With Plato ideas
are constitutive in themselves.[1]
Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the
faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could
raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has
been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated,
and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or
living, inborn, essential truths.
Yet what a mind was Aristotle's--only not the greatest that ever animated
the human form!--the parent of science, properly so called, the master of
criticism, and the founder or editor of logic! But he confounded science
with philosophy, which is an error. Philosophy is the middle state between
science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge said the Eudemian Ethics; but I half suspect he must have
meant the Metaphysics, although I do not know that _all_ the fourteen books
under that title have been considered non-genuine. The [Greek: Aethicha
Eusaemeia] are not Aristotle's. To what passage in particular allusion is
here made, I cannot exactly say; many might be alleged, but not one seems
to express the true Platonic idea, as Mr. Coleridge used to understand it;
and as, I believe, he ultimately considered ideas in his own philosophy.
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