1. Plato says, "The intelligence sees the ideas comprised within
the existing animal." He adds, "The demiurge conceived that this
produced animal was to comprise beings similar and equally numerous
to those that the intelligence sees in the existing animal." Does
Plato mean that the ideas are anterior to intelligence, and that they
already exist when intelligence thinks them? We shall first have to
examine whether the animal is identical with intelligence, or is
something different. Now that which observes is intelligence; so
the Animal himself should then be called, not intelligence, but the
intelligible. Shall we therefrom conclude that the things contemplated
by intelligence are outside of it? If so, intelligence possesses only
images, instead of the realities themselves--that is, if we admit that
the realities exist up there; for, according to Plato, the veritable
reality is up there within the essence, in which everything exists in
itself.