Plato's “eternal world of ideas” forms a background for this speculation. Windelband, explaining how the Neoplatonists developed the doctrine of their master, says: “Ideas appear no longer as self-subsistent essences (as they did with Plato), but as elements constituting the content of intellectual or spiritual activity; and, while they still remain for human cognition something given and determining, they become original thoughts of God.”[1] Now when we remember that the Neoplatonists are idealists and hold that all reality is in the intelligible world we are prepared to see how Mrs. Eddy does nothing more in this matter than reproduce them.
Plotinus says: “It (intellect) produces in itself an offspring, and at the same time is conscious of containing this progeny in itself;”[2] “One intellect subsists as comprehending all others.”[3] Proclus says: “Ideas are not separated from intellect, subsisting by themselves apart from it.”[4] Spinoza is quite as explicit as Mrs. Eddy. He says: “The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas;”[5] “There is in the mind no absolute faculty of understanding;”[6] The “understanding" is “nothing beyond in-
