Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/284

Rh that after careful reflection—and to understand what I am saying, you must reflect carefully on the operation of your own minds—after careful reflection you will be ready to concede that in thinking, the mind is, in point of fact, always really occupied with something more than that which is obtrusively and manifestly before it. Such you will admit to be the fact. But you will naturally raise the question, What is that "something more" by which we allege that the mind is possessed in all cases in which it thinks? What precisely is this "something more" which, we say, characterises all thought, this something which is always present to thought, over and above the object obviously thought of? What is it precisely? Now, gentlemen, that question is not so easily answered as it is asked. It is indeed the question which has tasked to the uttermost the powers of all great philosophers from Socrates, and more particularly from Plato, downwards. Plato elaborated and propounded his theory of ideas as a solution of that question. We shall consider this theory more particularly hereafter. Meanwhile, without troubling ourselves with that or any other theory or solution of the question, what I wish you at present to have a clear and vital apprehension of is, the fact which such theories are designed to explain. Are you satisfied that in thinking a thing, the scratch of a pin, or a book, or a walking-stick, a tree or a stone, you always think something more than that particular thing? Are you satisfied or not that this is the fact? If you