statuentibus placet: non enim arte factorum ideas dari ajebant, sed natura
procreatorum_). For the rest, the doctrine of Ideas originated with the
Pythagoreans, unless we distrust the assertion of Plutarch in the book,
_De placitis philosophorum_, L. i. c. 3.
The individual is rooted in the species, and time in eternity. And as
every individual is so only because it has the nature of its species in
itself, so also it has only temporal existence because it is in eternity.
In the following book a special chapter is devoted to the life of the
species.
In § 49 of the first volume I have sufficiently brought out the difference
between the Idea and the conception. Their resemblance, on the other hand,
rests upon the following ground: The original and essential unity of an
Idea becomes broken up into the multiplicity of individual things through
the perception of the knowing individual, which is subject to sensuous and
cerebral conditions. But that unity is then restored through the
reflection of the reason, yet only _in abstracto_, as a concept,
_universale_, which indeed is equal to the Idea in extension, but has
assumed quite a different _form_, and has thereby lost its perceptible
nature, and with this its thorough determinateness. In this sense (but in
no other) we might, in the language of the Scholastics, describe the Ideas
as _universalia ante rem_, the conceptions as _universalia post rem_.
Between the two stand the individual things, the knowledge of which is
possessed also by the brutes. Without doubt the realism of the Scholastics
arose from the confusion of the Platonic Ideas, to which, since they are
also the species, an objective real being can certainly be attributed,
with the mere concepts to which the Realists now wished to attribute such
a being, and thereby called forth the victorious opposition of Nominalism.
Chapter XXX.(10) On The Pure Subject Of Knowledge.