"The person who has found him is unable to tell this to others as he has seen it, for the discovery is not made by the soul who makes a statement, but by the soul who is initiated in and lies outstretched towards the divine light, not moving with its own movement, but keeping its own silence as it were. For if it is by nature not able to grasp the essential nature of other realities either by name or by a defining proposition or by scientific knowledge, but by intuitive thought (noĂŞsis) alone, as he himself says in the Letters, how could it discover the essential nature of the Demiurge in any other way than intuitively (noerĂ´s)? How could the soul, having found him in this way, be able to report what it had seen by means of nouns and verbs and convey this to others? After all, because discursive thought proceeds through combination, it is unable to express the nature that is unified and simple. ... If discovery takes place by the soul who keeps silent, how could the flow of language through the mouth be sufficient to bring to light the essential nature of what has been discovered?"
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pp. 157-8
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Proclus
Lycaeus (8 February 412 – 17 April 485 AD), called the Successor, was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher. As one of the last major classical philosophers, he set forth an elaborate and fully developed system of Neoplatonism, which had a profound influence upon Western medieval philosophy. His commentary on the first book of Euclid's Elements is one of the most valuable sources we have for the history of ancient mathematics, and its Platonic account of the status of mathematical objects was also in
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