s all through the
philosophy of Aristotle. The 'Realisation' of Aristotle is the
'Reminiscence' of Plato.
This conception Aristotle extended to Thought, to the various forms of
life, to education, to morals, to politics.
_Thought_ is an entelechy, an organic whole, in which every process
conditions and is conditioned by every other. If we begin with
sensation, the sensation, blank as regards predication, has relations
to that which is infinitely real,--the object, the real thing before
us,--which relations science will never exhaust. If we start from the
other end, with the datum of thought, consciousness, existence, mind,
this is equally blank as regards predication, yet it has relations to
another existence infinitely real,--the subject that thinks,--which
relations religion and morality and sentiment and love will never
exhaust. Or, as {189} Aristotle and as common sense prefers to do, if
we, with our developed habits of thought and our store of accumulated
information, choose to deal with things from a basis midway between the
two extremes, in the ordinary way of ordinary people, we shall find
both processes working simultaneously and in organic correlation. That
is to say, we shall be increasing the _individuality_ of the objects
known, by the operation of true thought and observation in the
discovery of new characters or qualities in them; we shall be
increasing by the same act the _generality_ of the objects known, by
the discovery of new relations, new genera under which to bring them.
Individualisation and generalisation are only opposed, as mutually
conditioning factors of the same organic function.
[316]
This analysis of thought must be regarded rather as a paraphrase of
Aristotle than as a literal transcript. He is hesitating and obscure,
and at times apparently self-contradictory. He has not, any more than
Plato, quite cleared himself of the confusion between the mutually
contrary individual and universal in _propositions_, and the
organically correlative individual and universal in _things as known_.
But on the whole the tendency of his analysis is towards an
apprehension of the true realism, which neither denies matter in favour
of mind nor mind in favour of matter, but recognises that both mind and
matter are organically correlated, and ultimately identical.
{190}
The crux of philosophy, so far as thus apprehended by Aristotle, is no
longer in the supposed dualism of mind and matter,
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