the soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So inconsistent
are the forms in which he describes the works which no tongue
can utter--his language, as he himself says, partaking of his own
uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking.

We may remark in passing, that the Platonic compared with the
Jewish description of the process of creation has less of freedom or
spontaneity. The Creator in Plato is still subject to a remnant of
necessity which he cannot wholly overcome. When his work is accomplished
he remains in his own nature. Plato is more sensible than the Hebrew
prophet of the existence of evil, which he seeks to put as far as
possible out of the way of God. And he can only suppose this to be
accomplished by God retiring into himself and committing the lesser
works of creation to inferior powers. (Compare, however, Laws for
another solution of the difficulty.)

Nor can we attach any intelligible meaning to his words when he speaks
of the visible being in the image of the invisible. For how can that
which is divided be like that which is undivided? Or that which
is changing be the copy of that which is unchanging? All the old
difficulties about the ideas come back upon us in an altered form. We
can imagine two worlds, one of which is the mere double of the other, or
one of which is an imperfect copy of the other, or one of which is the
vanishing ideal of the other; but we cannot imagine an intellectual
world which has no qualities--'a thing in itself'--a point which has no
parts or magnitude, which is nowhere, and nothing. This cannot be the
archetype according to which God made the world, and is in reality,
whether in Plato or in Kant, a mere negative residuum of human thought.

There is another aspect of the same difficulty which appears to have no
satisfactory solution. In what relation does the archetype stand to the
Creator himself? For the idea or pattern of the world is not the thought
of God, but a separate, self-existent nature, of which creation is
the copy. We can only reply, (1) that to the mind of Plato subject and
object were not yet distinguished; (2) that he supposes the process of
creation to take place in accordance with his own theory of ideas; and
as we cannot give a consistent account of the one, neither can we of
the other. He means (3) to say that the creation of the world is not
a material process of working with legs and arms, but ideal and
intellectual; according to h