Ptomaine

“ Petticoat said, casually, as he powdered his nose in the recesses of his triplicate mirror.
“A ball?”
“Oh, I don't mean a dance—I mean—er—well, what you'd call a sociable, I suppose.”
“Oh, ain't we got fun!”
“And, I say, Warble, I've got to chase a patient now; can you hike about a bit by yourself?”
“Course I can. Who's your patient?”
“Avery Goodman—the rector of St. Judas' church. He will eat terrapin made out of—you know what. And so, he's all tied up in knots with ptomaine poisoning and I've got to straighten him out. It means a lot to us, you know.” ”

“ The evidence put forward by the prosecution carried conviction to the jury, and the prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to death.
With reference to the more important points raised by the defence it may be mentioned that no known ptomaine (i.e., alkaloid formed by decomposition in the body after death) produces the same physiological effects as aconitine, and that the conclusions of Dr. Stevenson and Dr. Dupré were based upon the results of comparative tests, which showed that as little as 1⁄2000 grain of aconitine could be recognised in this way. ”

“ He was not unlike John Barrymore in The Jest, and Warble fell for him afresh.
“You are so beautiful—” she wailed. “I wish you loved me—”
“I wish I did,” he returned, honestly, “but you are such a butter-ball.”
“Oh, Butterfly Thenter calls anybody Butter-ball who weights over ninety-five! If you're so cut up about it I won't live under this roof another minute! I can earn my own living, and all I want, too! You can get a divorce and marry some thread of a woman who has ptomaines all the time!” ”

“ Since the soul is God the world is nothing. No more than the eye can taste or the ear handle, can the created comprehend the Divine. “If we are to know anything purely,” we read again in Plato, “we must be separate from the body.” And Plotinus adds that he who enters in quest of the One must ascend to the First Principle of his own nature. The First Principle of Plotinus is the same as Meister Eckhart’s Foundation of the Soul. It is the One. Intellect may be a means to reach it, but it is certainly not an end. The Mystic philosopher thinks himself into an ecstasy ”

“ The representative figure amongst the Neo-Platonists is Plotinus. His comprehensive mind gathered up the main threads of Alexandrian thought, and wove them into the fabric of a vast speculative system. The system is as much a religion as a philosophy. It is the triumph of uncompromising monism. The last traces of dualism have been eradicated. God, for Plotinus, is true being and the only being. He is all and in all. God is an impersonal Trinity, comprising the One, the cosmic reason and the cosmic soul. The One is primal, ineffable, behind and beyond all human experience. ”

“ Plutarch says that Timon had an associate, virtually a friend, not unlike himself, Apemantus, on whom he freely vented his spite and scorn for all the world beside and that he also took a special liking to Alcibiades in his youth, perhaps as to one fitted and destined to do an untold amount of mischief.] if there ever was such a man [Footnote: Latin, nescio, quem, I know not whom, or of whom I am ignorant, that is, there may or may not have been such a man.] he yet cannot help seeking some one in whose presence he may vomit the venom of his bitterness. ”

“ There are few things, we think, more delightful than a Pantomime—that is, a good Pantomime, such as is usually produced at Covent Garden. We know there are a set of solemn pompous mortals about town, who express much dignified horror at the absurdities of these things, and declaim very fluently, in good set terms, upon the necessity of their abolition. Such fellows as these are ever your dullest of blockheads. Conscious of their lack of ideas, they think to earn the reputation of men of sterling sense, by inveighing continually against what they deem to be frivolity ”

“ As to the essence and spirit of the teaching of Plotinus,
“He cannot be termed, strictly or exclusively, a Neo-Platonist: he is equally a Neo-Aristotelian and a Neo-Philosopher in general. He has himself one pervading idea, to which he is always recurring, and to which he accommodates, as far as he can, the reasonings of all his predecessors. It is his object to proclaim and exalt the immanent divinity of man, and to raise the soul to a contemplation of the good and the true, and to vindicate its independence of all that is sensuous, transitory, and special. ”

“ I hope, my dear Crato, that this cursory description of the Pantomime may mitigate your wrath against its devoted admirer. If you can bring yourself to bear me company to the theatre, you will be captivated; you will run Pantomime-mad. I shall have no occasion to exclaim, with Circe,
Strange, that my drugs have wrought no change in thee!
The change will come; but will not involve an ass's head, nor a pig's heart, but only an improved understanding. In your delight at the potion, you will drain it off, and leave not a drop for any one else. ”

“ Ptolemy, as soon as an account of the action was brought him, gave order that Cleomenes's body should be flayed and hung up, and that his children, mother, and the women that were with her, should be killed. Amongst these was Panteus's wife, a beautiful and noble-looking woman, who had been but lately married, and suffered these disasters in the height of her love. Her parents would not have her embark with Panteus, so shortly after they were married, though she eagerly desired it, but shut her up, and kept her forcibly at home. ”

“ From that, come the Soul of the World and the souls of men. Matter, which is no-thing, gains form and partial reality when informed with soul. Plotinus’s attitude toward knowledge of the concrete natural or historic fact, displays a transcendental indifference exceeding that of Plato. Perceptible facts with him are but half-real manifestations of the informing spirit. They were quite plastic, malleable, reducible. Moreover, thoughts of the evil of the multiple world of sense held for Plotinus and his followers a bitterness of ethical unreality which Plato was too great an Athenian to feel. ”

“ It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the weakness of his conceptions comes out. Plotinus was an earnest thinker, slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an infallible oracle, with a “He says,” as if there were but one he in the universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down. His dialectic is far superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come after him. He is a seeker. ”

