Note (return) — Chapter X

We are not from hence to infer that Plato intended to deny all reality whatever to the objects of sensible experience. These transitory phenomena were not real existences, but they were images of real existences. The world itself is but the image, in the sphere of sense, of those ideas of Order, and Proportion, and Harmony, which dwell in the Divine Intellect, and are mirrored in the soul of man. "Time itself is a moving image of Eternity." 539 But inasmuch as the immediate object of sense-perception is a representative image generated in the vital organism, and all empirical cognitions are mere "conjectures" (εἰκασίαι) founded on representative images, they need to be certified by a higher faculty, which immediately apprehends real Being (τὸ ὄν). Of things, as they are in themselves, the senses give us no knowledge; all that in sensation we are conscious of is certain affections of the mind (πάθος); the existence of self, or the perceiving subject, and a something external to self, a perceived object, are revealed to us, not by the senses, but by the reason.