vine Intelligence in the organization of the world.[601]

[Footnote 598: "Metaphysics," bk. vii. ch. i.]

[Footnote 599: Butler's "Lectures on Ancient Philosophy," vol. ii. p.
178.]

[Footnote 600: "Timaeus," ch. xxiii.]

[Footnote 601: Ibid., ch. xiiii]

There has been much discussion as to whether Plato held that this
"_Receptacle_" and "_Nurse_" of forms and ideas was eternal, or
generated in time. Perhaps no one has more carefully studied the
writings of Plato than William Archer Butler, and his conclusions in
regard to this subject are presented in the following words: "As, on the
one hand, he maintained a strict system of dualism, and avoided, without
a single deviation, that seduction of pantheism to which so many
abstract speculators of his own school have fallen victims; so, on the
other hand, it appears to me that he did not scruple to place this
principle, the opposite of the Divine intelligence, in a sphere
independent of temporal origination.... But we can scarcely enter into
his views, unless we ascertain his notions of the nature of _Time_
itself. This was considered to have been created with the rest of the
sensible world, to finish with it, if it ever finished--to be altogether
related to this phenomenal scene.[602] 'The generating Father determined
to create a moving image of eternity (aionos); and in disposing the
heavens, he framed of this eternity, reposing in its own unchangeable
unity, an eternal _image_, moving according to numerical succession,
which he called _Time_. With the world arose days, nights, months,
years, which all had no previous existence. The past and future are but
forms of time, which we most erroneously transfer to the eternal
substance (aidion ousian); we say it was, and is, and will be, whereas
we can only fitly say _it is_. Past and future are appropriate to the
successive nature of generated beings, for they bespeak motion; but the
Being eternally and immovably the same is subject neither to youth nor
age, nor to any accident of time; it neither was, nor hath been, nor
will be, which are the attributes of fleeting sense--the circumstances
of time, imitating eternity in the shape of number and motion. Nor can
any thing be more inaccurate than to apply the term _real being_ to
past, or present, or future, or even to non-existence. Of this, however,
we can not now speak fully. _Time_, then, was formed with the heavens,
that, together created, they may together end, _if in