The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, November 1879Various
Philosophy
The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, November 1879
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
Here you see how philosophical mythology springs up. The very question
what εἶδος or species or form was, and where these things were kept,
changed those words from predicates into subjects. Εἶδος was conceived
as something independent and substantial, something within or above the
individuals participating in it, something unchangeable and eternal.
Soon there arose as many εἴδη or forms or types as there were general
concepts. They were considered the only true realities of which the
phenomenal world is only as a shadow that soon passeth away. Here we
have, in fact, the origin of Plato's ideas, and of the various systems
of idealism which followed his lead, while the opposite opinions that
ideas have no independent existence, and that the one is nowhere found
except in the many (τὸ ἕν παρὰ τὰ πολλά), was strenuously defended by
Aristotle and his followers.[17]
The same red thread runs through the whole philosophy of the Middle
Ages. Men were cited before councils and condemned as heretics because
they declared that _animal_, _man_, or _woman_ were mere names, and that
they could not bring themselves to believe in an ideal animal, an ideal
man, an ideal woman as the invisible, supernatural, or metaphysical
types of the ordinary animal, the individual man, the single woman.
Those philosophers, called _Nominalists_, in opposition to the
_Realists_, declared that all general terms were _names only_, and that
nothing could claim reality but the individual.
We cannot follow this controversy further, as it turns up again between
Locke and Leibniz, between Herbart and Hegel. Suffice it to say that the
knot, as it was tied by language, can be untied by the science of
language alone, which teaches us that there is and can be no such thing
as "a name only." That phrase ought to be banished from all works on
philosophy. A name is and always has been the subjective side of our
knowledge, but that subjective side is as impossible without an
objective side as a key is without a lock. It is useless to ask which of
the two is the more real, for they are real only by being, not two, but
one. Realism is as one-sided as Nominalism. But there is a higher
Nominalism, which might better be called the Science of Language, and
which teaches us that, apart from sensuous perception, all human
knowledge is by names and by names only, and that the object of names is
always the general.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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