Note (return) — Chapter X

And then, furthermore, if this Supreme Intelligence, this Eternal Mind, shall create another mind, it must, in a still higher degree, resemble him. Inasmuch as it is a rational nature, it must, in a peculiar sense, partake of the Divine characteristics. "The soul," says Plato, "is that which most partakes of the Divine" 513 The soul must, therefore, have native ideas and sentiments which correlate it with the Divine original. The ideas of substance and cause, of unity and identity, of the infinite and perfect, must be mirrored there. As it is the "offspring of God," 514 it must bear some traces and lineaments of its Divine parentage. That soul must be configured and correlated to those principles of Order, Right, and Good which dwell in the Eternal Mind. And because it has within itself the same ideas and laws, according to which the great Architect built the universe, therefore it is capable of knowing, and, in some degree, of comprehending, the intellectual system of the universe. It apprehends the external world by a light which the reason supplies. It interprets nature according to principles and laws which God has inwrought within the very essence of the soul. "That which imparts truth to knowable things, and gives the knower his power of knowing truth, is the idea of the good, and you are to conceive of this as the source of knowledge and of truth." 515