Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 3Grote, George
Philosophy
Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 3
Grote, George
Philosophy, Ancient; Plato; Socrates, 470 BC-399 BC
different aspects of the same indivisible fact.
[Footnote 18: In regard to the impossibility of carrying
abstraction so far as to discard the thinking subject, see Hobbes,
Computation or Logic, ch. vii. 1.
"In the teaching of natural philosophy I cannot begin better than
from _privation_; that is, from feigning the world to be
annihilated. But if such annihilation of all things be supposed,
it may perhaps be asked what would remain for any man (_whom only
I except from this universal annihilation of things_) to consider
as the subject of philosophy, or at all to reason upon; or what to
give names unto for ratiocination's sake.
"I say, therefore, there would remain to that man ideas of the
world, and of all such bodies as he had, before their
annihilation, seen with his eyes, or perceived by any other sense;
that is to say, the memory and imagination of magnitudes, motions,
sounds, colours, &c., as also of their order and parts. All which
things, though they be nothing but ideas and phantasms, happening
internally to him that imagineth, yet they will appear as if they
were external and not at all depending upon any power of the mind.
And these are the things to which he would give names and subtract
them from, and compound them with one another. For seeing that
after the destruction of all other things I suppose man still
remaining, and namely that he thinks, imagines, and remembers,
there can be nothing for him to think of but what is past. . . .
Now things may be considered, that is, be brought into account,
_either as internal accidents of our mind_, in which manner we
consider them when the question is about _some faculty of the
mind_: or, as _species of external things, not as really existing,
but appearing only to exist, or to have a being without us_. And
in this manner we are now to consider them."]
[Side-note: Perpetual implication of Subject with Object--Relate
and Correlate.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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