Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

42 SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM
comparatively late; and a great deal of attention is
now being paid to it. In early Greek philosophy
the question was rather as to the relations of change
and permanence. To Heraclitus change is the great
reality; everything changes, flows. Plato met the
Heracliteans by pointing out that ideas are less
changing than matter. A mathematical relation,
for example, remains true and real though the materials
that it concerns are changing. Geometrical
roundness and squareness are changeless and timeless,
however perishable round things and square
things may be. Thus Plato set an impassible gulf
between mental forms and material objects.
The
former have their perfect and eternal existence in
God, who is pure mind. The latter, including the
entire visible world, are perishable. Time is not
real, but is a moving image of immovable eternity;
It was created, and it will cease to be.
Aristotle, that
greatest of ancient students of physical facts, refused
to admit the Impassible gulf. He gave to
every object Its
own form, and made the world and
time as eternal as God and eternity. Time Is the
number of motion, and motion proceeds In some way
from an unmovable mover, God.
Discontented with the static look of Aristotle's
realism, the Neoplatonlsts tried to rehabilitate Plato
by establishing a closer connection between time and