ting and rendering similar to themselves the
natures which they have generated, are the paradigms, or exemplars of all
things. But as these divine causes act for their own sake, and on account
of their own goodness, do they not exhibit the final cause? Since
therefore intelligible forms are of this kind, and are the leaders of so
much good to wholes, they give completion to the divine orders, though
they largely subsist about the intelligible order contained in the
artificer of the universe. But dianoetic forms or ideas imitate the
intellectual, which have a prior subsistence, render the order of soul
similar to the intellectual order, and comprehend all things in a
secondary degree.

These forms beheld in divine natures possess a fabricative power, but
with us they are only gnostic, and no longer demiurgic, through the
defluxion of our wings, or degradation of our intellectual powers. For,
as Plato says in the Phaedrus, when the winged powers of the soul are
perfect and plumed for flight, she dwells on high, and in conjunction
with divine natures governs the world. In the Timaeus, he manifestly
asserts that the demiurgus implanted these dianoetic forms in souls, in
geometric, arithmetic, and harmonic proportions: but in his Republic (in
the section of a line in the 6th book) he calls them images of
intelligibles; and on this account does not for the most part disdain to
denominate them intellectual, as being the exemplars of sensible natures.
In the Phaedo he says that these are the causes to us of reminiscence;
because disciplines are nothing else than reminiscences of middle
dianoetic forms, from which the productive powers of nature being derived
and inspired, give birth to all the mundane phenomena.

Plato however did not consider things definable, or in modern language
abstract ideas, as the only universals, but prior to these he established
those principles productive of science which essentially reside in the
soul, as is evident from his Phaedrus and Phaedo. In the 10th book of the
Republic too, he venerates those separate forms which subsist in a divine
intellect. In the Phaedrus, he asserts that souls elevated to the
supercelestial place, behold Justice herself, temperance herself, and
science herself; and lastly in the Phaedo he evinces the immortality of
the soul from the hypothesis of separate forms.

Syrianus[11], in his commentary on the 13th book of Aristotle's
Metaphysics, shows in defense of Socrates