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IS PLATO'S GOD A PERSON?

are verities. To limit the reality of existence to the One, Parmenides denied it to the manifold, and Heraclitus denied it to both the One and the many that he might ascribe it to the Becoming. But Plato saw in the One* the thinker, and in the manifold his thoughts. And who shall separate between the mind and its thoughts? Both are one. Both are realities, and therefore we ascribe real existence both to the one and the manifold. Objects of sense have an existence so far as they participate in the ideal. Thus, man, house, table, exist but only because the ideas, man, house, table, are real existences. Our conceptions become perceptions. The manifold has thus a double existence. One in its ideals, another in phenomena. The latter is the world of sense, what men call the material, and what the vulgar suppose to be reality. But its existence is only borrowed. It is a shadow-a copy of that which is real, the realities are the ideas, the architypes. The manifold then is at once being, and the semblance of being.

But these ideas, are they identical with God or distinct from God? Plato answers sometimes that they are identical, and at other times that they are distinct from God. This lies at the root of Plato's theology, and leaves an uncertainty whether God in his system is merely abstract Being or a personal creative Deity.

*This is only an interpretation of Plato. He does not call God the One, he calls Him Being. "Plato's one," says Professor Thompson," is relation, a thought as against a thing or perception, a genus as opposed to individuals, &c., he rejects the absolute One of Parmenides at least under that name. Mind is with him the giver of the limit not the limit itself; the efficient rather than the formal cause; that cause which blends the limit with the unlimited; in short, a creative energy, if we may not say, conscious Creator."

Warburton ascribes the notion of the derivation of the souls of men from the Divine essence, and their final resolution into it to all the philosophers of antiquity, without exception. Archer Butler thinks this opinion unsupported in the case of Platonism, as it came from the hands of Plato; yet he says, "Plato may in the last analysis have embraced all things in some mysterious unity; an idea which in some vague sense it is impossible for human reason to avoid."

According to the Timaeus the universe was generated, it was modelled after an eternal pattern. It is a blessed god, having its soul fixed in the centre, yet existing throughout the whole. The soul was made before the body. Between soul and body there is an intermediate, made up of the indivisible and divisible essence. The three are mingled into one. The eternal universe was a living existence.; so the deity tried to make the sensible universe, as far as he could, similarly perfect. Time was generated with the universe. Eternity is a unity. The stars are generated gods, living existences endowed with souls. Fire, water, &c., should not be called "this" or " that," not being "things." Before the creation of the universe there were being, place, and generation. The charge of producing mortal natures was committed by the Creator to his offspring the junior gods.

IDEAS AND PHENOMENA.

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In the one case the ideas are the being of God; in the other God is a Being who creates the universe after the pattern of the ideas. But where is the phenomenal world? Do the ideas create the phenomenal or is it eternal? When God made the world, He made it after the ideal pattern, but on what did he impress the idea? Here Plato ascribes eternity to that which is non-existent, matter. This shadowy semblance of being existed. It was that in which the idea took shape and form, and yet it is nothing. It has the capacity to receive any variety of form, yet it is undetermined, shapeless, and invisible. It receives and preserves being, only as it has in itself the ideal form. The visible universe is the result of ideas with this substratum of non-existence. The universal mind is God. He is the highest of our ideas, and the source of all thinking and knowing. He is "the Good." In this supreme Idea all ideas have their ground and centre. Though itself exalted above division, yet in it the perceiver and the perceived, the subject and the object, the ideal and the real, are all one.

In returning to the Socratic faith in the capacity of the mind. to know the truth, and applying it to the nature of essence, Plato in reality returned to Eleatic ground, and in following out his method, he arrived at the absolute reality in the same way as Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno, had done before him. The God of reason was Being absolute. God must be this, and yet Plato recoiled from the immoveable Deity of the Eleatics. God is this, but He is something else even if it it be something inconsistent with this. He is moveable; He is intelligent; He is mind; the king of the world; the father of the universe; God who according to reason must be entirely unlike man, must yet again have attributes corresponding to those of men.

ARISTOTLE.-At the point where Plato took up the ground of Socrates, Aristotle differed from Plato. He said that Plato

* Plato, says Archer Butler, calls matter the unlimited; intelligence, the the limit-one and many-single and multiple-indivisible and divisibleunchangeable and changeable-absolute and relative-example and copythe good and the manifestation of the good-the object of science, eternal being and the object of opinions. Professor Thompson adds, "Bare matter he scarcely distinguished from place."

Plato dedicated his mature powers to the task of reconciling the Ephesian doctrine of a flux, and becoming with the Eleatic principle of Parmenides.— Professor Thompson's Notes.

Plato, like most philosophers after Anaxagoras, made the supreme Being to be Intelligence, but in other respects left His nature undefined or rather indefinite though the variety of definition, a conception floating vaguely between Theism and Pantheism.-Mackay's Progress.

had never proved how ideas have an objective reality, nor had he even rationally explained how objects of sense participate in the ideal. Socrates proclaimed the universal as the essence of the individual—and so far he was right. Plato raised the conception of a universal to the rank of being, independent of the individual, and there, said Aristotle, Plato was wrong. totle's method differed so much from Plato's that these two philosophers have come to be regarded as the respective representatives of the two great classes of minds into which all men may be divided. But their conclusions differ less than their methods.

