Essays Towards a Theory of KnowledgePhilip, Alexander
Philosophy
Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge
Philip, Alexander
Cycles; Force and energy; Knowledge, Theory of
In all this argument it must be remembered Plato never said or suggested
that the intellect of man--thus equipped with ideal forms--was thereby
enabled to become, or did become, the creator of the world by and in
which each one believes himself to be surrounded and included. He always
distinguished between Idea and Reality, between Thought and Thing. The
ideas were types of the forms immanent in things themselves. It has been
said by some scholars that he generally distinguished between the two
by the employment of distinct terms, applying εἷδος to the mental
conception and ἰδέα to the substantial form. This verbal distinction
was accepted by many scholars of the epoch of Liddell and Scott and
Davies and Vaughan. A reference to this distinction in the present
writer's essay on _The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge_ provoked at the
instance of one critic the allegation that it is not borne out by a
critical study of the Platonic texts. That is a matter of little moment
and one upon which the writer cannot claim to pronounce. The important
point is that in one way or another Plato undoubtedly distinguished
between and indeed contrasted the idea and the substantial form. No
trace of the solipsism which results from their being confounded and
which has ultimately brought to destruction the imposing edifice of
Hegelian Thought is to be found in his writings.
* * * * *
The Platonic doctrine of ideas speedily found an energetic critic in
Aristotle. In Aristotle's view, it was quite unnecessary and
unwarrantable to postulate the existence in the Mind of ideal forms or
counterparts of the substantial forms of Reality. This, according to
him, was a wholly unnecessary reduplication. He was content to believe
that the mind found and recognised the essential forms of things when
they were presented to it in perceptive Experience. _Universalia in re_
were conceived by him as sufficiently explaining the genesis of
cognition without the postulation of any such _universalia extra rem_.
* * * * *
To the Platonic doctrine he offered the further objection that the
eternal forms of things which that doctrine affirmed and which it
declared to be represented in their ideal types were necessarily
impotential. There was no generative power in the pure activity of
Thought. If, therefore, the essentials of Reality were ideal, it
followed that they also were impotent, and incapable of causative
efficacy. The sensible world, however, was a fluent and perpetually
generated stream, which required some potent cause to uphold it.
The eternal Reality which sustained the world was for him an Energy
constantly generating the actual, and no conception which failed to
provide for this process of causative generation of the things of Sense
could in his view adequately account for the phenomena of Nature nor
consequently could constitute the system of science.
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