t such reminiscences being, in
their nature, imperfect and uncertain, we never can attain to absolute
truth. With Plato, the Beautiful is the perfect image of the true. Love
is the desire of the soul for Beauty, the attraction of like for like,
the longing of the divinity within us for the divinity beyond us; and
the Good, which is beauty, truth, justice, is God--God in his abstract
state.

[Sidenote: God is the sum of ideas.]

[Sidenote: The nature of the world and of the gods.]

[Sidenote: Triple constitution of the soul.]

[Sidenote: Transmigration and future rewards and punishments.]

[Sidenote: The physiology of Plato.]

From the Platonic system it therefore followed that science is
impossible to man, and possible only to God; that, however, recollecting
our origin, we ought not to despair, but elevate our intellectual aim as
high as we may; that all knowledge is not attributable to our present
senses; for, if that were the case, all men would be equally wise, their
senses being equal in acuteness; but a very large portion, and by far
the surest portion, is derived from reminiscence of our former states;
that each individual soul is an idea; and that, of ideas generally, the
lower are held together by the higher, and hence, finally by one which
is supreme; that God is the sum of ideas, and is therefore eternal and
unchangeable, the sensuous conditions of time and space having no
relation to him, and being inapplicable in any conception of his
attributes; that he is the measure of all things, and not man, as
Protagoras supposed; that the universe is a type of him; that matter
itself is an absolute negation, and is the same as space; that the forms
presented by our senses are unsubstantial shadows, and no reality; that,
so far from there being an infinity of worlds, there is but one, which,
as the work of God, is neither subject to age nor decay, and that it
consists of a body and a soul; in another respect it may be said to be
composed of fire and earth, which can only be made to cohere through the
intermedium of air and water, and hence the necessity of the existence
of the four elements; that of geometrical forms, the pyramid corresponds
to fire, the cube to earth, the octahedron to air, these forms being
produced from triangles connected by certain numerical ratios; that the
entire sum of vitality is divided by God into seven parts, answering to
the divisions of the musical octave, or to the seven planets;