Aristotle began with observations on the external world, but he found that in this way he could never get beyond the external. Sense acquaints us only with individual existence. We must get beyond this. We do get beyond this, for we have the knowledge of the universals. We have abstract ideas of things. Whence are these? From reason. The universal and the individual are then co-existent. We cannot separate a thing from our conception of it. The universal is immanent in the individual. It is as Plato said, the essence of the individual, but it is not itself independent of the individual. It is like form to the material in which form has its existence, yet only by means of the universal can we know the essence of any one particular thing. Though not independent, it is yet that which is actual, while the individual is only the potential. The absolute actuality is mind, and matter is the same essence in its potential being. There are four first causes, or first principles. Matter, form, moving cause, and end. Ás in a house there is the matter, the conception, the worker, and the actual house. These four determinations of all being resolve themselves into the fundamental ones of matter and form. The moving cause, form and end, stand together as opposed to matter. The last is that abiding something which lies at the basis of all becoming, and yet in its own being it is different from anything which has become. Whatever is, has been before potentially. Individual beings are produced by the coalescing of potential being and pure form. Every "That" is a meeting of potential and actual being. But there is a guiding power superintending these processes of progression. That power is a prime activity, a pure actuality, a first Mover. That Mover is God. The relation of the Divine to that of the world is left by Aristotle undertermined. In some places he seems to meet Plato, but in others he separates God from all being and becoming, con

templating Him as absolutely mind, not dwelling in the universe and moving it as the soul moves the body; but moving it externally, Himself unmoved and free from nature. The world has a soul, but it is not God. God is maker of the world soul, which is the movable mover outside of the immoveable Mover. "Aristotle's leaning was, seemingly, to a personal God, not a being of parts and passions, but a substantial head of all the categories of being. The doctrine of Anaxagoras revived out of a more elaborate and profound analysis of nature. Soon, however, the vision of personality is withdrawn. We have, in fact, reached that culminating point in thought where the real blends with the ideal; moral action and objective thought as well as material body are excluded. The Divine action on the world retains its veil of impenetrable mystery, and to the utmost ingenuity of research presents but a contradiction. God becomes the formal, efficient, final cause. He is the one Form comprising all forms. Acting and working is denied him, only activity of thought is ascribed to Him. The object of the absolute thought is the absolute good. In contemplating it the supreme Finality can but contemplate itself. Its immutable action is as the uniform self-circling revolution of the stellar heavens, and as all thought consists in contact and combination with the things thought, so all material inference being here excluded, the distinction of subject and object vanishes in complete identification, and the Divine thought is the thinking of thought. The energy of mind is life, and God is that energy in its purity and perfection. He is therefore life itself, eternal and perfect. This indeed seems all that is meant by the term God. Such,' says Aristotle, is the principle on which nature and the world depend.' If it be asked how these transcendent things came to be a part of a professedly empirical philosophy, and whence our knowledge of them, he replies that there is a faculty in the soul bearing the same relation to its proper objects as sensation does to phenomena, a faculty by which we recognize the object with certainty."

THE STOICS.-Plato and most of his predecessors endeavored to reduce all being to unity by denying reality to matter. As he admitted only reason for a channel of knowledge, he was consistent in regarding matter as non-being. But Aristotle, believing his senses as well as his reason, left the dualism mind and matter unreconciled. With Plato God was One and all things. With Aristotle God was One, and the universe a distinct existence. But as nothing can be which has not been

before. As there can be no addition to the totality of existence, Aristotle made two eternals, the one Form, the other Matter. God and the material from which the universe was made. The Stoics were not satisfied with the duality. They felt with Plato, that all must be one; that an infinite cannot leave a finite standing over against it. They were willing to trust the testimony of sense, and to admit that logically mind and matter God and the world are separate and distinct, yet the Stoics contended that actually they must be one. To show how God and the universe were distinct, and yet one was the problem of Zeno and his disciples. They did this by a philosophy of common sense, in which they acknowledged the truth both of our conceptions and our perceptions. The sensuous impression of an external object they looked upon as a revelation to the mind of the object itself. Sense furnished the materials of knowledge. Reason compared them and formed ideas. But if in this way all ideas came from the senses, how can we have an idea of pure spirit? The Stoics were consistent, they denied that we have such an idea, and with that they denied the existence of anything incorporeal. That every existence must have a body was the doctrine which moulded the whole of the theology of the Stoics. They did not define what a body was, that was impossible, bodies, beings of all kinds from the spiritual to the grossly material. But the very indefiniteness in which they left the idea of the corporeal, showed that they were far removed from the school of Epicurus. Their great enquiry was concerning the world-whence it is. Evidently it is not eternal as Aristotle supposed, since it is something produced. What we know of the world producer must be learned from the world itself. Being is evidently divisible into the active and the passive. A producing and a produced are the two obvious principles in the actual world. There must then be a similar two-foldness in the Original of the world, an active principle and a passive-the one a living power, the other a passive potentiality-the one that from which everything is, the other that through which everything is. The passive is the original matter-a lifeless and inert substance. The active is the efficient cause or producing power. But this cause must be corporeal, and yet how can we conceive of it under any known form of body. The Stoics tried to separate the living power which crcates the universe from every idea of gross matter, and at the same time they felt that to have a definite conception of that power we must clothe it with some material