ence, or by a disentanglement of that which | ality and universality in precisely the same

is implicit in the language, knowledge, and acts of men, as in metaphysics.

way. It is a centre of relations, which constitute its properties. As differenced from all things else by the sum of these relations, it is individual, but to be so differenced from them all it must have an element in common with them. If it be said that it is individ

this very presentation can only be known or named, i. e., can only have any meaning, as one property or relation of the thing amongst others. If then the thing of experience turns out to be what "thinking makes it," while, on the other hand, the motion of thought is no other than the correlative differentiation and integration," which constitutes the evolution of the phenomenal world, where is the obstacle to the admission that the world of experience is a world of ideas, or things as thought of, that its order is an order of thought, that in knowing it we do but realize ourselves?

The antithesis between relations of ideas and matters of fact, the treatment of which by Hume was "the occasional cause " of Kant's Critic, though latent in the opposition between "necessary and contingent "ual, as momentarily presented to the sense, matter, can scarcely be said to appear in Greek philosophy till after Aristotle. By Plato and Aristotle alike, things are supposed to exist as they are known, and to be known as they exist. Hence if "Universals" are the proper objects of knowledge, which Aristotle, no less than Plato, constantly affirms, they are also the real things, and if the cogitable world consists of a series of forms, corresponding to general names, and related to each other as the less and more abstract, such also is the real world. Scholasticism did actually proceed on this doctrine, and hence its philosophy of nature was a string of verbal propositions. The It may be reckoned an extravagance to popular philosophy of modern times, so far fasten such a view upon Aristotle on the as it has retained the old doctrine as to the strength of one aspect among many under procedure of thought, has only done so by which his theory of definition is presented regarding its order as the reverse of the or- to us. It must be remembered, however, der of real existence. Real things exist as that with Aristotle, as with Socrates, the individuals having properties, not as classes object of definition is to ascertain not merely of greater or less extension. The process the meaning ordinarily attached to a name, of life is one evermore leading to a greater but the nature of a thing at once as known complexity of attributes. Thought, then, and as it exists. So far then as definition as a process of abstraction, can only lead consists in the gradual differentiation of an farther away from reality and life. Science, indeterminate matter, this represents also however, follows the order of nature. Its the order both of thought and of the world. concern is with the relations of individual It is quite true that in Aristotle himself things to each other, with the simplest of there is no clear account of this differentiawhich it begins and advances to the more tion except as a re-addition of qualities precomplex. Its method, therefore, is at vari-viously abstracted in the process of Inducance with the supposed method of thought, and while the one comes to be regarded as a simple registration of sensible experience, the other, as having nothing to do with the world, is relegated to the limbo of words mistaken for things. Ideas are "abstract universals," there are no "abstract universals" in reality, therefore the real and ideal must be mutually exclusive.

The view of thought as a process from the less to the more determinate avoids this antagonism. It exhibits the first idea equally with the first datum of experience, as the most simple and abstract possible, as having a minimum of form, i. e., as relatively matter. It exhibits the idea, moreover, as no less individual than universal. As determinate, it is distinct from all other ideas, or individual; but this very distinction is only possible in virtue of a common relation to the thinking subject, which constitutes a universality. The real thing of intelligent experience unites the two sides of individu

tion. In putting the most abstract universal as matter," according to the theory of definition, in the same place which the sensible thing, as a concretion of properties, occupies in the theory of Induction, he merely after his manner "shoots from a pistol" a proposition, which properly carries with it a complete transmutation of his theory of knowledge, but which he himself never followed to its consequences. The same antagonism, pointing for reconciliation to a higher philosophy than Aristotle's own, appears under several other forms in his writings, especially in his controversy with Plato on the conception of "substance" (ovσía).

