n the other. Hence he has implicitly answered the difficulty
with which he started, of how the one could remain one and yet be
divided among many individuals, or 'how ideas could be in and out of
themselves,' and the like. Secondly, that in this mixed class we find
the idea of beauty. Good, when exhibited under the aspect of measure
or symmetry, becomes beauty. And if we translate his language into
corresponding modern terms, we shall not be far wrong in saying that
here, as well as in the Republic, Plato conceives beauty under the idea
of proportion.

4. Last and highest in the list of principles or elements is the cause
of the union of the finite and infinite, to which Plato ascribes the
order of the world. Reasoning from man to the universe, he argues that
as there is a mind in the one, there must be a mind in the other, which
he identifies with the royal mind of Zeus. This is the first cause of
which 'our ancestors spoke,' as he says, appealing to tradition, in the
Philebus as well as in the Timaeus. The 'one and many' is also supposed
to have been revealed by tradition. For the mythical element has not
altogether disappeared.

Some characteristic differences may here be noted, which distinguish the
ancient from the modern mode of conceiving God.

a. To Plato, the idea of God or mind is both personal and impersonal.
Nor in ascribing, as appears to us, both these attributes to him, and in
speaking of God both in the masculine and neuter gender, did he seem
to himself inconsistent. For the difference between the personal and
impersonal was not marked to him as to ourselves. We make a fundamental
distinction between a thing and a person, while to Plato, by the help of
various intermediate abstractions, such as end, good, cause, they appear
almost to meet in one, or to be two aspects of the same. Hence, without
any reconciliation or even remark, in the Republic he speaks at one time
of God or Gods, and at another time of the Good. So in the Phaedrus he
seems to pass unconsciously from the concrete to the abstract conception
of the Ideas in the same dialogue. Nor in the Philebus is he careful to
show in what relation the idea of the divine mind stands to the supreme
principle of measure.

b. Again, to us there is a strongly-marked distinction between a first
cause and a final cause. And we should commonly identify a first cause
with God, and the final cause with the world, which is His work. But
Plato, though not a P