Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/74

56 unity, according as we consider it as the beginning or as the end of things. The one creates: the other creates not, the c rest for which nature strives and which consists in the restoration of things to their original unity. Be tween these terms lie the two forms of created things. They have the same division as the other two. The second creates: the third creates not. The one is the world of ideas, the pattern upon which the other, the sensible universe, is made. It contains the abstractions: goodness—the first of things,—essence, life, wisdom, truth, intellect, reason, virtue, justice, health, greatness, omnipotence, eternity, peace, and all the virtues and reasons which the Father created once for all in his Son, and according to which the order of all things is framed, each considered by itself and apart from sensible objects. These are the primordial causes of things, the e effects of which are manifested in time and place in the third form of nature. But it is impossible to keep the effects apart from the causes; they are involved in them, and with them eternal, though not eternal as God; for & eternity, like every other attribute, can only be predicated of him in an improper sense, he is more than eternal. h Place and time exist not with him: he has nothing accidental, cause and effect with him are one. Therefore the i universe, as his creation, is eternal: non erat quando non erant. In such fashion this clear-sighted idealist represented the accepted belief, according to which creation is bringing into being in the sense of bringing into the sensible world : his opinion was perhaps an inevitable deduction from the premises of formal Platonism, and something very like it was k maintained by so correct a theologian as saint Anselm. To John Scotus thought is the only real being, and, philosophically speaking, l body has no existence except as dependent on thought. But he chooses to express