conception of philosophy as the science which contemplates these 

 Ideas, the science par excellence. 



Aristotle says that the successors of Socrates, and he refers 

 clearly to Plato and his followers, took the Socratic concepts and 

 ascribed to them a separate existence. These hypostasized con- 

 cepts are then the Ideas; to every concept there corresponds an 

 Idea, and, just as the former may be classified, so the latter may 

 be classified ; and thus there is a whole hierarchy of Ideas, the cul- 

 mination of which is the Idea of the Good or Idea Good. Ordinary 

 sense-perception furnishes only the suggestion or promptings, with 

 the help of which, according to the myth, the soul bethinks itself of 

 the Ideas, of which in its former existence it was fully cognizant. 

 This is the kernel of Plato's doctrine of ava/jLvrjaLs or reminiscence. 

 Philosophy then consists in the contemplation of these Ideas, they 

 are "that which in each case really exists". To express the relation 

 of individual sense things to the Ideas becomes the problem which 

 Plato must face. Whether Ideas are the only real or not makes not 

 a whit of difference to the fact that there are things of sense, and 

 Plato was far too sagacious and much too honest to ignore or deny 

 that. Individual things are imitations of the Ideas, or they parti- 

 cipate in them; the Ideas are, in some sense, present in the indivi- 

 dual things; but, further than these suggestions Plato did not go. 



It was in this connection that Aristotle made his greatest 

 criticism of Plato, but yet Aristotle himself was not to overcome 

 entirely the same difficulty. To these early thinkers the moral 

 aspect of human imperfection the problem of evil seemed so 

 acute that they could not succeed in surmounting in their theories 

 the "necessity" and the "contingency", which were so obvious in 

 the world about them. 



Before turning to the Aristotelian criticism of this theory of 

 Ideas and to the special system of the Stagirite himself, it must be 

 said that there is possible an interpretation of the Ideas of Plato 

 different from that which Aristotle and practically all succeeding 

 writers have held. The latter view, as has been suggested, ad- 

 vances the belief that Plato gave to the concepts a noumenal 

 existence, making them the Ideas. But may it not be that the 

 Ideas which are given suprasensible existence are not the concepts 

 of Socrates plus suprasensible existence, but rather supposed ob- 



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