—a pronouncement in which he gives the palm for 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_.”[188] The free, unfettered exercise of intelligence is therefore a function of the Divine Nature; but although Plutarch is clearly thinking of the νοῦς 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.”[189] 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 this world after an eternally existing pattern, in the intellectual contemplation of which he was already happy.[190] The “absence of envy” is not a philosophic reason: it is a Platonic leap over an unbridged chasm. The aloofness of the Epicurean gods in their _sedes quietæ_ is the logical outcome of this aspect of Platonism. Plutarch gives the Divine Intelligence an interest in the beings He has created. Apollo (here again the popular name is used for the Divine Being) knows all the difficulties that trouble the public and private lives of humanity, and he knows their solutions also. “In private matters we inquire of Apollo as a seer, in public matters we pray to him as a god. In the philosophic nature of the soul he is the author and inspirer of intellectual difficulties and problems, thus creating therein that craving which has its satisfaction in the discovery of Truth;”[191] _e.g._, “when the oracle was given out _that the altar of Delos should be doubled_, the god, as Plato says, not only conveyed a particular command, but also indicated his desire that the Greeks should study geometry; the task assigned involving an operation of the most advanced geometrical character.”[192] In another place this paternal interest in the doings of mankind is attributed to the Deity direct without the intrusion of any traditional name for a particular god. “It is not, as Hesiod supposes,[193] the work of human