Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Monist, 1918, Vol. 28: A Quarterly Magazine, Devoted to the Philosophy of Science
Yet Plato has no illusory notion that truth is of easy access. Immersed as we are in a sea of distorting sensa tion, our knowledge at its best is only a faith. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass darkly. In the famous image of the den, wherein mankind are the chained prisoners, with their eyes fixed upon the Shadows of real-0 ity, Plato reminds us that even were our eyes opened to the upper world the light of reality would sear our vision. All that we can hope for is such intimations of the truth as we can gather from the allegory of nature.
And with a curious astuteness he emphasizes the affin ity of vision - the clearest aperture of sense to the inner perception of truth. Sight in my opinion, says Timaeus, is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heavens, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the Sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal men. God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heavens, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.
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