Religious Teachers of Greece

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908. Excerpt: ... LECTURES XXI AND XXII PLATO--concluded. The Theory Of Ideas The educational discipline which occupied our attention during the last lecture was intended by Plato to prepare the soul for the contemplation of "that which is best in the world of Being," in other words, the Idea of the Good. It is with this highest and final stage of the soul's initiation that we are concerned to-day. We shall place ourselves in the best position for understanding what Plato meant by his Theory of Ideas, if we start from the passage in which Aristotle describes what he conceives to have been the strictly philosophical significance of the doctrine. According to Aristotle's account, the Theory of Ideas was generated out of the union of Socraticism with Heracliteanism. From first to last Plato, according to Aristotle, agreed with Heraclitus in holding that all perceivable things arc "ceaselessly flowing," and consequently incapable of being known: for the object of knowledge, he assumed, is necessarily constant and unchanging. At the same time, he believed that Socrates was right in the importance he attached to definition and the universals, with which definition is concerned. What then is this universal or constant element which the general term endeavours to express? It cannot be something perceivable, for perceivables are never constant, but always changing. Just because it is permanent and universal, it must be something entirely disparate from sensibles. In this way Plato arrived at his doctrine of Ideas or Forms, which are simply the objective correlates of our general notions; and he further declared that every group of sensibles is separate from its Idea, while at the same time participating in it and called by its name.1 The reasoning which Aristotle thus drily summari...