[150] PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies--a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] from his old Eleatic teachers, which reduce "the Many to the One." What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and species, class-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their relationship to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic. Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pass out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains it:-- that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question; and Plato is the father of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory; but rises, again and again, at least in a particular class of minds, quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist:--See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here (giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common [152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our individual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to assist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, "an intellectual world," as Plato calls it, a true noêtos topos +. So much