ABSTRACT
Philosophers cannot but be dissatisfied when they are left with two separate worlds on their hands the world of common sense and the world of science. This philosophy is as favourable to religion as phenomenalism and materialism are unfavourable: it is indeed itself almost a religion as well as a philosophy. It formed, at least in its later and more mystical developments, the background of early Christian thinking, very notably in St. Augustine, who did so much to determine the direction of traditional theology. From a religious point of view the attraction of the Platonic philosophy is that it claims to give knowledge of an abiding and eternal reality beyond the world of sense and matter and space and time. Platonism is one form of what is called realism; and, broadly speaking, whatever may have to be done by mind on the way to knowledge, knowledge is supposed to be a direct vision of reality as it is in itself.
