ato here calls 'What Is' he elsewhere calls 'The Limiting
or Defining'; the 'Other' he calls 'The Unlimited or Undefined.' Each
has a function in the divine process. The thoughts of God attain
realisation in the world of things which change and pass, through the
infusion {166} of themselves in, or the superimposing of themselves
upon, that which is Nothing apart from them,--the mere negation of what
is, and yet necessary as the 'Other' or correlative of what is. Thus
we get, in fact, _four_ forms of existence: there is the Idea or
Limiting (apart); there is the Negative or Unlimited (apart), there is
the Union of the two (represented in language by subject and
predicate), which as a whole is this frame of things as we know it; and
fourthly, there is the _Cause_ of the Union, which is God. And God is
cause not only as the beginning of all things, but also as the measure
and law of their perfection, and the end towards which they go. He is
the Good, and the cause of Good, and the consummation and realisation
of Good.

This absolute Being, this perfect Good, we cannot see, blinded as we
are, like men that have been dwelling in a cave, by excess of light.
We must, therefore, look on Him indirectly, as on an image of Him, in
our own souls and in the world, in so far as in either we discern, by
reason, that which is rational and good.

[269]

Thus God is not only the cause and the end of all good, He is also the
cause and the end of all knowledge. Even as the sun is not only the
most glorious of all visible objects, but is also the cause of the life
and beauty of all other things, and the provider of the light whereby
we see them, so also {167} is it for the eye of the soul. God is its
light, God is the most glorious object of its contemplation, God we
behold imaged forth in all the objects which the soul by reason
contemplates.

[260]

The ideas whereof the 'Other' (or, as he again calls it, the 'Great and
Small' or 'More and Less,' meaning that which is unnamable, or wholly
neutral in character, and which may therefore be represented equally by
contradictory attributes) by participation becomes a resemblance, Plato
compared to the 'Numbers' of the Pythagoreans (cf. above, p. 25).
Hence, Aristotle remarks (_Met_. A. 6), Plato found in the ideas the
originative or formative Cause of things, that which made them what
they were or could be called,--their _Essence_; in the 'Great and
Small' he found the opposite pr