Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/380

364 said that the pure ego and the "Ding an sich" are artificial concepts corresponding to nothing in experience. Ideation and matter are expressions derived from facts of experience; but there is no faculty of feeling or perceiving which exists alongside of that which is felt or perceived. The formal standpoint presents the forms of subjective idealism and of materialism as its extremes. This standpoint is an arbitrary solution of the problem which puts out of sight the essential conditions; the force of the opposition between the "in me" and the "outside of me" is here not operative. Psychologically, subjective idealism rests on an inverted concept of the development of self-consciousness; logically, it errs in asserting that everything perceivable is only an idea of the ego, because it does not take into account the relations of the objects of perception or ideation to one another. The considerations urged against an exclusive "in me" hold good, ''mut. mutan.'', against the exclusive "outside of me" of materialism. More than any line of philosophic thought has materialism forgotten that the concepts of natural science and psychology are only imperfect theories of what experience is, and are not the experiences themselves, and that we attain to and grasp reality only in what has been or can be experienced.

Plato's writings are less important for our knowledge of the philosophy of his predecessors and contemporaries than those of Aristotle, partly because Plato attached less worth to facts as such than Aristotle, — he is less scholar than poet. Further, the form in which his thought is cast is not adapted for considerable treatment of historical views; again, opinions are presented and discussed not in his own name, and he takes no part in the dialogue. When views of other philosophers are mentioned, it is sometimes without specification of the source; sometimes with expressed reference to the work from which the statement has been derived; and again, as if the view had no other authority than current tradition. Sokrates mentions the maxims of the Seven Wise Men (Protag., 343 A f.) and the discoveries of Thales and Anacharsis (Rep., X, 600 A) merely as something universally accepted. Z. quotes references in Theaitetos, Parmenides, Kratylos, Sophistes, Timaios, etc., to various doctrines of Plato's predecessors, which are recounted in the traditional form of historical narrative, and points out that these communications of Plato on the older philosophers are to be regarded as historical reports. Author