at has long ago been refuted, but because it has long been ignored. There is a sense in which, as the domain of positive knowledge advances, the difficulties of metaphysical philosophy increase. The metaphysician, as he is told in depreciation, but with a certain truth, adds nothing to the sum of existing knowledge. His concern is with the analysis of that which is already known, and with the new synthesis of spirit and its object which results therefrom. Penetrating the intelligible world, he seeks to disentangle its elements and to "put them together" again, not as a ready-made material, but in the order of their origination. The more complex this world has become, the harder is it to "begin at the beginning."

The Heraclitean theory of the sensible (in itself not so much a theory as a prophecy), and the Socratic practice of definition, are said by Aristotle to have formed the philosophic parentage of Plato. The correlation of the two is obvious. The Socratic method implied that something was knowable, in such a way that its nature could be fixed in a definition. This could not be the object of sense, which, according to Heraclitus, was always in flux. What then is it that I know in a thing in virtue of which I apply a name to it? The answer of Socrates or his inter

view which first finds distinct utterance in the dictum of Heraclitus, that objects of sense, as such, cannot be known. The sensible is the indeterminate (Tò TELрov), and the becoming (rò yeyvóuevov). That which (τὸ γιγνόμενον). is known must be susceptible of definition and description. If I say that I have a knowledge of "this bed," as an object of sense, and try to describe it, it appears that I do this by its properties. These, however, as has been shown above, are not properly sensible, but intelligible. They are known in acts of judgment, in the very first of which the sensation is held in relation to a subject which is not sensible, while in the rest of them this bed is compared with other things, ceasing in the comparison to be seen or handled at all. In the technical language of Greek philosophy "this bed," as known, is not merely this bed, but a kind of bed, the subject of attributes which it has in common with other things. It is not a Tóde, but a TOLÓvde. If it is said that no description of the properties of a bed can be adequate to this bed, as present to my senses here and now, I must ask myself in what this presence consists. I can only know it by describing it, and can only describe it as an affection of sensitive organs at a certain moment of time, and in a certain circumscription of space. This again is a judgment in terms, express-preters would be: It is the form, which is at ing not what is sensible, but what is intelligible. The attempt to know the sensible at once transmutes it into the intelligible, or, as a Greek might express it, the object of sense, as such, is evermore becoming something which it is not. It can only be described as that which is incapable of description, only determined as the indeterminate, or, to take a figure from the sphere of art, it is a matter as yet without form; not, however, such a matter as the artist uses, already formed by the eternal Demiurge, but the negation of all form. In other words, it is nothing, for to be anything it must have a form of some kind. That, therefore, which alone is and alone can be known is the "form" (idea or eldos). The object of knowledge and the true reality coincide.

Such in outline is the result of the Greek "criticism of the sensible"-a result which to the modern reader, floating far down the stream of experience, and careless of tracing it to its source, seems either wholly unaccountable, or to be accounted for only as an expression of religious mysticism. With mysticism, however, the philosophy, which defined itself as a search for "the reason why" in all things, could in its period of health have no fellowship, and if its conclusions sound strange to our ears, it is not because the process by which they were arrived

once the thing as known, and the thing in itself. This again is a "universal." The thing, as merely sensible, is merely individual. It is given in a multitude of acts of sense, each separate from the other. The form, on the other hand-the sum of properties which make the thing what it is-remains the same throughout the succession of sensuous presentations, and is predicable of the whole of them (ka öλov Kaτnyopeîtαi). As the thing is known under the sum of its properties, so also it exists as their unity. They at once account for it, or are its definition, and make it what it is, or are its cause. They are further the " mean (μéσov) or possible middle term, by which it may be connected with other objects of knowledge. Thus the Socratic question, What is the thing? (Tí OT;) is equivalent to, What is the meaning of its name? and that which answers the question is at once the thing in its essence, the thing as universal, the form of the thing, its cause, and its connection with the general world of knowledge. On the conceptions involved in these terms, the antagonisms of the Aristotelian philosophy, its truth and its error, really depend.

