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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: together from all accessible rags and bones of the dead world. Some
here will, perhaps, guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of
Iamblichus and Proclus.
Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to
him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to
Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell
back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational,
though more hopeless, school of Porphyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with
all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions--a dislike
intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common
herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common herd--
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