[405] De Isid. et Osir., xlv. f.; De Vir. Moral., iii.; De Anim. Procr., v., 5. Plutarch supposes that the irrational soul in man is derived from the evil world-soul which he regards rather as senseless than as Satanic. It would thus very closely resemble the delirious Demiurgus of Valentinus and the ‘absolut Dumme’ of Eduard v. Hartmann.
[406] Diss., III., xxiii.
[407] Zeller, Ph. d. Gr., III., a, pp. 807 ff.
[408] Porph., Vita Plot., cap. iii.
[409] Ibid., cap. vii.
[410] Ibid., cap. xiii.
[411] Not, as is commonly stated, on the model of Plato’s Republic, which would have been a far more difficult enterprise, and one little in accordance with the practical good sense shown on other occasions by Plotinus.
[412] Porph., Vita, cap. xii.; Hegel, Gesch. d. Ph., III., p. 34.
[413] Porph., Vita, cap. ix.
[414] Ibid., xi. Leopardi has taken the incident referred to as the subject of one of his dialogues; Plotinus, the great champion of optimism, being chosen, with bitter irony, to represent the Italian poet’s own pessimistic views of life. The difficulty was to show how the Neo-Platonist philosopher could, consistently with the principles thus fathered on him, still continue to dissuade his pupil from committing suicide. Leopardi voluntarily faces the argumentum ad hominem by which common sense has in all ages summarily disposed of pessimism: ‘Then why don’t you kill yourself?’ (‘Your philosophy or your life,’ so to speak.) The answer is singularly lame. Porphyry is to think of the distress which his death would cause to his friends. He might have replied that if the general misery were so great as Plotinus had maintained, a little more or less affliction would not make any appreciable difference; that, considering the profound selfishness of mankind, an accepted article of faith with pessimism, his friends would in all probability easily resign themselves to his loss; that, at any rate, the suffering inflicted on them would be a mere trifle compared to what he would himself be getting rid of; and that, if the worst came to the worst, they had but to follow his example and ease themselves of all their troubles at a single stroke. A sincere pessimist would probably say: ‘I do not kill myself because I am afraid: and my very fear of death is a conclusive argument in favour of my creed. Nothing proves the deep-rooted necessity of pain more strongly than that we should refuse to profit by so obvious a means of escaping from it as that offered by suicide.’ Of course where pessimism is associated with a belief in metempsychosis, as among the Buddhists, there is the best of reasons for not seeking a violent death, namely, that it would in all probability transfer the suicide to another and inferior grade of existence; whereas, by using the opportunities of self-mortification which this world offers, he might succeed in extinguishing the vital principle for good and all. And Schopenhauer does, in fact, adopt the belief in metempsychosis just so far as is necessary to exclude the desirability of suicide from his philosophy. But the truth is, that while Asiatic pessimism is the logical consequence of a false metaphysical system, the analogous systems of European pessimists are simply an excuse for not pushing their disgust with life to its only rational issue.