into relation with
man and nature. God and the world are mere names, like the Being of
the Eleatics, unless some human qualities are added on to them. Yet the
negation has a kind of unknown meaning to us. The priority of God and
of the world, which he is imagined to have created, to all other
existences, gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other systems of
theology and philosophy, that of which we know least has the greatest
interest to us.

There is no use in attempting to define or explain the first God in the
Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer to God the
Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the Church seemed to
recognize 'the firstborn of every creature.' Nor need we discuss at
length how far Plato agrees in the later Jewish idea of creation,
according to which God made the world out of nothing. For his original
conception of matter as something which has no qualities is really a
negation. Moreover in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world
is described, even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single
act, but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a chaos
in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any more than the
Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal existence of matter. The
beginning of things vanished into the distance. The real creation began,
not with matter, but with ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God
took of the same and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the
finite and infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined
created the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out
of the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God
imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law
and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in a
disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there is an
eternal pattern of the world, which, like the 'idea of good,' is not
the Creator himself, but not separable from him. The pattern too, though
eternal, is a creation, a world of thought prior to the world of
sense, which may be compared to the wisdom of God in the book of
Ecclesiasticus, or to the 'God in the form of a globe' of the old
Eleatic philosophers. The visible, which already exists, is fashioned
in the likeness of this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no
truth of which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of