THEORY OF KNOWING.
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PROP. X.————
they profess to distinguish the mental functions and faculties, thus hopelessly confuse them, is to encounter a prospect too alarming for the eye of reason to contemplate.
Comment on third misconception21. Worse remains to be told. Thirdly, if the data of sense, the sensibles of the older schools (τὰ αἰσθητά, sensibilia) are construed by psychology as a sort of intelligibles, pray what are the intelligibles of these older systems? (νόητα, intelligibilia). If the sensibles are advanced into the place of the intelligibles, the intelligibles must be translated into something else. What is that something else? Nobody knows, and nobody can know; for there is nothing else for them to be. Yet the whole philosophical world has been hunting, day and night, after these elusory phantoms through eighty generations of men. We have had expositors of Plato, commentator after commentator, talking of their great master's super-sensible world as something very sublime—something very different from the sensible world in which the lot of us poor ordinary mortals is cast—insinuating, moreover, that they had got a glimpse of this grand supra-mundane territory. Rank impostors. Not one of them ever saw so much as the fringes of its borders; for there is no such world for them to see; and Plato never referred them to any such incomprehensible sphere. This terra incognita is a mere dream—a fable, a
