ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE IDEAS.
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quite a different form, and has thereby lost its perceptible nature, and with this its thorough determinateness. In this sense (but in no other) we might, in the language of the Scholastics, describe the Ideas as universalia ante rem, the conceptions as universalia post rem. Between the two stand the individual things, the knowledge of which is possessed also by the brutes. Without doubt the realism of the Scholastics arose from the confusion of the Platonic Ideas, to which, since they are also the species, an objective real being can certainly be attributed, with the mere concepts to which the Eealists now wished to attribute such a being, and thereby called forth the victorious opposition of Nominalism.
