PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 



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concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive 

 reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing 

 away with the materiality that lessens being, grasps 

 being itself in the immutable system of Ideas. Thus 

 Science is obtained, which appears to us, complete and 

 ready-made, as soon as we put back our intellect into 

 its true place, correcting the deviation that separated 

 it from the intelligible. Science is not, then, a human 

 construction. It is prior to our intellect, independent 

 of it, veritably the generator of Things. 



And indeed, if we hold the Forms to be simply 

 snapshots taken by the mind of the continuity of 

 becoming, they must be relative to the mind that 

 thinks them, they can have no independent existence. 

 At most we might say that each of these Ideas is an 

 ideal. But it is in the opposite hypothesis that we 

 are placing ourselves. Ideas must then exist by 

 themselves. Ancient philosophy could not escape this 

 conclusion. Plato formulated it, and in vain did 

 Aristotle strive to avoid it. Since movement arises 

 from the degradation of the immutable, there could 

 be no movement, consequently no sensible world, if 

 there were not, somewhere, immutability realized. 

 So, having begun by refusing to Ideas an independent 

 existence, and rinding himself nevertheless unable to 

 deprive them of it, Aristotle pressed them into each 

 other, rolled them up into a ball, and set above the 

 physical world a Form that was thus found to be 

 the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his 

 own words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the 

 God of Aristotle necessarily immutable and apart from 

 what is happening in the world, since he is only the 

 synthesis of all concepts in a single concept. It is true 

 that no one of the manifold concepts could exist apart, 



