several years to this mode of composition. But all the while his powers, his knowledge, and his methods of thought were maturing, and he was working his way to the conception of a quite different mode of setting forth philosophy. Gradually, as he grasped, or thought he had grasped, all that Plato had to impart, his mind would tend to dwell more on those aspects of Plato’s thought with which he did not sympathise. He would especially feel a sort of impatience at the licence allowed to the imagination to intrude itself into the treatment of philosophic questions,—at the substitution of gorgeous myths and symbolical figures for plain exact answers of the understanding. This feeling of impatience broke out in a polemic against that doctrine of the eternal “Ideas” or Forms of Things, which appears somewhat variously set forth in Plato’s dialogues, especially in ‘Timæus,’ ‘Phædrus,’ and ‘Republic,’ and which doubtless formed a prominent topic in Plato’s discourses to his school. We are told by Proclus[1] that Aristotle “proclaimed loudly in his dialogues that he was unable to sympathise with the doctrine of Ideas, even though his opposition to it should be attributed to a factious spirit.” The import of that doctrine was to disparage the world of sensible objects. It represented that when we, by means of our senses, apprehend, or think that we apprehend, particular objects, we are like men sitting in a dimly-lighted subterraneous cavern, and staring at shadows on the wall; that the world of sense is a world of shadows, but that a true world exists,—a world of Ideas; that
- ↑ Quoted by Philoponus, ii. 2.
