last point, Plato wavered and fell. He cannot
resist the temptation to think of the absolute reality as existing.
And consequently the Ideas are {247} not merely thought as the real
universal in the world, but as having a separate existence in a world
of their own. Plato must have realised what is, in truth, involved in
his whole position, that the absolute reality has no existence. For he
tells us that it is the universal, and not any particular individual
thing. But everything that exists is an individual thing. Again, he
tells us that the Idea is outside time. But whatever exists must exist
at some time. Here then this central idealistic thought seems well
fixed in Plato's mind. But when he goes on to speak of recollection
and reincarnation, when he tells us that the soul before birth dwelt
apart in the world of Ideas, to which after death it may hope to
return, it is clear that Plato has forgotten his own philosophy, that
he is now thinking of the Ideas as individual existences in a world of
their own. This is a world of Ideas having a separate existence and
place of its own. It is not this world. It is a world beyond. Thus the
Platonic philosophy which began on a high level of idealistic
thinking, proclaiming the sole reality of the universal, ends by
turning the universal itself into nothing but an existent particular.
It is the old old story of trying to form mental pictures of that
which no picture is adequate to comprehend. Since all pictures are
formed out of sensuous materials, and since we can form no picture of
anything that is not an individual thing, to form a picture of the
universal necessarily means thinking of it as just what it is not, an
individual. So Plato commits the greatest sin that can be ascribed to
a philosopher. He treats thought as a thing.

To sum up. Plato is the great founder of idealism, the initiator of
all subsequent truths in philosophy. {248} But, as always with
pioneers, his idealism is crude. It cannot explain the world; it
cannot explain itself. It cannot even keep true to its own principles,
because, having for the first time in history definitely enunciated
the truth that reality is the universal, it straightway forgets its
own creed and plunges back into a particularism which regards the
Ideas as existent individuals. It was these defects which Aristotle
set himself to rectify in a purer idealism, shorn of Plato's
impurities.

{249}

CHAPTER XIII

ARISTOTLE

1. L