This, as we understand it, excludes alike the plastic soul of the Platonists and the Demiourgos of the Gnostics, and teaches that the mimesis is as directly created by God himself as the methexis. Mr. Emerson, indeed, uses neither of these Platonic terms, though if he had, he would, with his knowledge of the Christian doctrine of creation, have detected the error of Plato, and most likely have escaped his own. The term _methexis_--participation--excludes the old error that God generates the universe, which is rather favored by the terms genera and species. We use the term _mimesis_ because it serves to us to express the fact that the lower copies or imitates the higher, and therefore the doctrine of St. Thomas, that "Deus est similitudo rerum omnium," or that God is himself the type or model after which the universe is created, and which each and every existence in its own order and degree strives to copy or represent. The error of Plato is, that he makes the methexis an emanation rather than a creature, and the plastic power that produces the mimesis; the error of Mr. Emerson, as we view the matter, is, that he makes the mimetic purely phenomenal, therefore unreal, sinks it in the methexic, and the methexis itself in God, as the one only being or substance, the _natura naturans_ of Spinoza. With Plato, the mimesis is the product of the methexic, but is itself passive, and the sooner the soul is emancipated from it the better; though what is the soul in his system of ideas we understand not. With Mr. Emerson, it is neither active nor passive, for it is purely phenomenal, therefore nothing. With us it is real, and, like all real existences, it is active, and is not a simple image or copy of the methexic or the ideal, but is in its order and degree a _vis activa_, and copies or imitates actively the divine type or the _idea exemplaris_ in the divine mind, after which it is created. Mr. Emerson says, in the introduction to his essay on _Nature_, "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of nature and soul." But all activity is in the soul, and what is distinguishable from the soul is purely phenomenal, and, if we may take his essay on the _Over-soul_, not republished in these volumes, is but the soul's own projection of itself. The soul alone is active, productive, and it is myself, my own ego; not indeed in its personal limitations and feebleness, but in its absoluteness, as the absolute or impersonal _Ich_ of Fichte, and identically God, who is the great, the absolute I AM.