R.C. Sproul

Would you stand up and let me see your chair for a second?

Would you donate that for this cause here?

Can you do that for just a second, please?

If you don't mind sitting in your husband's lap or whoever, so you can let the camera take a look at these, thank you.

We have two objects up here, both of which this dear friend here has identified by a single word, chair.

Now, can you see the difference between these objects?

I mean, we see similarities.

They have four legs.

This one's metal.

Listen to the sound of it.

This is padded and wooden, beautiful, ornate, and yet they're both identified as chairs.

Now, how is it, in spite of the differences, that somebody could look at these two objects and use the same word for both of them?

Well, Plato said that's because everybody has in their mind the perfect idea of chairness.

This woman came to this lecture tonight with an eternal understanding of perfect chairness.

And so when I asked her to identify this, she could see the approximation of this imperfect copy of the ideal chair and put it in that category.

She saw this as even more imperfect of the ideal chair because the ideal chair obviously is nicer than this.

Right now, this is coming close to the ideal.

You can have that.

And we'll stick this away, but Plato said that the physical, he called the receptacle of the idea.

And insofar as any imitation is less than perfect, there's something lacking.