The grand defect of the Platonic philosophy is the transformation of abstract ideas into realities. A man can only perform a fine action, because a beauty really exists, which is its archetype.
We cannot perform any action, without forming an idea of the action—therefore these ideas exist I know not where, and it is necessary to study them.
God formed an idea of the world before He created it. This was His logos: the world, therefore, is the production of the logos!
What disputes, how many vain and even sanguinary contests, has this manner of argument produced upon earth! Plato never dreamed that his doctrine would be able, at some future period, to divide a church which in his time was not in existence.
To conceive a just contempt for all these foolish subtilties, read Demosthenes, and see if in any one of his harangues he employs one of these ridiculous sophisms. It is a clear proof that, in serious business, no more attention is paid to these chimeras than in a council of state to theses of theology.
Neither will you find any of this sophistry in the speeches of Cicero. It was a jargon of the schools, invented to amuse idleness—the quackery of mind.
SOUL.
SECTION I.
This is a vague and indeterminate term, expressing an unknown principle of known effects, which we feel in ourselves. This word "soul" answers to the "anima" of the Latins—to the "pneuma" of the Greeks—to the term which each and every nation has used to express what they understood no better than we do.