being fashioned by God from matter, which,
being capable of receiving any impress, may be designated with propriety
the Mother of Forms. He held that intellect existed before such forms
were produced, but not antecedently to matter. To matter he imputed a
refractory or resisting quality, the origin of the disorders and
disturbances occurring in the world; he also regarded it us the cause of
evil, accounting thereby for the preponderance of evil, which must
exceed the good in proportion as matter exceeds ideas. It is not without
reason, therefore, that Plato has been accused of Magianism. These
doctrines are of an Oriental cast.

[Sidenote: He asserts the existence of a personal God.]

[Sidenote: Nature of the soul.]

The existence of God, an independent and personal maker of the world, he
inferred from proofs of intelligence and design presented by natural
objects. "All in the world is for the sake of the rest, and the places
of the single parts are so ordered as to subserve to the preservation
and excellency of the whole; hence all things are derived from the
operation of a Divine intellectual cause." From the marks of unity in
that design he deduced the unity of God, the Supreme Intelligence,
incorporeal, without beginning, end, or change. His god is the fashioner
and father of the universe, in contradistinction to impersonal Nature.
In one sense, he taught that the soul is immortal and imperishable; in
another, he denied that each individual soul either has had or will
continue to have an everlasting duration. From what has been said on a
former page, it will be understood that this psychological doctrine is
essentially Indian. His views of the ancient condition of and former
relations of the soul enabled Plato to introduce the celebrated doctrine
of Reminiscence, and to account for what have otherwise been termed
innate ideas. They are the recollections of things with which the soul
was once familiar.

[Sidenote: Plato's Ideal theory.]

[Sidenote: Exemplars or types.]

The reason of God contemplates and comprehends the exemplars or original
models of all natural forms, whatever they may be; for visible things
are only fleeting shadows, quickly passing away; ideas or exemplars are
everlasting. With so much power did he set forth this theory of ideas,
and, it must be added, with so much obscurity, that some have asserted
his belief in an extramundane space in which exist incorporeal beings,
the ideas or origina