In other words, monism is as unsatisfactory to reason as dualism. This was the chief point of agreement between Pythagoras and the Stoics; and Pragmatism has in modern times attempted to show a way out by a higher sanction of another kind.
Perhaps the reader may be interested in a side-light on this subject. Drews is interested in Plotinos only because Plotinos's super-rational divinity furnishes a historical foundation for Edouard Hartmann's philosophy of the Unconscious. It would seem, however, to be a mistake to use the latter term, for it is true only as a doubtful corollary. If the Supreme is super-conscious, it is possible to describe this logically as unconscious. But generally, however, unconsciousness is a term used to denote the sub-conscious, rather than the super-conscious, and the use of that term must inevitably entail misunderstandings. It would be better then to follow Pragmatism into the super-conscious, rather than to sink with Hartmann into the sub-conscious. It was directly from Plotinos[481] that Hartmann took his expression "beyond good and evil."
Having watched Numenius, for Platonic dualism; and Plotinos for Stoic monism, both appeal to a miracle as court of last resort, we may now return to that result of Platonism which has left the most vital impress on our civilization, its conception of the divine.
IV. PLOTINOS'S CREATION OF THE TRINITY.
Elsewhere we have seen how Numenius waged the traditional Academic feud with the Stoics bravely, but uselessly, inasmuch as it was chiefly a difference of dialects that separated them. In the course of this struggle, Numenius had made certain distinctions within the divinity, which were followed by Amelius, but are difficult to trace in Plotinos because, as a matter of principle, Plotinos[482] was averse to thus "dividing the divinity." Why so? Because he was waging a struggle with the Gnostics, who had followed in the footsteps of the Hermetic writings (with their Demiurge and Seven Governors); Philo Judaeus (with his five Subordinate Powers); Numenius and Amelius (with their triply divided First and Second gods);—after which we come to Basilides (with his seven Powers); Saturninus (with his Seven Angels); and Valentinus (with his 33 Aeons).
This new feud between Plotinos and the Gnostics is however just as illusory as the earlier one between Numenius and the Stoics. It was merely a matter of dialects. Plotinos indeed found fault with the Gnostics for making divisions within the Divinity; but wherever he himself is considering the divinity minutely, he, just as much as the Gnostics, is compelled to draw distinctions, even though he avoided acknowledged divisions by borrowing from Plutarch a new, non-Platonic, non-Numenian, but Aristotelian, Stoic (Cornutus and Sextus) and still Alexandrian (Philo, Septuagint, Lucian) term "hypostasis."
The difference he pretended to find between the Gnostic distinctions within the Divinity and his new term hypostasis was that the former introduced manifoldness into the divinity, by splitting Him,[483] thus allowing the influence of matter to pervade the pure realm of Being. Hypostasis, on the contrary, wholly existed within the realm of pure Being, and was no more than a trend, a direction, a characterization, a function, a face, or orientation of activity of the unaffected unity of Being. Thus the divinity retained its unity, and still could be active in several directions, without admixture of what philosophy had till then recognized as constituting manifoldness. But reflection shows that this is a mere quibble, an evasion, a paralogism, a quaternio terminorum, a pun. How it came about we shall attempt to show below.
In thus achieving a manifoldness in the divinity without divisions, Plotinos did indeed keep out of the divinity the splitting influence of matter, which it was now possible to banish to the realm of unreality, as a negation, and a lie. Monism was thus achieved ... but at the cost of two errors: denial of the common-sense reality of the phenomenal world,[484] and that quibble about three hypostases without manifoldness, genuinely a "distinction without a difference."
This intellectual dishonesty must not however be foisted on Aristotle[485] or Plutarch. The latter, for instance,[486] adopted this term only to denote the primary and original characteristics (or distinctions within) existing things, from a comparative study of Aristotle's "de Anima," and Plato's "Phaedo."[487] These five hypostases were the divinity, mind, soul, forms immanent in inorganic nature, "hexis," in Stoic dialect, and to matter, as apart from these forms.