PREFACE.

what man has in common with the nature of things, what nature and man have in common with the author of both, and what is the relationship of the diverse and the whole with the one. This is proposed most seriously for Ontological the study of being speculation, and thus most freely investigated. Furthermore, since I am accustomed in the public exposition of my doctrines to employ psychological pertaining to the study of the mind terms above others, I have now begun this restoration of Alexandrian opinions with those things that pertain to man. And when the time arrives in which I myself am carried toward transcendentalism the philosophy of transcending empirical experience, and, with the light of psychological observation leading the way, I penetrate the darkness of beings, then at last will the Commentary of Proclus on Plato’s Parmenides be published to the light. I approach that obscure commentary on the obscure work of Plato, and that ancient monument of Greek and Egyptian wisdom, not without a certain religious dread, no differently than if I were gazing at one of the oldest temples that, half-ruined yet still immense, appear in the midst of the deserts of Upper Egypt. But if indeed time