refore, takes place when the object
stamps its form upon the soul. This is important for what it implies
rather than what it states. It shows the thoroughly idealistic trend
of Aristotle's thought. For if the form is what is knowable in a
thing, the more form there is, the more knowable it will be. Absolute
form, God, will be the absolutely knowable. That the Absolute is what
alone is completely knowable, intelligible, and comprehensible, and
the finite and material comparatively unknowable, is a point of view
essential to idealism, and stands in marked contrast to the popular
idea of rationalism that the Absolute is unknowable, and matter
knowable. For idealism, the Absolute is reason, thought. What can be
more thoroughly intelligible than reason? What can thought
understand, if not thought? This, of course, is not stated by
Aristotle. But it is implied in his theory of sense-perception.

Next in the scale above the senses comes the common sense. This has
nothing to do with what we understand by that phrase in every-day
language. It means the central sensation-ganglion in which isolated
sensations meet, are combined, and form a unity of experience. We saw,
in considering Plato, that the simplest kind of knowledge, such as,
"this paper is white," involves, not only isolated sensations, but
their comparison and contrast. Bare sensations would not even make
objects. For every object is a combined bundle of sensations. What
thus combines the various sensations, and in {300} particular those
received from different sense-organs, what compares and contrasts
them, and turns them from a blind medley of phantasms into a definite
experience, a single cosmos, is the common sense. Its organ is the
heart.

Above the common sense is the faculty of imagination. By this
Aristotle means, not the creative imagination of the artist, but the
power, which everyone possesses, of forming mental images and
pictures. This is due to the excitation in the sense-organ continuing
after the object has ceased to affect it.

The next faculty is memory. This is the same as imagination, except
that there is combined with the image a recognition of it as a copy of
a past sense-impression.

Recollection, again, is higher than memory. Memory images drift
purposelessly through the mind. Recollection is the deliberate evoking
of memory-images.

From recollection we pass to the specifically human faculty of reason.
But reason itself has two grades. Th