The Platonic doctrine of ideas rested on the view that the "sensible" was properly no thing at all, but the possibility of becoming something through the determining action of thought. The Greek language, by its use of the neuter gender in place of the substantive "thing," had special facilities

for the statement of this view, which, on the other hand, can only be stated in English (as a reader of the present article will observe) by what seems a pedantic use of the term "sensible." Notwithstanding this Plato is constantly lapsing from it into the notion that the "sensible" is equivalent to the individual thing, as qualified by properties. We thus get two separate sets of things, individuals which are objects of sense, on the one side; universals or ideas, which are objects of thought, on the other. To take one of Plato's own examples: this individual bed is one thing, an object of sense. The universal or ideal bed, which corresponds to the general term "bed," is something else. Having lapsed, however, from the view that the "sensible" is nothing, he still holds it to be something unreal, -a mere shadow of the truth; while the idea having become nothing in particular, is still asserted to be alone real and an object of knowledge. It is just this failure, through want of adequate formulæ, to maintain himself in his idealism, not the idealism itself, which justifies the popular notion that Plato was a dreamer who mistook shadows for things, and things for shadows.

The error is detected by Aristotle more clearly than its source. The universal, he says, cannot, as Plato supposed, be a separate, self-existent entity; it must attach as an attribute to things individual, and individual all things known as "" substances necessarily are. It is not something apart from, above, and beyond, sensible things, but in them, and, as such, predicable of them. The so-called thing in itself, or ideal thing, is simply the sensible thing, minus the attri bute of being sensible.

thing, and as the application of such a name is coincident with the earliest knowledge of it, it is nothing more than the thing in its most obvious aspect. It is indeed, unlike the merely sensible, a real object of knowledge, but the poorest possible, and a method like the Platonic, which takes it as the fullest and ultimate object, contains no principle of progress.

a

The assertion of Aristotle against Plato, that the universal is not to be found apart from "sensible things," but attaches to them, has been strangely thought to be an aban donment of the doctrine of the reality of universals. It can only be so on the supposition that a thing is more real than its properties. It can only be on such a supposition that Mr. Mill, having maintained that names are names of things, treats the doctrine of "general essences "" as a scholastic absurdity. Yet, a common name, to use his own language, connotes an attribute or attri butes. If it is also the name of a thing, the attributes or general essence must constitute a thing. It makes no difference to say that the common noun "denotes thing, while it " connotes " an attribute, for it denotes the thing only in virtue of connoting the attribute. If the individual "bed " is something apart from its properties—if it alone is properly real, while they are not,then to say that the general essence "bed" means the properties which attach to individual beds, is to admit that general essences are not real. This doctrine, however, is simply to restore the notion of an "unknown substratum of attributes" (for such is the individual bed without properties), against which the enemies of realism are apt to be severe. If, on the other hand, the individual thing is what it is in virtue of its attributes, if these constitute its reality, then the Aristotelian doctrine, by treating the universal as a property or sum of properties, while it in no way modifies the reality which Plato ascribed to it, avoids the error of admitting a quasi-reality in distinction from it. That which can be predicated of the sensible thing, in other words, that which can be known about it, is the essence, and an object not of sense but of thought. This view of the essence or form properly prevents (though it did not always prevent with Aristotle) the shallow conception of it as a class, and renders it capable of further formation or development with the progress of knowledge.

In meeting these objections, the ideal theory necessarily comes to a better understanding of itself. That the idea, as Plato constantly treats it, is simply the sensible thing after abstraction of its sensibility, cannot be denied. Whatever can be predicated of "this bed " can be predicated of "bed in general," with deduction of the peculiarities of this bed, as distinct from others. But of "this bed "" as sensible, nothing can be predicated, or, more properly, as merely sensible it is not a bed or anything else at all. According to Aristotle's own phraseology, it is absolutely indeterminate matter, and therefore has no proprieties, is unknowable. If by the sensible thing is meant the thing as first known-known, i. e., under the minimum of determination requisite to any knowl- Aristotle's reiterated statement, then, that edge at all, then Plato's "thing-in-itself" the universal is not "separable," but imis simply identical with it. As it is consti-plies something to which it attaches as an tuted by the properties which are connoted attribute, really amounts not to an abandonby the general name first applied to the ment of the Platonic "idea," but to a resoluN-5

VOL. XLV.

tion of it into two correlative elements. | hang escapes his grasp. They appear in hard juxtaposition, instead of as a rhythm where each member is different from the rest, but different solely in virtue of its relation to them. The thinking self is individual, as exclusive of all things. But it excludes all things as the negation of each in particu. lar, and such negation is a relation. Therefore, as exclusive of them all, it is in relation, or present, to each of them: it is an omnipresent element or universal. The individual has thus transformed itself into the universal in virtue of its particularity or definite relations. The process may be reversed. The thinking self is present to all objects of consciousness, not here or there, but continuously. It is only in virtue of this presence that they are what they are; without it they would be in "disconnexion, dead, and spiritless;" and thus it is a universal element. But it is related to all these particular objects as their negation; it is not any one of them in particular. Thus it is exclusive of them all, or individual. As the individual self is universalized, so the universal is individualized, through its particular relations.

What Plat had spoken of indifferently as "form," the "universal," essence," and substance," emerges from the Aristotelian crucible, as, on the one hand, "substance," which is individual, "separable" (xwpiσTóv), and "subject" (VπоKEίμevov); as on the other, "form," or essence, ," which is universal and the attribute of a subject. The conception of individual substance having thus presented itself, requires the same purgation from sense as the "real thing" of experience, a purgation which at Aristotle's hands it only partially receives. Hence his statements concerning it seem at first sight to be in hopeless contradiction with each other. Substance, he tells us, is necessarily individual, and as individual, it "has matter." Matter, however, is properly unknowable, because indeterminate. Yet, elsewhere, he speaks of individual substance as the proper object of knowledge, and as determinate in opposition to the kind (Tò Totóvde). Substance, again, according to him, as individual, is an object of sense; yet, for the same reason, it is a definite something, while the sensible is the indefinite. Substance is that which remains when all attributes have been abstracted, yet it is also the concretion of attributes, supposed to be given by sense, with which the abstracting process of thought begins. To this web of apparent contradictions (which might be greatly extended) Aristotle supplies no sufficient clue. In the Metaphysics, indeed, he twice sums up the significations of "substance." It is either, he says, the "subject-matter," or the "form," or the individual thing compounded of the two, i.e., the subject-matter as formed by properties. As the mere form substance is the so-called "secondary " or improper substance of the treatise on the categories; as the individual thing, having properties, it is the "primary" or proper substance of that treatise. So far the two passages in the metaphysics agree; but there is an important difference. According to one passage, substance, as" subject-matter," has sensible or phenomenal qualities; according to the other it is the negation of all qualities, the caput mortuum," or "unknown substratum," from which everything determinate has been abstracted.

The truth is, that the elements into which Aristotle resolves the intelligible world, are not fully conceived of by him, as determinations of a creative spirit, which reflects itself in things. To him they are rather fixed elements in a world presented from without. Hence the sequence and dependence of one on the other are not clearly seen. The thread of spiritual unity on which they all

"Substance," as the outward thing, is but the reflex of the inward subject, and involves the same correlative opposites. It is individual or exclusive of all things but itself; otherwise it would be no object of definite knowledge. But it is not merely individual. If it were, it would be, as it is sometimes presented to us by Aristotle, an indeterminate, and therefore unknowable "matter." It would be out of relation to other things, and relations alone constitute the determinate properties in virtue of which a thing is known. As known, it is in implicit relation to all things else, on the principle that one item of knowledge ultimately qualifies every other; in other words, it involves an element in common with them, a universal. It is an individual universalized through its particular relations or qualities. Here again the process may be reversed. If there is no universal element in things known, there can be no unity of knowledge or community of thought. But this universal is not merely such. If it were "ever the same,' so as to be void of all distinction, like the shadowy goal of the Platonic dialectic, it would be, as it in turn is exhibited by Aristotle, the indeterminate and unknowable. It must be that which is the negation of all particular relations so as to be determined by the sum of them. In virtue of this negative relation, as identical with itself in exclusion of all things, it is individual. It is a universal individualized through its particularity. Thus we see that the por

ovoía, or individual substance, and the devrépa | rience. The "here" and "now," however, ovoía, or essence constituted by general at- are not seen, or heard, or handled. As has tributes, are not to be placed, as Aristotle been pointed out, the sensible "here" has, placed them, over-against each other, as if while I write it, become a "there," the senone excluded, or even could be present with- sible " now a "then." We may call the out, the other. They are as necessarily cor- sensible "heres" and nows an indistinrelative as subject and object, as the self guishable succession of points or moments, and the world. Each, by its native energy, each changing place with that which goes which is the hidden "spontaneity" of thought, before;" but in the very act of naming, i. e., necessarily creates its opposite. Nor is one, of knowing them, we transmute them. For as Aristotle supposed, in any special sense, the flux of points and moments we have fixed "matter," the other "form." Each, taken categories-the "here" and the now " in by itself, is matter, as the indeterminate and general-objects of intelligent consciousness. negation of the knowable. Each, again, so In like manner, the "presentation," as soon taken, is matter, as the "subject" (TOKEίue- as named, becomes a general attribute of vov), receptive of a form of a form, how- things. As it is to the sense, momentary ever, not imposed from without, but project- and isolated, it is unnameable, for a name is ed from within. Each, lastly, may be re- permanent, and represents a permanence, garded either as a void "substratum," or as while it is the negation of permanence, yet a complex of attributes, according as it is not determined by this negation; for if so, it isolated or regarded in the realization which would cease to be momentary and indiviit only attains by passing into its opposite. dual.

The crudity in the philosophical digestion of Aristotle, which prevented the due fusion of the correlative meanings of ovoía, was the notion our old enemy-that the individual substance, as matter, was given by sense, and yet had determinate properties. This brings him into collision with his own principle, that the matter of sense, as indeterminate, was unknowable. The "object of sense and the “individual” he constantly uses as equivalent terms. Yet he could not but see that the mere individual, as out of relation, and thus unqualified, afforded no beginning for knowledge. Thus when he treats the "sensible thing" as constituting such a beginning, he is obliged to explain that it is not merely individual, not a simple "this" (róde), but of a kind (Totóvde). The general essence, however, which makes it a rolóvde, and which it must involve in order to be an object of knowledge, is given, says Aristotle, in a definite "here " and "now." This individuality of presentation in space and time he seems to have considered the differentia of the "sensible thing." It at once constitutes its materiality, and is a determination of it. Hence the contradiction between his view of matter, or the sensible element, as indeterminate, and his view of it as determining, in the sense of individualizing, the thing known. The aionróv with him, as the qualified object of knowledge presented in limits of space and time, thus corresponds to the object of intuition, as distinct from sensation, of Kant.

Presentation in an individual "here" and now" is undoubtedly the condition of the first objects of knowledge. If, then, it is it self sensible, sense must at least be an element in the constitution of intelligent expe

The "presentation in a here and now," to which, according to Aristotle, the sensible or material element in knowledge reduces itself, is thus a general predicate, expressing a general attribute of objects of knowledge. It is a predicate, however, which is in perpetual process of self-negation. As the individual necessarily passes into the universal, so the limitation in space, which is but a first (though necessary) envisagement of individuality, as a condition of things known effaces itself. It is true that I necessarily present to myself all things, which I regard as outward, as external to and limited by each other, i.e., under the form of space; but this very limitation implies a relation of each to the other, which constitutes an element of absolute continuity, the negative of spatial limitation. If again I am necessarily conscious of my own thoughts and feelings as in succession to each other, i.e., under the form of time, this of itself implies the undivided presence of the thinking self to each as an absolute stability in relation to which alone succession has any meaning.

Thus placing ourselves outside the process by which our knowledge is developed, we see that its sensuous conditions are only knowable under categories which sense itself does not supply. But to us, who are within the process, these conditions have a different meaning. They form the element of imperfection in our knowledge. In us, as not simply contemplative of animal life in its properties or essence, but ourselves animals, knowledge is developed through the action of sensitive organs. These, indeed, can of themselves give no knowledge apart from the distinguishing and unifying self which makes them its vehicle. Except in relation to this