do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonic
ideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value,
their Socratic significance. They had become ontological entities,
whereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life.
This hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates its
meaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had already
been carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine,
while helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, was
able as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the human
blood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned all
human interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at all
condemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adopt
those mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. In
Saint Augustine's mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonic
figments became the Christian God, the Christian Church, and the
Christian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance than
that which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionary
philosophy from the soil of Greek culture.

[Sidenote: God the good.]

Saint Augustine's way of conceiving God is an excellent illustration of
the power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of giving
life and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from a
fabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. God, to
him, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. All
ideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divine
essence. "The rational soul understands God, for it understands what
exists always unchanged." ... "God is happiness; and in him and from
him and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. God is
the good and the beautiful." He was never tired of telling us that God
is not true but the truth _(i.e._, the ideal object of thought in any
sphere), not good but the good _(i.e._, the ideal object of will in all
its rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflecting
on his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and the
eternal, he conceived God, inadequately, of course, yet essentially,
because God signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfections
which the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of this
divine essence, a