Crossword-Solution: NEOPLATONISTS 13 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 15

The only element of Plato’s thought to which they clung was, as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the mysterious powers of numbers, and of the regular solids.

Very probably he connected it with the other object of his especial hatred, that fashion of interpreting Homer allegorically, which was springing up in his time, and which afterwards under the Neoplatonists rose to a frantic height, and helped to destroy in them, not only their power of sound judgment, and of asking each thing patiently what it was, but also any real reverence for, or understanding of, the very authors over whom they declaimed and sentimentalised.

Ritter, I think, it is who complains naïvely enough, that the Alexandrian Neoplatonists had a bad habit, which grew on them more and more as the years rolled on, of mixing up philosophy with theology, and so defiling, or at all events colouring, its pure transparency.

And one can no more doubt that before writing them he had studied Philo, and was expanding Philo’s thought in the direction which seemed fit to him, than we can doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists.

These brutes in human form, these souls wallowing in earthly mire, could hardly, in the Neoplatonists’ eyes, be objects of the Divine desire.