Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/355

 354 D. G. EITCHIE : learn what is quite alien to us. But the knowledge, which in some form is there already, is there only virtually, and requires the effort of what we call learning to become actual, to be realised, to become what we can properly call knowledge. Plato in the Theaetetus (which in many respects may be called the most ' modern ' of all his dialogues, for in it he discusses not the usual ancient question of Being, but the modern ques- tion of Knowing) does arrive at this Aristotelian distinction in his recognition of the difference between " possessing '' and " having or holding," illustrated by the birds in a cage (Theaet., 197) ; but it remained for Aristotle to grasp the full signifi- cance of this distinction, which has become so much a commonplace of our language and our thought that it requires an effort to see its importance and to understand how the problems of knowledge presented themselves before the time of Aristotle. Now, this is just the philosophic truth of Plato's theory of Kecollection : in learning the mind is not filled with something alien to it, as popular language, now as then, is inclined to assume, and as even some philo- sophers have been apt to suppose, when they ask how Mind can know Matter, after defining Matter in such a way that it is of its very essence, as the exact antithesis of Mind, that it cannot be known. According to Plato, in learning the soul recovers its own. This is more than a theory of know- ledge merely. In the Phaedrus it becomes a theory of art and morality as well. The ideal of beauty, the ideal of goodness, is figured as something we have once known and have to regain. And are we not all ready to speak and think in this way ? What is the meaning of the phrase ' Natural Bights,' which popular politicians have not yet given up, and which even Mr. Herbert Spencer defends against Bentham and Mr. Matthew Arnold ? We have come to form an ideal of society, and we speak as if that were a state from which we had fallen away. We transfer the 'ought to be' to 'once upon a time ' a golden age, ' a past that never was a pre- sent '. The same tendency of imagination may be found in the treatment of the term ' a priori '. A priori conceptions, in Kant's use of the term, are those which are necessarily implied or presupposed in knowledge. How often is the Kantian theory of knowledge criticised as if Kant had meant that the infant comes into the world with a ready-made logic ! We become explicitly conscious of the necessary con- ditions of our thinking very late, if at all ; but the conditions are there implicitly all the same. In the word 'presup- posed' there again slips in the suggestion of priority in time. The doctrine of Recollection has been made most familiar