Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/19

nothing is really good or beautiful in the world of sense, but what we call good or beautiful things are those which have a faint semblance to the Idea of the good or the beautiful, and thus bring back to our souls the remembrance of those Ideas, which we once saw in our ante-natal condition; that the Ideas or Forms are archetypes, in accordance with which the Creator framed this world; that they are not only the cause of qualities and attributes in things, such as goodness, justice, equality, and the like, but also they are heads of classes or universals, and that they alone have complete reality, while the individuals, constituting the classes at the head of which they stand, only “participate” to a certain extent in real existence. Such were some of the features of Plato’s celebrated doctrine of Ideas. That he did not himself hold very strongly or dogmatically to its details, may be judged from the fact that in two of his dialogues (‘Parmenides’ and ‘Sophist’) he himself points out, and does not remove, many difficulties which attach to them. But the main gist of the doctrine was to assert what is called Realism; and this, under one form or another, Plato always maintained. When Aristotle attacked the doctrine of Ideas, there was the first beginning of that controversy between the Realists and the Nominalists, which so much excited the minds of men in the middle ages. Realism, making reason independent of the senses, asserts that the universal is more real than the particular,—that, for instance, the universal idea of “man” in general is more real, and can be grasped by the mind with greater certainty, than the concep-