ON RVOLUTION. 985 
inward eye that strove hard to escape being dazed and abused 
by the fleeting images of a phantasmal scene, fancied that 
he saw in them adumbrations of archetypal forms ; and these 
forms, which he called ideas (idéar), were in his view true, 
substantial, and enduring. Aristotle’s imagination, while his 
inquisitive and discriminating intellect sought to penetrate 
the secrets of nature, likewise created for each subjective 
concept a sort of objective counterpart. This, the distinctive 
sidoc of the object contemplated (be did not name it idéa), 
was its constitutive form, something which the conception of 
it implied, and which must therefore be considered indispen- 
sable to its essence (John iii. 10 R.V.) or being (ovota), but 
which, apart from the supposed nondescript material (vAn), 
wherein alone specific characters could find expression, had no 
substantial existence. Of these two notions the later shows 
doubtless some advance in the spirit of scientific caution which 
facilitates the avoidance of error, but it was not, like the 
earlier, conceived in that elevation of soul which involves a 
superior aptitude for the apprehension of truth. In the 
efforts, however, thus made to discover the stable and real 
by looking through the sensible into the sphere of the 
intellectual, it was overlooked that the concepts thereby 
assumed to have their counterparts in the nature of things 
had not been formed out of pure intuitions, either intellectual 
or moral, materials in respect to which philosophers might be 
permitted to say, ‘‘ We bear witness of that we have seen,”* 
but were products of tentative thought, as it were distinctive 
labels of provisional value at best, appended to aggregates ot 
properties, observed and classified from variable points ot 
limited view, results of an empirical and unfinished process, 
arrived at in the exercise of limited powers of perception and 
a fallible judgment, and leaving indefinite room for in- 
creasingly profound, accurate, and comprehensive knowledge, 
No portion of the universe, no single phase, or observed 
association of phases, of the ever-moving system of the 
manifold, can have an adequate intellectual counterpart 
otherwise than in each and all of its interrelations with the 
rest, not simply the interrelations of mere coexistence in an 
arbitrarily-assumed present, but those of a past which dates 
from a mysterious beginning inscrutably remote, and those of a 
future yet to be disclosed, which shall have no end. The 
eternal purpose of summing up (Eph. i. 10.) the universe in the 
* In eidoc we perceive a purely metaphysical conception ; it is that which 
makes the thing just what it is. Relatively, therefore, to this term essence 
(odcia) must be distinguished from existence. 
