and successive ideas which compose the model of the
intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that
perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent
chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties,
which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might
induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold
modification--of the first cause, the reason, or Logos, and the soul
or spirit of the universe. His poetical imagination sometimes fixed and
animated these metaphysical abstractions; the three archical on original
principles were represented in the Platonic system as three Gods, united
with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation; and the Logos
was particularly considered under the more accessible character of the
Son of an Eternal Father, and the Creator and Governor of the world.
Such appear to have been the secret doctrines which were cautiously
whispered in the gardens of the academy; and which, according to the
more recent disciples of Plato, [11a] could not be perfectly understood,
till after an assiduous study of thirty years. [12]

[Footnote 11: Plato Aegyptum peragravit ut a sacerdotibus Barbaris
numeros et coelestia acciperet. Cicero de Finibus, v. 25. The Egyptians
might still preserve the traditional creed of the Patriarchs. Josephus
has persuaded many of the Christian fathers, that Plato derived a
part of his knowledge from the Jews; but this vain opinion cannot be
reconciled with the obscure state and unsocial manners of the Jewish
people, whose scriptures were not accessible to Greek curiosity till
more than one hundred years after the death of Plato. See Marsham Canon.
Chron. p. 144 Le Clerc, Epistol. Critic. vii. p. 177-194.]

[Footnote 11a: This exposition of the doctrine of Plato appears to me
contrary to the true sense of that philosopher's writings. The brilliant
imagination which he carried into metaphysical inquiries, his style,
full of allegories and figures, have misled those interpreters who did
not seek, from the whole tenor of his works and beyond the images which
the writer employs, the system of this philosopher. In my opinion, there
is no Trinity in Plato; he has established no mysterious generation
between the three pretended principles which he is made to distinguish.
Finally, he conceives only as attributes of the Deity, or of matter,
those ideas, of which it is supposed that he made substa