The Ideas of Plato
A philosopher said to me: “Since we can know nothing of the beyond, let us make a virtue of necessity, and learn exactly what there is on our side of the veil.” The advice is excellent. Astronomy teaches us that perfect order reigns in the sphere studied by that science. The world may be the result of certain chemical combinations which have met by chance; but if chance has introduced order in these chemical combinations, it might as easily derange them and replace them by disorder; yet the astronomers have not succeeded in discovering the least indication of disorder in their domain; that we know positively.
It is generally admitted that the world has had a beginning; is it reason or the absence of reason that we should expect to find at the origin of the world? Does it proceed so regularly in obedience to laws? Sages have said, “Laws govern matter, forces, movements, all things that are, but might not have been, just as the world is or exists, but might not have been.”
Since Darwin wrote, much discussion has taken place with regard to the origin of species, no one has thought of asking whether the Greek philosophers had anything to say on the subject. If, for instance, it had been discovered that the law of certain sidereal phenomena compelled a circular or elliptical movement, or any other geometrical form, then this law, in itself, would be a geometrical idea; that could exist, although the phenomenon in which it was realised, might disappear with the world itself.
According to Kepler, geometry has given forms for all creation, and Kepler has also said that God governs all things in conformity with Himself; in that case geometry would be anterior to the world and co-eternal with God, and if these geometrical forms which are perfect have been thought out by a perfect intelligence, is it not the same with all the component parts of the vegetable and animal kingdoms? Would a horse, or whatever the ancestor of a horse may be, have been produced spontaneously by nature? Must there not have been a type of some kind, which was realised in all horses, multiplying and varying for every new species? And in the same manner also for all trees and plants. The first types of these things existed before man, that other part of nature, and before all that man calls the good, the beautiful. Were not all these things thought and willed by a mind capable of thinking and willing?
Thus Plato reasons.
It is received in theology as in philosophy that all things have their ideal in God; matter itself has its conception and raison d’être in God; St Thomas Aquinas was able to say with no trace of pantheism, “God is eminently all things.”