Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE STANDING-GROUND OF PHILOSOPHY 1/3such a God; that the legislator, the poet, the artist,and last of all the philosopher, merely exert theirseveral powers to give expression, as each best may,to this intuitive judgment. But was he in this likewisea Platonist ? Had Plato preceded him by nearlyfive hundred years in setting forth such a God ? Inthe Timceus we certainly find delineated an agent conceivedas preceding the world, a divine constructor orartist who puts together the universe, which is a mixedgeneration of mind and necessity. This agent, so faras mind, or intelligent force, can persuade matter,which it finds pre-existing, and in which resides an" erratic,1 irregular, random causality," to yield to itssway, produces what is best under the circumstances.The Kosmos, the orderlv W arrangementIwhich extendsthrough all nature, is the result of his skill. " ThisKosmos, having received its complement of animals,mortal and immortal, has become greatest, best, mostbeautiful and most perfect, a visible animal comprehendingall things visible, a perceivable God, the imageof the cogitable God: this Uranus, one and only-begotten."So far as this Dio's Demiurge is the reproductionof Plato's. But now we come to an important variationbetween them. The Demiurge of Plato is entirelydistinct from the generated gods. First he makes theKosmos, which has both a soul to itself implanted byhim, and a body of the primordial matter, and so isitself a god, though with many separate gods residentwithin it, or attached to it. Such are the sun, themoon, the planets, the stars, which are generated orconstructed by the Demiurge as portions or members1 Grote, who (Plato iii. 293) translates, as follows, the last wordsof the