The term "universal," correlatively with the "sensible thing," is the crux of philosophy. When a sensible thing has been so far defined by thought as to be an object of

it is gained. In the "critique of the sensible" it appeared as the relation to the knowing subject under which even the simplest objects are known. As such it is a property, as yet abstract, but capable of determination, by becoming in its turn the subject of successive judgments. As a class, however, it can only be the subject of judgments in which it is brought under a class more extensive than itself, i. e., in which that is predicated of it which is already involved in it. By such a process its emptiness becomes yet more empty, and meanwhile the individual thing is asserting its independence. Instead of being regarded as that which becomes universal so soon as it is judged of or known, in virtue of the property under which it is

knowledge, it is at once a "form." This form is real and essential, as contrasted with the mere object of sense. It is determinate, and therefore something, while that was nothing. It is also a "universal," for it is constituted by a relation to the thinking subject; in other words, by an intelligible property, in virtue of which it can be held together with any other objects presented to the same subject. So far the Platonist is right. But this determinate form is capable of infinitely numerous other determinations as it is brought into other relations. In other words, our first knowledge of a thing is not our ultimate knowledge of it; the first "form" is not the final one; the mere universal is a shell to be filled up by particular attributes. But it is our first knowl-known, it is connected with the universal as edge of the thing that suggests a name, and a thing with the class to which it belongs. it is on the insignificant superficial property In this position it is vain to deny its priority connoted by the name that a class is con- and independence. Thus individuals come structed. Classification, it is to be observed, to be regarded as one set of knowable things, is of two kinds. The interest of scientific universals another. But the "sensible," acclassification consists in the fact that the in-cording to the ideal theory, is the merely dividuals formed into a class are known to individual. It is so because it is in no depossess other properties than that in virtue terminate relation to anything else, and of which they are included in it. The clas- therefore nothing positive. The mere indisification thus constitutes a further determi- vidual, however, having by the wrong path nation of that property, and a further step just traced been raised to the position of a in knowledge. It may be of scientific inter- real entity, the "sensible" is so raised likeest, for instance, to know how many animals wise. The ideal theory has built again that are "mammal" because they are known to which it destroyed, and the sensible thing possess other properties the connexion of becomes, as such, the determinate subject of which with "mammality" may be of im- properties. portance. The class, however, which may be formed in correspondence to any general name, is of a different kind. There is nothing in it which is not in each individual constituting it. The class as known and the individual as known, each involve a universal, and the class is but an "envisagement," by way of accommodation to sense, in a multitude of sensible things of the properties which constitute the object of knowledge. Now it was with the class of the latter kind that the Platonic philosophy, in a lapse of reason, came to identify the essential form and the universal. Hence two correlative errors. The identification of the essential form of a thing with the class corresponding to its name, implies that the form under which the thing is first known, which is only "essential" relatively to the nothingness of mere sense, is its true and ultimate form. To revert to an instance already given: the essence of an acid will be that it sets the teeth on edge, that being the obvious property by which the sensation is first defined in thought, and which is thus associated with its name. By the identification of the universal with a class, the true view of it is lost as soon as

It is from this false view of the universal and the form-a view preserved in the ordinary use of the term 'species-that the syllogistic theory of Aristotle, with the whole scholastic logic based on it, is derived, and it is this that has made it such a barren mother of science. Its futility in the direction of physical research was the result of a metaphysical mistake, and of a mistake which originated, as we have seen, in an accommodation to sense. The syllogism is properly a mere formulation of the answer to the Socratic question, Tí čσri; We may suppose Socrates to have heard Aristides called the Just, and to have interposed with the inquiry, what justice was. It would be defined, perhaps, to consist in giving every man his due. This definition is the "reason why" (oyos) the term "just" is applied to Aristides, or it is the middle term by which Aristides is brought under the general appellation. We thus get the syllogism-Whoever gives every man his due is just; Aristides gives every man his due; therefore Aristides is just. In order to get to such definitions, Socrates employed, we are told, "inductive arguments" (TaKTIKOì λóyo). The term expresses the exact nature of the pro

