Chap. X. ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. 179 



fore, we commit to writing what difcoveries we have made in know- 

 ledge in our younger days, we will reap the benefit of it when wc 

 become old. This is an advantage which I enjoy in my old age ; 

 when I may be faid to live by the learning which I colleded and 

 put down in wrhing in my younger days. It is by writing, as I 

 have elfewhere obferved, that men, living in the mod diftant coun- 

 tries, communicate their learning to one another j and that the 

 learning, even of the moft diftant ages, is tranfmitted to the prefent 

 generation*; and, indeed, without this wonderful art of prefervino- 

 the difcoveries of arts and fciences, we fhould have had no learuino* 

 in this age of any value. 



And here I will conclude this chapter^ in which, I think, I have 

 ihown the progrefs of our ideas from particular ideas, that is ideas 

 of objeds of fenfe, to the moft general ideas, which, by Ariftotle 

 are called the roc ovruy by way of eminence and diftindion, as they not 

 only exift as other ideas do, but, by being the moft general, contain 

 in them all other ideas ; and thefe he makes the fubjed of his Me- 

 taphyfics, which, he fays, treat of the roc ovra, 'p ovrcc. By thefe laft 

 words he informs us, that he confidered them not as the terms of 

 propofitions and fyllogifms, the way in which he confiders them in 

 his treatife of Categories prefixed to his Logic, but as exifting in 

 the nature of things, unconneded with propofitions or fyllogifms, 

 or with any operation of the human mind. 



But I have not yet done with ideas, which, as they are the foun- 

 dation of all arts and fciences and of all our knowledge, ought to be 

 moft carefully confidered by the philofopher; for, in the next chap- 

 ter, I propofe to treat of a fubjed well known among the philofo- 

 phers of the Platonic and Ariftotelian fchools, but not known at all 

 among our modern philofophers ; I mean t^e ideas of Plato, who 



2; 2 has 



* Vol. 4. of this Work, p. 262. 



