctions, from undifferentiated matter, the formless No-thing, which Plotinus puts at the lowest end of the scale.

I believe that the Neoplatonic “vision” owes its place in the system to two very different causes.  First, there was the direct influence of Oriental philosophy of the Indian type, which tries to reach the universal by wiping out all the boundary-lines of the particular, and to gain infinity by reducing self and the world to zero.  Of this we shall say more when we come to Dionysius.  And, secondly, the blank trance was a real psychical experience, quite different from the “visions” which we have already mentioned.  Evidence is abundant; but I will content myself with one quotation.[148] In Amiel’s Journal[149] we have the following record of such a trance:  “Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the moment when it returns upon myself.  I feel myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing.  My travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my