Plotinus
[Plato](/philosophy/thinker/plato) had left the world in two halves: the changing things the senses report, and the eternal Forms above them, more real than anything down here. Plotinus, five hundred years later, took that frozen diagram and set it in motion. He made it flow. Everything that exists, on his account, pours out from a single source so simple and so full that it cannot help overflowing, the way the sun cannot help shining; and everything that exists, having fallen from that source, is straining to climb back up to it. Reality has a current, and the current runs both ways. That double motion (everything streaming down from the One, the soul fighting its way back up) is the engine room of mysticism in three religions, and the man who built it would not even sit for a portrait.