e of their essential inadequacy. What sounds are to
words and words to thoughts, that was a thing to its idea.

[Sidenote: Its essential fidelity to the ideal.]

Plato, however, retained the moral and significant essence of his ideas,
and while he made them ideal absolutes, fixed meanings antecedent to
their changing expressions, never dreamed that they could be natural
existences, or psychological beings. In an original thinker, in one who
really thinks and does not merely argue, to call a thing supernatural,
or spiritual, or intelligible is to declare that it is no _thing_ at
all, no existence actual or possible, but a value, a term of thought, a
merely ideal principle; and the more its reality in such a sense is
insisted on the more its incommensurability with brute existence is
asserted. To express this ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle; a
vehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more freely that he
inherited a religion still plastic and conscious of its poetic essence,
and did not have to struggle, like his modern disciples, with the
arrested childishness of minds that for a hundred generations have
learned their metaphysics in the cradle. His ideas, although their
natural basis was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they always
represented meanings and functions and were never degraded from the
moral to the physical sphere. The counterpart of this genuine ideality
was that the theory retained its moral force and did not degenerate into
a bewildered and idolatrous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul's
destiny to be her emancipation from those material things which in this
illogical apparition were so alien to her essence. She should return,
after her baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world of sense
and accident, into the native heaven of her ideas. For animal desires
were no less illusory, and yet no less significant, than sensuous
perceptions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the good and taught him,
through disappointment, to look for it only in those satisfactions which
can be permanent and perfect. Love, like intelligence, must rise from
appearance to reality, and rest in that divine world which is the
fulfilment of the human.

[Sidenote: Equal rights of empiricism.]

A geometrician does a good service when he declares and explicates the
nature of the triangle, an object suggested by many casual and recurring
sensations. His service is not less real, even if less obvious, when h