Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH 299relation to this Mind, he held that the universe waseternal. Thus the two princes of Greek thought,while not Pantheists, so far as they conceived oneSupreme Mind, entirely detached from Matter, yetfailed to solve the problem of the relation of thisMind to the universe in such a manner as wouldescape the error of Pantheism. For not only wasMatter conceived by them as ever existing overagainst Mind, but their conception of Mind itselfappears to have been only an abstraction from thehuman mind; a generalising of Intellect parallel tothe conception of Materia prima as the substratum ofall body. At least the result in those who followedthem was that the one Supreme Mind and the humanmind fell under the same genus with only a quantitativedifference. And so they made this mind notindeed the material but yet the formal cause of theworld : the formal cause inasmuch as the world sub-sisted as it does because Mind was in it arranging andordering it, as the soul is in the body. And if thenotion of creation out of nothing is excluded, thenthis arranging and ordering must be by the substanceof the arranging and ordering power being likewisethe substance of things. This in philosophic languageis to make God the formal cause of the world.Now, excepting the Epicurean school, which wasmaterialistic, that is, placed in Matter itself the forcewhich made the world, it seems to have been the universaldoctrine of Greek philosophy after Plato andAristotle that the Logos in man is part of the onedivine Logos. We have seen this run through Stoicismas its generating and characteristic doctrine, thebasis of such moral teaching as it possessed. Cicerorepresented this not only as his own conclusion, the