4th. REASON (νοῦς)--Intuitive Reason, is the organ of self-evident, necessary, and universal Truth. In an immediate, direct, and intuitive manner, it takes hold on truth with absolute certainty. The reason, through the medium of ideas, holds communion with the world of real Being. These ideas are the light which reveals the world of unseen realities, as the sun reveals the world of sensible forms. "The idea of the good is the sun of the Intelligible World; it sheds on objects the light of truth, and gives to the soul that knows, the power of knowing." [547] Under this light, the eye of reason apprehends the eternal world of being as truly, yes more truly, than the eye of sense apprehends the world of phenomena. This power the rational soul possesses by virtue of its having a nature kindred, or even homogeneous with the Divinity. It was "generated by the Divine Father," and, like him, it is in a certain sense "eternal." [548] Not that we are to understand Plato as teaching that the rational soul had an independent and underived existence; it was created or "generated" in eternity, [549] and even now, in its incorporate state, is not amenable to the conditions of time and space, but, in a peculiar sense, dwells in eternity; and therefore is capable of beholding eternal realities, and coming into communion with absolute beauty, and goodness, and truth--that is, with God, the Absolute Being.
[Footnote 547: ][ (return) ] Ibid., bk. vi. ch. xix.; see also ch. xviii.
[Footnote 548: ][ (return) ] The reader must familiarize himself with the Platonic notion of "eternity" as a fixed state out of time existing contemporaneous with one in time, to appreciate the doctrine of Plato as stated above. If we regard his idea of eternity as merely an indefinite extension of time, with a past, a present, and a future, we can offer no rational interpretation of his doctrine of the eternal nature of the rational essence of the soul. An eternal nature "generated" in a "past" or "present" time is a contradiction. But that was not Plato's conception of "eternity," as the reader will discover on perusing the "Timæus" (ch. xiv.). "God resolved to create a moving image of eternity, and out of that eternity which reposes in its own unchangeable unity he framed an eternal image moving according to numerical succession, which we call Time. Nothing can be more inaccurate than to apply the terms, past, present, future, to real Being, which is immovable. Past and future are expressions only suitable to generation which proceeds through time." Time reposes on the bosom of eternity, as all bodies are in space.
[Footnote 549: ][ (return) ] "Timæus," ch. xvi., and "Phædrus," where the soul is pronounced ἀρχὴ δὲ ἁγένητον.
Thus the soul (ψυχή) as a composite nature is on one side linked to the eternal world, its essence being generated of that ineffable element which constitutes the real, the immutable, and the permanent. It is a beam of the eternal Sun, a spark of the Divinity, an emanation from God. On the other side it is linked to the phenomenal or sensible world, its emotive part [550] being formed of that which is relative and phenomenal. The soul of man thus stands midway between the eternal and the contingent, the real and the phenomenal, and as such, it is the mediator between, and the interpreter of, both.
[Footnote 550: ][ (return) ] Θυµειδές, the seat of the nobler--ἐπιθυµητικόν, the seat of the baser passions.
In the allegory of the "Chariot and Winged Steeds" [551] Plato represents the lower or inferior part of man's nature as dragging the soul down to the earth, and subjecting it to the slavery and debasement of corporeal conditions. Out of these conditions there arise numerous evils that disorder the mind and becloud the reason, for evil is inherent to the condition of finite and multiform being into which we have "fallen by our own fault." The present earthly life is a fall and a punishment. The soul is now dwelling in "the grave we call the body." In its incorporate state, and previous to the discipline of education, the rational element is "asleep." "Life is more of a dream than a reality." Men are utterly the slaves of sense, the sport of phantoms and illusions. We now resemble those "captives chained in a subterraneous cave," so poetically described in the seventh book of the "Republic;" their backs are turned to the light, and consequently they see but the shadows of the objects which pass behind them, and they "attribute to these shadows a perfect reality." Their sojourn upon earth is thus a dark imprisonment in the body, a dreamy exile from their proper home. "Nevertheless these pale fugitive shadows suffice to revive in us the reminiscence of that higher world we once inhabited, if we have not absolutely given the reins to the impetuous untamed horse which in Platonic symbolism represents the emotive sensuous nature of man." The soul has some dim and shadowy recollection of its ante-natal state of bliss, and some instinctive and proleptic yearnings for its return.
[Footnote 551: ][ (return) ] "Phædrus," § 54-62.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,