The Absolute in Plato’s thought had not only life and intelligence but also creative activities; and the acts of creation consisted in imposing on the formless material principle the ideas which the Absolute comprehends in itself, or, as perhaps he would have preferred to say, in making the material principle partake of the appropriate idea. In the Cratylus he illustrates the relation of matter to the idea by the way in which the artisan makes a shuttle out of wood, always forming his material with reference to the true or ideal shuttle.[211] We may illustrate further by examples modelled on Plato’s own. Think for a moment of the potter and his clay. The clay is formless matter which the potter takes and places on the wheel, and there imposes upon the clay the idea of the pot which is in his own mind; so the pot acquires a real existence in so far as it partakes of or embodies the idea which exists in the potter’s mind. Or we may think of the sculptor and the shapeless block of marble. By imposing his idea upon the marble, by making the shapeless block embody his idea, the sculptor brings the statue into being. These illustrations, both Plato’s and my own, are of course misleading, for the wood, clay, and marble from which the several objects are made are far from being the negative substance which Plato would have us believe his material principle to be. But they may serve to suggest the way in which he conceived the varied world about us to come into its temporary existence. Now to Plato’s mind the Absolute and the ideas are perfect; yet we know that the phenomenal world is imperfect, and imperfection is evil; therefore, he says, evil must be found in the negative substratum, since as we have already seen, this was regarded by Plato as in every way the opposite of the perfect ideas. This imperfection, inherent in the material principle, is the “necessity” of which he speaks in the Theaetetus as causing evils—the opposite of the good.[212] Evil, therefore, is eternal, but, as we have earlier learned, the individual may escape, if he will take the deliverance which philosophy offers him.