Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/128

 dignity and honour to the sovereignty of Jove, inasmuch as he is older in knowledge and wisdom. And I am of opinion that the blessedness of that eternal life which belongs to God consists in the knowledge which gives Him cognizance of all events; for take away knowledge of things, and the understanding of them, and immortality is no longer life, but mere duration." The free, unfettered exercise of intelligence is therefore a function of the Divine Nature; but although Plutarch is clearly thinking of the [Greek: nous] of Anaxagoras as embodied by Plato in his conception of the Chief Good, yet he succeeds in bringing the Divine Nature, by the exercise of intelligence, into an intimate relation with humanity which the Platonic Demiurgus never attains. The true successors of Plato in the realm of Idealism were the neo-Platonists, who maintained that "the sum total of the Ideas exists in the Divine nous, not outside of it, 'like golden statues,' which God must search and look up to before He can think. It is not to be supposed that He must needs run about in search of notions, perhaps not finding them at all, perhaps not recognizing them when found. This is the lot of man, whose life is spent often in the search, sometimes in the vain search, after truth. But to the Deity all knowledge is always equally present." The vicious weakness of Platonism, whether Old or New, lies in the fact that no real reason exists why God should ever leave the contemplation of "worlds not realized" to create