cess as pursued by him. It consisted in bringing forward various cases in which a certain name, expressive of praise or blame, was applied. The consideration of what it was that these cases had in common, gave the essence of the virtue or vice in question. Now, it is clear that this process does not in itself constitute a further determination of an object imperfectly known. It supposes determinate knowledge of which the features have become dim, and have to be recalled into distinct consciousness. In order to ascertain the nature of thing, it goes over the various instances in which its name has been applied, considering what in each case it was meant to convey. The only "essence" at which it can arrive is thus that which is involved in our existing knowledge of the thing, in virtue of which we have given it a name and made it the basis of a class.

Incidentally as applied to morals, the method had a far higher value. It was the correlative of the Socratic doctrine of innate moral ideas, and the method has a practical value, as the doctrine a practical truth. The truth of the doctrine lies in the fact that an unconscious always precedes a conscious morality; that men act on moral principles, embodied in law and custom, which have never distinctly become part of their individual consciousness. The value of the method lies in its power, as a process of selfexamination, to awaken in a man the consciousness of the law on which, under higher guidance than his own, he has already been acting, and thus to transform it from an outward to an inward law, to be obeyed not on authority but in freedom, not under the limitations of local or temporary enactment, but in the open atmosphere of reason.

As systematized and applied however, by Plato (under the term ovvaywyn) and by Aristotle (under the term maywyn), the method professes to be that which thought necessarily follows in learning to know-or, more properly, since with them things exist as they are known, in creating-the universe of things. It is that by which it ascends from sensible things to forms, and from the lower, i.e., the less abstract and extensive forms, to the higher, i.e., the more abstract and extensive. The process begins with the observation of a multitude of sensible things to which a common name is applied. Abstraction is made of the qualities in which these differ, and those in which they agree are retained as constituting their form. Another form having been arrived at in the same way, comparison is made of the two; that in which they differ is left out, and the like qualities which remain constitute a higher form, and so on. Thus a series of

forms is obtained of the kind known to school-logicians as the "logical tree" of Porphyry. The reverse process to this "scala ascensoria" is the "scala descensoria," in which an individual is brought under a previously given species, or a lower species under a previously given higher one, through a "middle;" the lower, middle, and higher being so called in respect of extension.* This process of descent is called by Aristotle syllogism, by Plato division. According to both philosophers alike, the intelligible world consisted of a series of such forms, related to each other as the less and more abstract or extensive classes, along which thought moved up and down, in the manner here indicated.

The futility of this view, to which alone the scholastic syllogism is adapted, is so obvious as scarcely to need pointing out. It supposes the process of thought to begin where it really ends, and end where it really begins. It supposes it to begin with a knowledge of the thing, as a complex of determinate attributes, for unless the attributes are there, they cannot be abstracted; and to end with the simple predication of Being, which, as excluding all definite attributes, is virtually Nothing. As has already been shown, and as the Platonic "criticism of the sensible" implied, the real process is just the reverse. The first act of thinking or knowing is the judgment "something is," and the predicate of this judgment- Being " or the simple relation, which it expresses, becomes gradually a subject of more and more determinate properties, as in successive judgments it is brought into new relations. The syllogism or deduction, moreover, is simply the induction, so to speak, upside down. It adds on again the attributes which the induction had taken away. induction having abstracted from "this, that, and the other" magnets all particular properties but that of attracting iron, the syllogism, or series of syllogisms, by dividing the summum genus in which this abstract property is envisaged, brings it again into connexion with the complex particularity of "this, that, and the other."

แ

The

The fault of this crude "realism," it will be observed, whether Platonic, Aristotelian,

*That the terms "major," "middle," and "minor" refer properly to extension, is clear from Aristotle's account of the "inductive syllogism," as that which proves a major of a middle through a minor. Here the minor term, which represents the individual things in which the property represented by the major is found, is middle in respect of position, but is called the minor, because the individual things separately are less in extension than the class which they constitute, and which is thus called "middle.”

