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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: furnish the laws according to which the world is created. But though the
conception of the ideas as genera or species is forgotten or laid aside,
the distinction of the visible and intellectual is as firmly maintained as
ever. The IDEA of good likewise disappears and is superseded by the
conception of a personal God, who works according to a final cause or
principle of goodness which he himself is. No doubt is expressed by Plato,
either in the Timaeus or in any other dialogue, of the truths which he
conceives to be the first and highest. It is not the existence of God or
the idea of good which he approaches in a tentative or hesitating manner,
but the investigations of physiology. These he regards, not seriously, as
a part of philosophy, but as an innocent recreation (Tim.).
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