Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge | Page 9

This explains the immense importance which Socrates naturally attached to the criticism of general and abstract terms.
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The work of Socrates in this direction was immediately taken up and carried much further by Plato. Plato maintained that these general and abstract terms were in truth the names of ideas (+eid��+) with which the mind is naturally furnished, and further that these ideas corresponded to and typified the eternal forms of things--the essential constituents of the real world. Knowledge was possible because there were such eternal forms or ideal elements--the archetypes--of which the +eid��+ were the counterparts and representations.
Knowledge, Plato held, was concerned solely with these eternal forms, not with sensation at all. The sensible world was in a state of constant flux and could not be the object of true science. Its apprehension was effected by a faculty or capacity (Republic, v. 478-79) midway between Knowledge and nescience to which he applied the term +doxa+, frequently translated opinion, but which in this connection would be much more accurately rendered, sensible impression, or even perception. At any rate, the term opinion is a very unhappy one, and does not convey the true meaning at all, for no voluntary intellective act on the part of the subject was implied by the term. Now intelligence in constructing a scheme of Knowledge is active. The ideas are the instruments of this activity.
Plato's doctrine of ideas was probably designed or conceived by him as affording an explanation also of the community of Knowledge. He emphasised the fluent instability of the sensible impression, and as we have already pointed out, sensation in itself labours also under this drawback that it contains and affords no common nexus whereby the conceptions or perceptions of one man can be compared or related with those of another.
Indeed, if Experience were composed solely of sensations, each individual would be an isolated solipsistic unit--incapable of rational Discourse or communication with his fellow-men. To cure this defect, Plato offered the ideas--universal forms common to the intelligence of every rational being. Not only would they render possible a common Knowledge of Reality--the existence of such ideas would necessarily also give permanence, fixity, law, and order to our intellectual activity. Our Knowledge would not be a mere random succession of impressions, but a definitely determined organic unity.
In all this argument it must be remembered Plato never said or suggested that the intellect of man--thus equipped with ideal forms--was thereby enabled to become, or did become, the creator of the world by and in which each one believes himself to be surrounded and included. He always distinguished between Idea and Reality, between Thought and Thing. The ideas were types of the forms immanent in things themselves. It has been said by some scholars that he generally distinguished between the two by the employment of distinct terms, applying +eidos+ to the mental conception and +idea+ to the substantial form. This verbal distinction was accepted by many scholars of the epoch of Liddell and Scott and Davies and Vaughan. A reference to this distinction in the present writer's essay on The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge provoked at the instance of one critic the allegation that it is not borne out by a critical study of the Platonic texts. That is a matter of little moment and one upon which the writer cannot claim to pronounce. The important point is that in one way or another Plato undoubtedly distinguished between and indeed contrasted the idea and the substantial form. No trace of the solipsism which results from their being confounded and which has ultimately brought to destruction the imposing edifice of Hegelian Thought is to be found in his writings.
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The Platonic doctrine of ideas speedily found an energetic critic in Aristotle. In Aristotle's view, it was quite unnecessary and unwarrantable to postulate the existence in the Mind of ideal forms or counterparts of the substantial forms of Reality. This, according to him, was a wholly unnecessary reduplication. He was content to believe that the mind found and recognised the essential forms of things when they were presented to it in perceptive Experience. Universalia in re were conceived by him as sufficiently explaining the genesis of cognition without the postulation of any such universalia extra rem.
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To the Platonic doctrine he offered the further objection that the eternal forms of things which that doctrine affirmed and which it declared to be represented in their ideal types were necessarily impotential. There was no generative power in the pure activity of Thought. If, therefore, the essentials of Reality were ideal, it followed that they also were impotent, and incapable of causative efficacy. The sensible world, however, was a fluent and perpetually generated stream, which required some potent cause to uphold it.
The eternal