The inadequacy, then, of the Aristotelian logic to the real world of knowledge, which led to the Baconian revolt, does not result from its being too "idealistic," but from its not being idealistic enough; from its virtual admission that there is a reality--the sensible thing as the complex of attributeswhich is not an idea. False to the "criticism of the sensible" which showed the form, or thing as known, to be the sole reality, it has allowed that sense, as distinct from thought, gives an experience of things hav ing definite properties. Give sensation this first inch, and it takes an ell. If sense gives a knowledge of properties, nothing remains for thought but to abstract and combine them, and it is vain then to re-assert for the data of thought, for its abstractions and "mixed modes," the dignity of the "things themselves." Thought has abdicated its proper prerogatives. It has admitted that experience is something given to it from without, not that in which it comes to itself. It inevitably follows that in what it does for itself, when not simply receptive of experience, it is merely draining away in narrower and more remote channels the fulness of the real world. We cannot know by abstraction, for properties must be known before they can be abstracted. If thought, then, is a process of abstraction as it is according to the Aristotelian logic,--we think by other methods than we know. Thought, therefore, cannot gives us knowledge, but only lead us away from it.

or scholastic, is that it is virtually nominal-sented by terms in received use-that it is ism. It holds the universal to be real, but working a treadmill, which, when it fancies it finds the universal simply in the meaning itself laboriously ascending, brings it back to of a name. That the "sensible," as such, is the simple predication of Being with which unreal in so far as nothing can be predicated it really began. of it; that it becomes real, or a possible subject of properties, only by being fixed in relation to the thinking self, which relation constitutes a universal or common element between it and all other things; that thus the universal is real and in things, can be established by the most exact dialectic. Such realism is no enemy either to common sense or to scientific investigation. It admits in the fullest measure that the individual thing is real, and an object of knowledge, but maintains that it is so only in virtue of a relation which is universal, and without which the thing would have no intelligible properties at all. Its real universal is not, like the scholastic, bounded by the rigid limits of a class, and capable only of the relations of a geometrical magnitude. It is a unity essentially relative to a multiplicity. Like the thinking self, of which it is the reflex, it is capable of infinite determination, as in the motion of knowledge it is brought into new relations. It "lives through all life, extends through all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent." But the realism of the ancient logic, taking for its reality the species denoted by a common noun, is doubly at fault. It makes its universal a class instead of a relation, and it takes as the essential attributes of the class those only which are connoted by its name, i.e., the most superficial. Having thus begun with a meagre conception as its first reality, it passes on in its process of abstraction to what is more meagre still, ending in that which has no properties at all. It is thus set at war at once with the common understanding and with actual science. The common understanding is scandalized by a doctrine which, allowing the sensible thing to be a complex of attributes, finds "reality," not in it, but in a class to which it belongs. It maintains irrefragably that such a class is a more compendious sign for a multitude of individual things. Science discovers that thought, according to the path marked out for it by the logician, can never arrive at anything new, but is for ever retracing the first steps of its childhood, which are repre

* If it should seem absurd at first sight to speak in this way of the "sensible," when a physiologist can tell us so much about sense, describing minutely its conditions, a moment's consideration will show that sense, as known and thought of by the physiologist, is one thing; sense, as the germ of consciousness preceding thought, quite another.

A philosophy, however, which had begun with the principle that the definite alone is knowable, and that thought alone defines, could not thus be lost in the shallows of a false antithesis. It is only because Aristotle has been known to the modern world chiefly through his logic, and through his logic as interpreted by the schoolmen, that his name has become associated with a splendid failure. In his other, and probably later writings, especially the treatise De Animâ, and the Metaphysics, we find a more thorough and therefore truer idealism, which, inconsistent as this may seem with the ordinary notion of his relation to his master, sometimes appears most clearly in his polemic against Plato. It may already be disentangled, though amid much apparent confusion, from his theory (or one of his theories) of Definition. The place which the conception of "Matter" fills in this theory is inconsistent with its place in the