ONTOLOGICAL VIEWS. 541 
CHAPTER X. 
ONTOLOGICAL VIEWS. 
305. BErorE proceeding to essay a preliminary ontological analysis, it may be well to 
group together a few of the observations of prominent philosophers who have been led, 
experimentally, to conclusions analogous to those which flow necessarily from the theo- 
retical relations of the subjective and objective.* 
306. “ Being and thought are therefore identical, with Parmenides. This pure thought, 
directed to the pure being, he declares is the only true and undeceptive knowledge, in 
opposition to the deceptive notions concerning the manifoldness and mutability of the 
phenomenal.”  Schiwegler, p. 29. 
307. “ But my thinking, my reason is not something specially belonging to me, but 
something common to every rational being ; something universal, and in so far as I am a 
rational and thinking being, is my subjectivity a universal one. But every thinking in- 
dividual has the consciousness that what he holds as right, as duty, as good or evil, does 
not appear as such to him alone, but to every rational being, and that consequently his 
thinking has the character of universality, of universal validity, in a word,—of objec- 
tivity, . . . and therefore with him [Socrates] the philosophy of objective thought begins.” 
Id., p. 51, 52. 
308. “Some of the ancients say that Plato was the first to unite in one whole the scat- 
tered philosophical elements of the earlier sages, and so to obtain for philosophy the three 
parts, logic, physics, and ethics. The more accurate statement is given by Sextus Empi- 
ricus, that Plato has laid the foundation for this threefold division of philosophy, but that 
it was expressly recognized and affirmed by his scholars, Xenocrates and Aristotle.” 
Id., p. 82. 
309. “ Plato distinguishes two components of the soul,—the Divine and the mortal,— 
the rational and the irrational. ‘These two are united by an intermediate link which Plato 
calls dep%s, or spirit, and which, though allied to reason, is not reason itself, since it is often 
exhibited in children and also in brutes, and since even men are often carried away by it 
without reflection. This threefoldness, here exhibited psychologically, is found, in different 
applications, through all the last general period of Plato’s literary life. Based upon the 
* The selections in this chapter are taken from the works of German philosophical historians, because Kant 
and his successors of the modern German school have recognized a prevailing triplicity, to which they have been 
empirically led through the radical duality of the subjective and objective. 
