THE meaning of the term Gnosis or Knowledge, as applied to a system of philosophy, may be illustrated by the language of Plato towards the end of the fifth book of the Republic, in which he distinguishes between knowledge and opinion as being concerned respectively with the real and the apparent. When to this distinction is added the further explanation that the objects of sense; the visible things of the world, belong to the class of phenomena and are objects of opinion, while the invisible essence of things, the one as distinguished from the many, is the true reality, discerned not by sense but by intellect, we shall be justified in identifying "knowledge" with that a apprehension of things which penetrates beyond their sensible appearances to their essence and cause, and which differs in name only from that "wisdom" which Aristotle tells us is by common consent admitted to consist in a knowledge of first Causes or Principles. In this general sense however, the term gnosis has nothing to distinguish it from the ordinary Greek conception of "philosophy", and so long as it remains solely within the region of philosophical inquiry and terminology, we do not find it generally employed to designate either philosophy as a whole or any special philosophical system. It is not till after the Christian era that the term comes into use as the distinct designation of a certain form of religious philosophy, emanating in some degree from Christian sources, and influenced by Christian ideas and Christian language. Even in the earlier association of Greek philosophy with a revealed religion, which is manifested in the GraecoJewish philosophy of Alexandria, though the teaching of Philo may be regarded as embodying the essential constituents of Gnosticism in an entire if an undeveloped form, we do not find the distinctive name of Gnosis or Gnostic applied to designate the system or its teachers.
About the Author: Henry Longueville Mansel, D.D. (1820 - 1871) was an English philosopher and ecclesiastic writer. He was born at Cosgrove, Northamptonshire (where his father, also Henry Longueville Mansel, fourth son of General John Mansel, was rector). He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London and St John's College, Oxford. He took a double first in 1843, and became tutor of his college. He was appointed reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855, and Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1859. He was a great opponent of university reform and of the Hegelianism which was then beginning to take root in Oxford. In 1867 he succeeded Arthur Penrhyn Stanley as regius professor of ecclesiastical history, and in 1868 he was appointed dean of St Paul's. He died in Cosgrove on the first of July 1871. The philosophy of Mansel, like that of Sir William Hamilton, was mainly due to Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Reid. Like Hamilton, Mansel maintained the purely formal character of logic, the duality of consciousness as testifying to both self and the external world, and the limitation of knowledge to the finite and "conditioned." His doctrines were developed in his edition of Aldrich's Artis logicae rudimenta (1849) - his chief contribution to the reviving study of Aristotle - and in his Prolegomena logica: an Inquiry into the Psychological Character of Logical Processes (1851), in which the limits of logic as the "science of formal thinking" are rigorously determined. In his Bampton lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought (1858) he applied to Christian theology the metaphysical agnosticism which seemed to result from Kant's criticism, and which had been developed in Hamilton's Philosophy of the Unconditioned. While denying all knowledge of the super sensuous, Mansel deviated from Kant in contending that cognition of the ego as it really is belongs among the facts of experience. Consciousness, he held - agreeing thus with the doctrine of "natural realism" which Hamilton developed from Reid - implies knowledge both of self and of the external world. The latter Mansel's psychology reduces to consciousness of our organism as extended; with the former is given consciousness of free will and moral obligation. These lectures led Mansel to a bitter controversy with the Christian socialist theologian Frederick Maurice. A summary of Mansel's philosophy is contained in the 5th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1860).