is own fine expression, 'the thought of
God made the God that was to be.' He means (4) to draw an absolute
distinction between the invisible or unchangeable which is or is the
place of mind or being, and the world of sense or becoming which is
visible and changing. He means (5) that the idea of the world is prior
to the world, just as the other ideas are prior to sensible objects; and
like them may be regarded as eternal and self-existent, and also, like
the IDEA of good, may be viewed apart from the divine mind.

There are several other questions which we might ask and which can
receive no answer, or at least only an answer of the same kind as the
preceding. How can matter be conceived to exist without form? Or, how
can the essences or forms of things be distinguished from the eternal
ideas, or essence itself from the soul? Or, how could there have been
motion in the chaos when as yet time was not? Or, how did chaos come
into existence, if not by the will of the Creator? Or, how could there
have been a time when the world was not, if time was not? Or, how could
the Creator have taken portions of an indivisible same? Or, how could
space or anything else have been eternal when time is only created? Or,
how could the surfaces of geometrical figures have formed solids? We
must reply again that we cannot follow Plato in all his inconsistencies,
but that the gaps of thought are probably more apparent to us than to
him. He would, perhaps, have said that 'the first things are known only
to God and to him of men whom God loves.' How often have the gaps in
Theology been concealed from the eye of faith! And we may say that only
by an effort of metaphysical imagination can we hope to understand Plato
from his own point of view; we must not ask for consistency. Everywhere
we find traces of the Platonic theory of knowledge expressed in an
objective form, which by us has to be translated into the subjective,
before we can attach any meaning to it. And this theory is exhibited
in so many different points of view, that we cannot with any certainty
interpret one dialogue by another; e.g. the Timaeus by the Parmenides or
Phaedrus or Philebus.

The soul of the world may also be conceived as the personification of
the numbers and figures in which the heavenly bodies move. Imagine
these as in a Pythagorean dream, stripped of qualitative difference and
reduced to mathematical abstractions. They too conform to the principle
of the same, and