Plato’s theory, we must have some very wonderful knowledge of which we are not conscious.[232] And the weapons with which Trendelenburg and others have waged war on Hegel are avowedly drawn from the Aristotelian arsenal.[233] In his criticism on the ideal theory, Aristotle argues that it is unproved; that the consequences to which it leads would be rejected by the idealists themselves; that it involves a needless addition to the sum of existence; that it neither explains the origin of things nor helps us to understand them, while taking away from them their substantial reality; that the Ideas are merely sensible objects hypostasised, like the anthropomorphic divinities of primitive men; that, to speak of them as patterns, in whose likeness the world was created, is a mere idle metaphor; that, even assuming the existence of such patterns, each individual must be made in the likeness, not of one, but of many ideas—a human being, for instance, must be modelled after the ideal biped and the ideal animal, as well as after the ideal man; while many of the ideas themselves, although all are supposed to exist absolutely, must be dependent on other and simpler types; finally, that, assuming an idea for every abstract relation, there must be ideas to represent the relation between every sensible object and its prototype, others for the new relations thus introduced, and so on to infinity. Aristotle’s objections to the Neo-Pythagorean theory of ideal numbers need not delay us here. They are partly a repetition of those brought against the Platonic doctrine in its original form, partly derived from the impossibility of identifying qualitative with quantitative differences.[234]