CHAPTER X. OF IDEAS.
An idea is a being incorporeal, not subsisting by itself, but gives figure unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its phenomena.
Socrates and Plato conjecture that these ideas are beings separate from matter, subsisting in the understanding and imagination of the deity, that is, of mind.
Aristotle accepted forms and ideas; but he doth not believe them separated from matter, or patterns of the things God has made.
Those Stoics, that are of the school of Zeno, profess that ideas are nothing else but the conceptions of our own mind.
CHAPTER XI. OF CAUSES.
A cause is that by which anything is produced, or by which anything is effected.
Plato gives this triple division of causes,—the material, the efficient, and the final cause; the principal cause he judges to be the efficient, which is the mind and intellect.