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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: of the universe? Or, having regard to the ages during which the human race
may yet endure, do we suppose that we can anticipate the proportions human
knowledge may attain even within the short space of one or two thousand
years?
Again, we have a difficulty in understanding how ideas can be causes, which
to us seems to be as much a figure of speech as the old notion of a creator
artist, 'who makes the world by the help of the demigods' (Plato, Tim.), or
with 'a golden pair of compasses' measures out the circumference of the
universe (Milton, P.L.). We can understand how the idea in the mind of an
inventor is the cause of the work which is produced by it; and we can dimly
imagine how this universal frame may be animated by a divine intelligence.
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