Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/50

 outlines the spiritual idealism which in its fresh form appears to be gaining new ground to-day. God writes the book of nature; man is the son of God and reads and vaguely understands the meaning of the mighty volume.

Sensations are not knowledge, but the signs of knowledge, as words are the signs of thought, and the mind is innately active and rational, else there could be no interpretation of those signs. This appears to be the true explanation of the fact that we are educated by contact with nature. Without the signs, no communication of knowledge; without the native power of the reader, no reception of knowledge.

Plato held that the ideas were manifest in nature and were also innate in the mind; hence by self-*examination and comparison with the copies of the ideas in nature, man arrived at essential truth which was the work of philosophy.

Plato identified the Idea of Ideas with Cause, Mind, the Good or God. God was a personality and supreme above the gods. He was named by his chief attribute, the Good, and of this the True and the Beautiful were qualities. Cousin says, "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are only revelations of the same Being; that which reveals them to us is reason." "If all perfection belongs to the perfect being, God will possess beauty in its plenitude. The father of the world, of its laws, of its ravishing harmonies, the author of forms, colors, and sounds, he is the principle of beauty in nature. It is he whom we adore without knowing it, under the name of the ideal, when our imagination, borne on from beauties to beauties, calls for a final beauty