When Plato speaks thus of the beautiful and good, these are concrete ideas, or rather there is only one idea. But we are still far from these concrete ideas when we begin with such abstractions as Being, non-being, unity, and multiplicity. If Plato, however, has not succeeded in bringing these abstract thoughts through further development and concretion, to beauty, truth, and morality, there at least lies in the knowledge of those abstract determinations, the criterion by which the concrete is determined, as also its sources. This transition to the concrete is made in the Philebus, since the principle of feeling and of pleasure is there considered. The ancient philosophers knew very well what they had of concrete in those abstract thoughts. In the atomic principle of multiplicity we thus find the source of a construction of the state, for the ultimate thought-determination of such state-principles is the logical. The ancients in their pure Philosophy had not the same end in view as we—they had not the end of a metaphysical sequence placed before them like a problem. We, on the other hand, have something concrete before us, and desire to reduce it to settled order. With Plato Philosophy offers the path which the individual must follow in order to attain to any knowledge, but, generally speaking, Plato places absolute and explicit happiness, the blessed life itself, in the contemplation during life of the divine objects named above.[44] This contemplative life seems aimless, for the reason that all its interests have disappeared. But to live in freedom in the kingdom of thought had become the absolute end to the ancients, and they knew that freedom existed only in thought. 2. PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE.