Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
He was more a Platonist in his spirit than an Aristotelian, although he was indebted to Aristotle for his method. He appealed to both reason and authority. He presented the Christian religion in a scientific form. His book is an assimilation of all that is precious in the thinking of the Church.
The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as he was willing to be called a Platonist.
But its central activity was the repression of crime, and for Godwin's system the test question was his handling of the problem of crime and punishment. He was no Platonist, but not for the first time we discover him in a familiar Socratic position. "Do you punish a man," asked Socrates, "to make him better or to make him worse?" Godwin starts by rejecting the traditional conception of punishment.
The other Cambridge Platonist whose writings may be said to have a distinct bearing on the subject and period before us, is Henry More. Even if there were no trace of the interest with which his works continued to be read in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, it would still seem like an omission if his treatise upon the question under notice were passed over.
Hence there arose a new school more suited to the requirements of the time, which gave itself out as Platonist. This new philosophy was anything but a genuine reproduction of the thought of the great Athenian. With some of his more popular and especially his oriental conceptions, it combined a mass of alien importations drawn from foreign cults, and in particular from Egypt.
On the whole his account of the soul is simply a development of eastern Ionian theories, and we feel that we are far removed indeed from the Platonist conception of the soul's priority to everything else.
It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman's admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be." "The Stage is more beholding to Love than the life of man," says Bacon.
But then we find the very same phrases used of writings not Apostolic, or with no other difference than what the greater name of the authors would naturally produce; just as a Platonist would speak of Speusippus's books, were they extant, compared with those of later teachers of Platonism; 'He was Plato's nephew-had seen Plato was his appointed successor, &c. But in inspiration the early Christians, as far as I can judge, made no generic difference, let Lardner say what he will.
Some early neo-Platonist, perhaps Numenius, declared that Plato was only the Attic Moses; and in more modern times the Cambridge Platonists of the sixteenth century harbored similar ideas, and Nietzsche spoke bitterly of the day when "Plato went to school with the Jews in Egypt." Of Philo, then, we may say, as Montaigne said of himself, that he was a Platonist before he knew who Plato was.
Barry is when he speaks of Newman as a 'thorough Alexandrine. To deny the existence of universals, to regard them as mere creations of the mind, is rank blasphemy to a Platonist; and the Alexandrines were Christian Platonists. No more misleading statement could be made about Newman's philosophy than to associate him with Platonism of any kind, whether Pagan or Christian.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking