Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/100

Rh 90 METAPHYSIC do not wait for scientific ethics to judge and act morally, any more than they wait for logic to reason correctly. It is this line of thought which is universalized and mythically expressed by Plato in his doctrine of &quot;reminiscence.&quot; According to this myth, we were conscious of ideas or universals in our pre-natal state ; we forgot them in the shock of birth into this mortal life ; but in feeling or sharing the rapture of the poet or the lover we recall them as identified or confused with individual objects which &quot;are like them, or partake in them.&quot; The same explana tion is given of the practical skill of the general and the statesman, and even of the &quot; right opinion &quot; which guides the ordinary good man. Such opinion is neither knowledge nor ignorance : not knowledge, for general principles or ideas are not in it present to the mind as ideas, and there fore the particular cannot be distinctly subsumed under them ; yet not ignorance, for the ideas are after all present, though wrapped up in the particulars or confused with them. Nay, in the Thextetus, Plato endeavours to show that the pure particular without the universal, sensations without ideas, cannot enter into our consciousness at all, and that therefore the lowest point to which a conscious being can descend is &quot; opinion,&quot; in which particular and universal, sensible and intelligible, are mingled together. In other words, no conscious being can apprehend the particular except through the universal, though that uni versal may be present only in consciousness and not to it. The task of philosophy is therefore only to make men &quot;recollect themselves,&quot; i.e., to make self-conscious that universality of thought in which all rational beings &quot; partake,&quot; or which, in the language of later philosophy, constitutes reason. The imperfection of Plato s view lay, however, in this, that, while he clearly recognized that the condition of all consciousness of the particular is the universal, he did not see with equal clearness that the universal has a meaning only in relation to the particular. And this tendency to separate universal from particular is naturally accompanied by a tendency to set the subjective against the objective, and to regard the world, not as the manifestation of reason, but as a dualistic world, in which reason is chained to a lower principle a world which can at best only give a hint or suggestion to the mind to enable it to recollect itself and recover for itself its own treasures. Thus the false method of introspection, the &quot; high priori road &quot; of mysticism, was at least opened up by Plato, if he did not altogether forsake the narrower and harder way to the spiritual world through nature and experience. The great step in advance taken by Aristotle was due to his seeing the danger of this tendency. Those, however, who have maintained that Aristotle is the great a posteriori philosopher, as Plato is the great a priori philosopher, have entirely mistaken the bearing of Aristotle s criticism of the Platonic theory. As strongly as Plato does Aristotle maintain that reason is Swa//.ei iravra. TO. vorjTa, and that, therefore, the apprehension of truth by the mind is not a mere external communication of it to the mind, but rather is the mind coming to a consciousness of itself. As firmly as Plato does he declare that truth in its highest form is self-evidencing, i.e., that the principles of science, the laws of nature, when once they have been discovered, are seen to be true by their own light. His statements to this effect have been neglected or explained away, because they were supposed to be inconsistent with his still more frequently reiterated assertions that it is only from experience and by induction that the truth of things can be discovered. Writers of a later day, who came to Aristotle with an idea of a fixed opposition between a priori and a posteriori, and who held that the only possible alternatives were either to divide knowledge between the two or to explain away one of them, could not comprehend that Aristotle might be in earnest both in asserting that knowledge is derived from experience and in asserting that it is an apprehension by reason of that which is identical with itself and needs no extraneous evidence. But Aristotle started with no such fixed opposition. On the contrary, any one who reads the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics will see that he had no difficulty in maintaining that knowledge begins in the apprehension of TO Kaff tKacrrov in sense perception, and that it proceeds from many perceptions to experience, and from many experiences to science ; while at the same time he declared that the principles of science have their evidence in them selves. And the meaning of this declaration is shown in the De Anima, where we find him speaking of knowledge as the realization in the &quot; passive reason &quot; of man of an &quot; active reason &quot; which is eternal and unchangeable, and which in the consciousness of itself includes the knowledge of all things. Of this realization, indeed, there is in man only the potentiality or capacity, but just because this is a pure or universal capacity, because, as Aristotle puts it, it has no quality or determination of its own to stand between it and its objects, it is a capacity in which the absolute reason can realize itself, a capacity of knowing all things. Here we have Plato s myth of reminiscence freed from the metaphor of memory, and reduced to scientific terms ; for that myth simply meant that the evolution of knowledge is the development of the mind to the consciousness of itself, and of all that is potentially in it. Only, by the combination of this doctrine with the idea of the necessity of induction, Aristotle at the same time guards against the purely subjective interpretation to which in Plato it was liable. For the process by which the mind &quot; comes to itself &quot; is conceived as a process by which at the same time it rises from the particular to the universal, from the yvwpipa rjfj.lv to the yvoi/Di/xa aTrAw?, from the bare apprehension of the facts of experience to the knowledge of them through their principles or laws. Yet Aristotle was as little able as Plato to work out fully a theory of the relation between the universal and the individual reason; and the cause of this failure was in both cases substantially the same. In Plato s philosophy, the ideal tended to divorce itself from the phenomenal world in such wise that the latter was regarded only as suggesting or partaking in the former, but not as entirely explicable by it. It was not merely that, to the mind of the individual in its progress, the veil was only gradually lifted from the rationality of the world, but that in the world there was an irrational element from which the mind could save itself only by flight into the region of abstrac tion. And, though Aristotle by his doctrine of the essential relation of ideas to experience, or of the development of the mind to the acquisition of knowledge of the world, seemed to be on the way to correct this error, yet he too shrinks from regarding the phenomenal world as in itself intelligible. To him also an irrational matter mingles with things, and is in them a source of contingency and imper fection. Chance is not merely the reflexion upon the world of our imperfect knowledge, but a fact of experience, and there is therefore a region in which our best science cannot rise above generality to universality. In this way there remains for Aristotle an absolute a posteriori, a reality which cannot be understood, and which we can scarcely conceive as existing at all for the divine intelligence. At this point the Aristotelian philosophy appears to stand between two alternatives, either that, in the sense of pantheism, the finite world and its contingency is an illusion, or that it is con tingent only for the growing intelligence of man, which fully understands neither itself nor the world which is its object. Aristotle, however, does not choose either horn of