- phy to keep uppermost the thought of distinct
classes, types, or kinds of things in nature; the thought of the corresponding class concepts, general notions or universals in the human mind; and the thought of original ideas in the mind of God, as constituting principles or laws or modes of action in nature. This is not a world of chaotic chance, it is a world of rational and progressive order, and we are compelled to seek for the architecture an architect and a plan embodying rational ideas. Plato's ideas are eternal entities existing neither in nature nor in the mind of God, but nevertheless the archetypes, forms, or patterns after which every kind of things to which may be applied a common name was fashioned. Plato here held in an imperfect way the mighty truth of all philosophy, and the "Ideas" have reappeared in many guises,—as the forms or essences of Aristotle, existing only as realized in nature, as ideas in the mind of God, as the self-evolving categories of Hegel, as the perfecting principle and the fashioning laws in the doctrine of evolution.
Man in his preëxistent state dwelt in the region of immaterial ideas and gazed on the fulness of their truth. At his human birth he was made oblivious of his past existence, and growth in wisdom was a gradual realization in the consciousness of the eternal verities formerly known. As in Wordsworth, man's birth was but a "sleep and a forgetting;" growth in knowledge was a remembering. "Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home." The truth in this metaphor of philosophy, we may believe, is that man is of divine origin, and hence may know the divine revelations in his own being and in the material world. Here was foreshadowed in rough
