ABSTRACT
We shall devote the present lecture to pondering over the putative structure and contents of what must be held to be a most important and central zone of the ‘upper world’ we are speculating about: the zone which corresponds to the noetic cosmos or intelligible world of Plato and Plotinus, and which seems not very different from the Dharmadhatu of Buddhism. This is a zone parallel to that of the floating meanings and notions which, as we saw, are constituted by our earthly thought in the upper regions of the cave. Only whereas we then were dealing with ectypal mental constructions, involving much that was arbitrary and correspondent only with human approaches, it is now our design to say something about the originals, the archetypes, which these intentional objects merely seek to copy. For us the two zones are necessarily distinct, since the archetypes in question are not mere patterns and ideals of cave-thought, but are thought of as given in a real experience which is never adequately ours in this present life, and which is only by courtesy different from the archetypes it presents or contemplates. Things as abstractly seen by us in the cave may at times, we hope coincide with things as they really are ‘yonder’, but we must also allow the possibility of wide divergence and inadequacy. The relation is that which Aristotle has described as holding between the active intelligence which ‘makes’ all forms and the passive intelligence which merely receives them; it is a relation we all feel to exist when we struggle to give a true account of anything, to work out its deeper implications, to penetrate to its essence, to see it in a manner in which it not only becomes clear but also beautiful. It is, we feel, because there is a real eidetic order guiding our feeble adumbrations, that our logical, mathematical, scientific axiological and aesthetic inquiries are at all possible.
