Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/90

purity of Being that Aristotle’s lonely God possesses, you find that, although in regard to formal truth omniscient, and thus fully knowing what reality is, the God of Aristotle cannot regard his own reality as of any independent type. For if he did so regard himself, he would then have to observe that his reality is independent of our knowledge of him; and in that case he would be taking account of us, and would view our world as another than himself. But such views, according to Aristotle, would be unworthy of God. So God, who is formally omniscient, still knows of no reality that is independent of the knowledge which refers to this reality. For God, as Aristotle says, knows only himself. Just so Plato’s Ideas, although for us now independent realities, were once, in our previous state of being, according to a half true myth, immediately and fully known by a direct intuition. And this character of the ideal world, if consistently developed at the expense of the other characters, transforms the reality of the Ideas of Plato into the form which the doctrine later assumed in Plotinus; but that is in part a mystical form. Nor are there lacking other tendencies, in Plato, to ascribe to the Ideas a Being that is not of the realistic type. Kant was a realist; but he invented, in the world of Mögliche Erfahrung, a new realm of objects which he regards as real, and yet as not at all possessed of the independent type of reality. Spinoza's Substance is not only an independent reality, but is also a mystical Absolute. Notoriously, it keeps two sets of accounts, or even an infinite number. And hence it is like a defaulting cashier. You never quite know with what sort of reality