Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/160

152 the Neoplatonic trinity amplified so as to embrace the Biblical trinity. Or stated still more accurately, it is an explaining away of the Biblical trinity in order to make it harmonize with the psychological trinity of the Neoplatonists.

Plotinus says: “Intellect, intelligence and the intelligible are one and the same thing.” He argues that creation is related to the creator as the image “in water, in mirrors or in shadows” is related to its object, in that the image exists by virtue of the object, thus furnishing the basis for the like figure of Mrs. Eddy's sentence above. Proclus says: “Since thinking is the medium between that which thinks and the object of thought, these are the same, thinking likewise will be the same with each.” Now, consider the sweeping significance that these statements must have when uttered by the founders of a system of idealism, the psychology of which becomes essentially its metaphysics. Existence in toto has three aspects, the knowing subject, the known object and the act of knowing and these three are one, namely, existence itself, or God. This is certainly a sort of trinity. But how the Biblical trinity should be confounded with this idealism is a marvel indeed.

Spinoza says: “This truth seems to have been dimly recognized by those Jews who maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things