e
philosophy of the Idea. {332} But in his hands, idealism was clogged
with unessentials, and overgrown with excrescences. His crude theory
of the soul as a thing mechanically forced in and out of the body, his
doctrines of reincarnation and recollection, the belief that this
_thing_ the soul can travel to some place far away where it will see
those _things_ the Ideas, and above all, what is the root of all
these, the confusion between reality and existence, with its
consequent degradation of the universal to a mere particular--these
were the unessentials with which Plato connected his essential
idealism. To take the pure theory of Ideas--albeit not under that
name--to purge it of these encumbrances and to cast them upon the
rubbish heap, to cleanse Plato's gold of its dross, this was the task
of Aristotle. Thought, the universal, the Idea, form--call it what
you will--this is the ultimate reality, the foundation of the world,
the absolute prius of all things. So thought both Plato and Aristotle.
But whereas Plato began to draw mental pictures of the universal, to
imagine that it existed apart in a world of its own, and so might be
experienced by the vision of the wandering soul, Aristotle saw that
this was to treat thought as if it were a thing, to turn it into a
mere particular again. He saw that the universal, though it is the
real, has no existence in a world of its own, but only in this world,
only as a formative principle of particular things. This is the
key-note of his philosophy. Aristotle registers, therefore, an
enormous advance upon Plato. His system is the perfected and completed
Greek idealism. It is the highest point reached in the philosophy of
Greece. The flower of all previous thought, the essence and pure
distillation of the Greek philosophic spirit, the gathering {333} up
of all that is good in his predecessors and the rejection of all that
is faulty and worthless--such is the philosophy of Aristotle. It was
not possible for the Greek spirit to advance further. Further
development could be only decay. And so, in fact, it turned out to be.

Aristotle deserves, too, the credit of having produced the only
philosophy of evolution which the world has ever seen, with the
exception of that of Hegel; and Hegel was enabled to found a newer
theory of evolution only by following largely in the footsteps of
Aristotle. This was perhaps Aristotle's most original contribution to
thought. Yet the factors of the p