5. THE RELATION OF IDEAS TO THE PHENOMENAL WORLD. Analogous to the different definitions of idea are the different names which Plato gives to the sensible and phenomenal world. He calls it the many, the divisible, the unbounded, the undetermined and measureless, the becoming, the relative, great and small, not-being. The relation now in which these two worlds of sense and of ideas stand to each other is a question which Plato has answered neither fully nor consistently with himself. His most common way is to characterize the relation of things to conceptions as a participant, or to call things the copies and adumbrations, while ideas are the archetypes. Yet this is so indefinite that Aristotle properly says that to talk in this way is only to use poetical metaphors. The great difficulty of the doctrine of ideas is not solved but only increased by these figurative representations. The difficulty lies in the contradiction which grows out of the fact that while Plato admits the reality of the becoming and of the province of the becoming, he still affirms that ideas which are substances ever at rest and ever the same are the only actual. Now in this Plato is formally consistent with himself, while he characterizes the _matériel_ of matter not as a positive substratum but as not-being, and guards himself with the express affirmation that he does not consider the sensible as being, but only as something similar to being. (_Rep._ X. 597.) The position laid down in the Parmenides is also consistent with this, that a perfect philosophy should look upon the idea as the cognizable in the phenomenal world, and should follow it out in the smallest particulars until every part of being should be known and all dualism removed. In fine, Plato in many of his expressions seems to regard the world of sensation only as a subjective appearance, as a product of the subjective notion, as the result of a confused way of representing ideas. In this sense the phenomena are entirely dependent on ideas; they are nothing but the ideas themselves in the form of not being; the phenomenal world derives its whole existence from the ideal world which appears in it. But yet when Plato calls the sensible a mingling of the same with the different or the not-being (_Tim._ p. 35), when he characterizes the ideas as vowels which go through every thing like a chain (_Soph._ p. 253), when he himself conceives the possibility that matter might offer opposition to the formative energy of ideas (_Tim._ p. 56), when he speaks of an evil soul of the world (_de Leg._ X. 896), and gives intimations of the presence in the world of a principle in nature hostile to God (_Polit._ p. 268), when he in the Phædon treats of the relation between body and soul as one wholly discordant and malignant,—in all this there is evidence enough, even after allowing for the mythical form of the Timæus, and the rhetorical composition which prevails in the Phædon, to substantiate the