and
called them non-sensuous. But there is, in fact, no difference between
the horse and the Idea of the horse, between the man and the Idea of
the man, except a useless and meaningless "in-itself" or "in-general"
attached to each object of sense to make it appear something
different. The Ideas are nothing but hypostatized things of sense, and
Aristotle likens them to the anthropomorphic gods of the popular
religion. "As {264} these," he says, "are nothing but deified men, so
the Ideas are nothing but eternalized things of nature." Things are
said to be copies of Ideas, but in fact the Ideas are only copies of
things.

(6) Next comes the argument of the "third man," so called by Aristotle
from the illustration by which he explained it. Ideas are assumed in
order to explain what is common to many objects. Wherever there is a
common element there must be an Idea. Thus there is a common element
in all men, and therefore there is an Idea of man. But there is also
an element common to the individual man and to the Idea of man. There
must, therefore, be a further Idea, the "third man," to explain this.
And between this further Idea and the individual man there must be yet
another Idea to explain what they have in common, and so on _ad
infinitum_.

(7) But by far the most important of all Aristotle's objections to the
ideal theory, and that which, to all intents and purposes, sums up all
the others, is that it assumes that Ideas are the essences of things,
and yet places those essences outside the things themselves. The
essence of a thing must be in it, and not outside it. But Plato
separated Ideas from things, and placed the Ideas away somewhere in a
mysterious world of their own. The Idea, as the universal, can only
exist in the particular. Possibly the reality in all horses is the
universal horse, but the universal horse is not something that exists
by itself and independently of individual horses. Hence Plato was led
into the absurdity of talking as if, besides the individual horses we
know, there is somewhere another individual called the
horse-in-general, or as if besides white objects there is a thing
called {265} whiteness. And this is in fact the supreme
self-contradiction of the theory of Ideas, that it begins by saying
that the universal is real, and the particular unreal, but ends by
degrading the universal again into a particular. This is the same
thing as saying that Plato's mistake lay in first (rightly) seei