argument: Why did God make the world? Like man, he must have a purpose;
and his purpose is the diffusion of that goodness or good which he himself
is. The term 'goodness' is not to be understood in this passage as meaning
benevolence or love, in the Christian sense of the term, but rather law,
order, harmony, like the idea of good in the Republic. The ancient
mythologers, and even the Hebrew prophets, had spoken of the jealousy of
God; and the Greek had imagined that there was a Nemesis always attending
the prosperity of mortals. But Plato delights to think of God as the
author of order in his works, who, like a father, lives over again in his
children, and can never have too much of good or friendship among his
creatures. Only, as there is a certain remnant of evil inherent in matter
which he cannot get rid of, he detaches himself from them and leaves them
to themselves, that he may be guiltless of their faults and sufferings.

Between the ideal and the sensible Plato interposes the two natures of time
and space. Time is conceived by him to be only the shadow or image of
eternity which ever is and never has been or will be, but is described in a
figure only as past or future. This is one of the great thoughts of early
philosophy, which are still as difficult to our minds as they were to the
early thinkers; or perhaps more difficult, because we more distinctly see
the consequences which are involved in such an hypothesis. All the
objections which may be urged against Kant's doctrine of the ideality of
space and time at once press upon us. If time is unreal, then all which is
contained in time is unreal--the succession of human thoughts as well as
the flux of sensations; there is no connecting link between (Greek) and
(Greek). Yet, on the other hand, we are conscious that knowledge is
independent of time, that truth is not a thing of yesterday or tomorrow,
but an 'eternal now.' To the 'spectator of all time and all existence' the
universe remains at rest. The truths of geometry and arithmetic in all
their combinations are always the same. The generations of men, like the