As Plato made ideas eternal and immutable ; as they were all included in the idea of God, i. e., in God ; and as they constitute the only really existing beings, all that is phenomenal or that affects the senses being mere shadows of the real, it can hardly be denied that his system in its essential character is really pantheisti- cal. It is, however, an ideal Pantheism. It does not admit that matter or evil is a manifestation of God, or mode of his existence. Only what is good, is God ; but all that really is, is good.
The Cosmogony of Plato. Plato's cosmogony and anthropology confirm this view of his theology. Nothing has ever been created. All that is, is eternal ; not indeed in form, but in substance. Matter, something material, has always existed. Tiiis in itself is lifeless, but it has " a soul," an unintelHgent force by which chaotic or disorderly agitation or motion is produced. This unintelligent force God endowed with a portion of his own intelligence or loi}?, and it becomes the world- soul, i. e., the Demiurgus, the formative principle of the world. God is not therefore himself even the framer of the world. This is the work of the Demiurgus. This world-soul pervades the visi- ble universe, and constitutes one living, animated whole. This " world-soul " is individuahzed in star-gods, demons, and human souls. Thus Plato's system makes room for polytheism.
The Nature of the Soul. The soul, according to this theory, consists of intelligence which is of the substance of God, and of elements derived from the world-soul as distinguished from the loiJs which did not originally belong to it. All evil arises from the connection of the divine ele- ment in man with matter. The object of life is to counteract this evil influence by contemplation and communion with the ideal
1 The Gentile and the Jew, vol. i. p. 329. ' 2 /frjrf. p. 312,
326 PART I — THEOLOGY. [Ch. HI. — Anti-Theism.
world. Plato taught the preexistence as well as the immortality of the soul. Its state in the present stage of existence being de- termined by its course in its previous forms of being. It is, how- ever, according to his common mode of representation, strictly immortal. " Plato's monotheistic conception of God," says Bol- linger,^ " is one of the most refined to which ante-Christian specu- lation attained ; yet he contributed nothing whatever to the knowl- edge of the perfect, living, personality of God, and its absolute and unconditional liberty." His monotheism, it would seem, consisted in the acknowledgment of a universal intelligence which manifested itself as reason in all rational beings.
AriBtotle. Aristotle, although the disciple, was the great opponent of Plato and his philosophy. He rejected Plato's doctrine of ideas as chi- merical, as a hypothesis which was unnecessary and without evi- dence. In like manner he denied the existence of preexistent mat- ter out of which the world was fashioned. He believed the world to be eternal both in matter and form. It is, and there is no reason to doubt that it always has been and always will be. He admitted the existence of mind in man ; and, therefore, assumed that there is an infinite intelligence, of which reason in man is a manifesta- tion. But this infinite intelligence, which he called God, was pure intelligence, destitute of power and of will ; neither the creator nor the framer of the world ; unconscious, indeed, that the world exists ; as it is occupied exclusively in thought of which it is itself the object. The world and God are coeternal ; and yet, in a cer- tain sense, God is the cause of the world. As a magnet acts on matter, or as the mere presence of a friend stirs the mind, so God unconsciously operates on matter, and awakens its dormant powers. As the universe is a cosmos, an ordered system ; and as innumera- ble organized beings, vegetable and animal, exist in the Avorld, Aristotle assumed that there are " forms " inherent in matter, which determine the nature of all such organizations. This is very much what in modern language would be called " vital force," " vitality," <■' vis formativa,'' " Bildungstrieb," or Agassiz's "immaterial prin- ciple," which is different in every distinct species, and which con- stitutes the difference between one species and another. The soul is the ''forma " of the man. " It is the principle that gives form, motion, and development to the body, the entelecheia of it ; i. e., that substance, which only manifests itself in the body which is formed and penetrated by it, and continues energizing in it as the 1 The Gentile and the Jew, p. 329.