“ Amidst the great qualities of the philosopher, we discover some ridiculous singularities. Plotinus never permitted his picture to be taken, and he observed, that to see a painting of himself in the following age, was beneath the notice of an enlightened mind. These reasons also induced him to conceal the day, the hour, and the place of his birth. He never made use of medicines, and though his body was often debilitated by abstinence or too much study, he despised to have recourse to a physician, and thought that it would degrade the gravity of a philosopher. ”

“ It was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and ’tis very likely he had good reason for it,—that his body was a bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect. ”

“ Whether Plotinus was or was not the disciple of Ammonius, it is beyond all doubt that he considered himself the disciple of Plato. There are more than a hundred references to that philosopher in the Enneads, against less than thirty references to all the other ancient thinkers put together;428 and, what is more remarkable, in only about half of them is he mentioned by name. The reader is expected to know that ‘he’ always means Plato. ”

“ In one respect Plutarch transcends Plato, and, so far as I know, all pre-Christian philosophers. Plato’s theism bears a close kindred to pantheism. His God, if I may be permitted the phrase, is only semi-detached. He becomes the creator rather by blending his essence with eternal matter, than by shaping that matter to his will. He is rather in all things than above all things, rather the Soul of the universe than its sovereign Lord. But in Plutarch’s writings the Supreme Being is regarded as existing independently of material things ”

“ In this connexion we may deal with the question whether the philosophy of Plotinus is properly described as a pantheistic system. Plotinus was certainly not a pantheist in the same sense as Spinoza and Hegel. With him, the One and the All are not identical; although impersonal and unconscious, his supreme principle is not immanent in the universe, but transcends and creates it: the totality of things are dependent on it, but it is independent of them. ”

“ Dualistic ethics which find in matter the principle of unreality or evil, diminish the human interest in physical fact. The ethics of Plotinus consisted in purification and detachment from things of sense. This is asceticism. And Plotinus was an ascetic, not through endeavour, but from contempt. He did not struggle to renounce the world, but despised it with the spontaneity of a sublimated temperament. He seemed like a man ashamed of being in the body, Porphyry says of him. ”

“ Plutarch had been content to state the Unity, Eternity, Absoluteness of God. He needed such a conception to make the world intelligible; but he defined his conception with a rare simplicity which satisfies the practical mind as well as meets the essential requirements of Philosophy. But the Neo-Platonist theology refines and subdivides and abstracts to an extent which puzzles and bewilders its most earnest students, and removes God infinitely further from mankind than even the Ideas of Plato are removed. “According to Plotinus, God is Goodness without Love. ”

“ With a temperament more active and practical than that of Plotinus, with more various ability and far more facility in adaptation, with an erudition equal to his fidelity, blameless in his life, pre-eminent in the loftiness and purity of his ethics, he was well fitted to do all that could be done towards securing for the doctrines he had espoused that reputation and that wider influence to which Plotinus was so indifferent. ”

“ No one coins them independently out of his own brain; little by little men are impelled along the path that leads to such conclusions. Plotinus was a careful student of the philosophers that preceded him. He saw that mind must be distinguished from matter, and he saw that what is given a location in space, in the usual sense of the words, is treated like a material thing. On the other hand, he had the common experience that we all have of a relation between mind and body. ”

“ If the possibilities, "per variation et mutation" of gorgeous modern Pantomime, are exhausted—"which," as Euclid observes, "is impossible"—except we may "add a rider" (as the Clown in the Circle might observe) that Pantomime is, in itself, a reductio ad absurdum—then, perchance, Sir Druriolanus Magnificus may give us next Christmas a Shorter Opening, say ten Scenes, to be followed by six Harlequinade Scenes, treating, by way of "Review," all the leading topics of Ninety-Three. Nous verrons—at least, such is our hope. ”

“ Ptolemy himself was quite young, and therefore Pothinus, who had the principal administration of all affairs, called a council of the chief men, those being the greatest whom he pleased to make so, and commanded them every man to deliver his opinion touching the reception of Pompey. It was, indeed, a miserable thing, that the fate of the great Pompey should be left to the determinations of Pothinus the eunuch, Theodotus of Chios, the paid rhetoric master, and Achillas the Egyptian. ”

“ There was no creed in Neoplatonism, and, therefore, what was believed has to be deduced from a study of the Enneads of Plotinus, so-called as consisting of a series of books, six in all, each containing nine treatises. The logical germ of the conception is that the One emits continually the Nous or intelligence ”

“ Plotinus, indifferent to the material universe, had been content to inherit and transmit the doctrine of the world’s vitality. That notion now became the nucleus of a complex system of sympathies and antipathies. It suggested remedies for every disease, whether of mind or body. It prompted a thousand fantastic appliances and symbols. But at the same time it rendered the enquirer more keenly observant of natural phenomena. Extolling Trismegistus to the skies, and flinging his Galen into the fire, Paracelsus declared the world his book. ”

“ Can anything so thoroughly destroy the phantom of false enthusiasm as establishing the real object of the true? Let us then boldly enlist ourselves under the banners of Plotinus, and, by his assistance, vigorously repel the encroachments of error, plunge her dominions into the abyss of forgetfulness, and disperse the darkness of her baneful night. For indeed there never was a period which required so much philosophic exertion, or such vehement contention from the lovers of Truth. On all sides nothing of philosophy remains but the name, and this is become the subject of the vilest prostitution ”

“ Without adding anything to the sum of positive knowledge, Plotinus produced an effect on men’s thoughts not unworthy of the great intellect and pure life which he devoted to the service of philosophy. No other thinker has ever accomplished a revolution so immediate, so comprehensive, and of such prolonged duration. He was the creator of Neo-Platonism, and Neo-Platonism simply annihilated every school of philosophy to which it was opposed. ”