iversality and necessity of this principle of causality is recognized
with just as much clearness and certainty as in the presence of a
million events, however carefully generalized.

[Footnote 582: Cousin's "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good," pp. 57,
58.]

Abstraction, then, it will be seen, creates nothing; neither does it add
any new element to the store of actual cognitions already possessed by
all human minds. It simply brings forward into a clearer and more
definite recognition, that which necessarily belongs to the mind as part
of its latent furniture, and which, as a law of thought, has always
unconsciously governed all its spontaneous movements. As a process of
rational inquiry, it was needful to bring the mind into intelligible and
conscious communion with the world of _Ideas_. These ideas are partially
revealed in the sensible world, all things being formed, as Plato
believed, according to ideas as models and exemplars, of which sensible
objects are the copies. They are more fully manifested in the
constitution of the human mind which, by virtue of its kindred nature
with the original essence or being, must know them intuitively and
immediately. And they are brought out fully by the dialectic process,
which disengages them from all that is individual and phenomenal, and
sets them forth in their pure and absolute form.

But whilst Plato has certainly exhibited the true method of
investigation by which the ideas of reason are to be separated from all
concrete phenomena and set clearly before the mind, he has not attempted
a complete enumeration of the ideas of reason; indeed, such an
enumeration is still the grand desideratum of philosophy. We can not
fail, however, in the careful study of his writings, to recognize the
grand Triad of Absolute Ideas--ideas which Cousin, after Plato, has so
fully exhibited, viz., the _True_, the _Beautiful_, and the _Good_.

PLATONIC SCHEME OF IDEAS

I. _The idea of_ ABSOLUTE TRUTH or REALITY (to alethes--to on)--the
ground and efficient cause of all existence, and by participating in
which all phenomenal existence has only so far a reality, sensible
things being merely shadows and resemblances of ideas. This idea is
developed in the human intelligence in its relation with the phenomenal
world; as,

1. _The idea of_ SUBSTANCE (ousia)--the ground of all phenomena, "the
being or essence of all things," the permanent reality.--"Timaeeus," ch.
ix. and xii.; "Republic," b