then how it was that, while all individual women
came and went and vanished, the form in which they were cast remained the
same?

Here you see how philosophical mythology springs up. The very question
what {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI AND PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} or species or form was, and where these things were kept,
changed those words from predicates into subjects. {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI AND PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} was conceived as
something independent and substantial, something within or above the
individuals participating in it, something unchangeable and eternal. Soon
there arose as many {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~} or forms or types as there were general concepts.
They were considered the only true realities of which the phenomenal world
is only as a shadow that soon passeth away. Here we have, in fact, the
origin of Plato's ideas, and of the various systems of idealism which
followed his lead, while the opposite opinion that ideas have no
independent existence, and that the one is nowhere found except in the
many ({~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}), was strenuously defended by Aristotle and his
followers.(16)

The same red thread runs through the whole philosophy of the Middle Ages.
Men were cited before councils and condemned as heretics because they
declared that _animal_, _man_, or _woman_ were mere names, and that they
could not bring themselves to believe in an ideal animal, an ideal man, an
ideal woman as the invisible, supernatural, or metaphysical types of the
ordinary animal, the individual man, the single woman. Those philosophers,
called _Nominalists_, in opposition to the _Realists_, declared that all
general terms were _names onl