On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
principal aims of philosophy , to determine with precision the ideas as they are termed by Plato , the essences as others have called them , of those great genera and species under which we necessarily or habituall y arrange all the objects of our knowledge ; philosophers have differed , even to contrariety , in their notions of the real nature of those genera
and species . Some have ascribed to them an objective reality , as things existing in themselves ; others , more philosophically , Lave considered them as merely subjective ^ the creatures of our own minds . To state the same thing more clearly—some , including the greater number of the philosophers of the last two centuries , consider classification to be coiw
ventional , subject to no laws but those which convenience prescribes ; while others , including most of the ancients , and the prevailing sect among" the Aristotelian schoolmen of the middle ages , thought that genera and species exist by nature ; that every individual thing naturally belongs to a certain species , and cannot be subjected to any other classification : and that as there are individual substances , so there
are also universal substances , corresponding to our general or class names , and with which the individual substances which we rank under those classes are in a sort of mysterious communion . Thus , there are not only individual men , and individual stars , but there is also Man in general , and Star in general ; which do not consist of individual men or stars considered in the aggregate , but are entities existing per se . John , Peter , or Paul are only constituted men by participating , in some strange way , in this universal essence of humanity .
We have stated this doctrine in its most systematic form and in its extreme extent , as it was conceived by that portion of the schoolmen called the Realists , who , however , had little warrant for it from the oracle in which they implicitly confided , their master Aristotle . To the same school , though in a somewhat qualified sense , the speculations of Plato decidedly assimilate him . His tendencies ( for opinions , let us once more repeat , are not on such subjects to be ascribed to him ) led
him to attribute self-existence to genera and species . In the present dialogue he adverts only to those genera which form the basis of our great moral and emotional ( or as the Germans say , aesthetic ) classifications . The Just , the Brave , the Holy , the Beautiful ( in English we more readily personify these abstractions by the words Justice , Courage , Holiness , Beauty ) existed according to him as essences or Ideas , of which all sublunary things which we decorate by these names were but
resemblances or copies : a doctrine shadowed forth in the mythos which occupies so conspicuous a place in the present dialogue . But the Ideas or essences of all other things had equally , in his view , an independent existence ; and to these pre-existent ideas as his types or exemplars , the Creator fashioned all that lie called into existence by his will . This is the doctrine more or less vaguely alluded to by those who speak of the Platonic or as it is sometimes called the Divine Idea .
Views not indeed the same but analogous to these , are professed at tliis day by most German philosophers , and by their followers in France and England . It is natural that persons holding such opinions , should dee m these Ideas ( for they have endeavoured to brine back the Platonic w ord to its Platonic sense ) to be the objects of the highest knowledge ; l"e knowledge to which the term Philosophy ought to be confined ; and t' » at to apprehend an idea as One and as Many , ' to detect and distin-
Untitled Article
Plato ' s Dialogues ; the Phcedrvs . 645
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1834, page 645, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2637/page/41/
-