492 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Here I am balked: who now can help afford f 

 The Word? — impossible so high to rate it; 

 And otherwise I must translate it 

 If by the spirit I am truly taught. 



So he tries again. 



In the beginning was the Thought. 



Is it the Thought which works, creates, indeed? 



Another attempt leads him to translate : 



In the beginning was the Power. 



Finally he declares : 



The spirit aids me: now I see the light! 

 In the beginning was the Act, I write. 



Many volumes have been written to explain the meaning of the 

 mysterious word Logos, yet the underlying idea does not seem particu- 

 larly difficult of comprehension. The abstruse doctrines that have been 

 built upon it are another matter. The writer of the fourth gospel 

 understood it to mean the divine reason that existed before anything 

 visible or tangible was created, and through which "everything was 

 made that was made." It was an effort on the part of the dualistic 

 philosophy to account for the creation, or at least for the orderly ar- 

 rangement of matter, by a power that dwelt outside of it. As matter 

 could not have produced God, God must have produced matter. In the 

 older Jewish philosophy, so far as their thorough-going belief in the 

 constant interference of the Deity in everything can be called a phi- 

 losophy, the problem never found a place. It also engaged the atten- 

 tion of the early Greek philosophers. We find the same notion under- 

 lying Plato's doctrine of ideas, which is not difficult to comprehend in 

 its main outlines. He evidently means that the concept of things exists 

 in the mind of the self-existent designer before the objects themselves 

 are called into being, just as a man who undertakes to make any thing 

 has a plan in mind before he enters upon his work ; when it is completed 

 the abstract idea is concretely realized. In like manner, a quality may 

 be conceived abstractly before it is embodied in concrete form. In the 

 Cratylus, Socrates asks whether " our legislator ought not also to know 

 how to put the true natural name of everything into sounds and syl- 

 lables, and to make and give all names with a view to the ideal name, 

 if he is to be a namer in any true sense." The thought was anterior to 

 the word which expressed it. The mind exists independent of the body; 

 it therefore possesses innate ideas, ideas that had a previous and in- 

 corporeal being. The .idea of justice, for example, existed before it was 

 embodied or externalized in just acts. The maker of a statue, or of a 

 table, or of a house, had in mind its idea or mental image before he 

 could give it a visible form. The visible is fleeting, the conceptual is 

 abiding. This doctrine was developed in contradistinction to that of 



