A Critical History of Greek Philosophy

Excerpt: ...transcendent inasmuch as they have a reality of their own apart from the objects of sense which participate in them. The Idea of man would still be real even if all men were destroyed, and it was real before any man existed, if there ever was such a time. For the Ideas, being timeless, cannot be real now and not then. Of what kinds of things are there Ideas? That there are moral Ideas, such as Justice, Goodness, and Beauty, Ideas of corporeal things, such as horse, man, tree, star, river, and Ideas of qualities, such as whiteness, heaviness, 195 sweetness, we have already seen. But there are Ideas not only of natural corporeal objects, but likewise of manufactured articles; there are Ideas of beds, tables, clothes. And there are Ideas not only of exalted moral entities, such as Beauty and Justice. There are also the Ideal Ugliness, and the Ideal Injustice. There are even Ideas of the positively nauseating, such as hair, filth, and dirt. This is asserted in the Parmenides. In that dialogue Plato's teaching is put into the mouth of Parmenides. He questions the young Socrates whether there are Ideas of hair, filth, and dirt. Socrates denies that there can be Ideas of such base things. But Parmenides corrects him, and tells him that, when he has attained the highest philosophy, he will no longer despise such things. Moreover, these Ideas of base things are just as much perfection in their kind as Beauty and Goodness are in theirs. In general, the principle is that there must be an Idea wherever a concept can be formed; that is, wherever there is a class of many things called by one name. We saw, in treating of the Eleatics, that for them the absolute Being contained no not-being, and the absolute One no multiplicity. And it was just because they denied all not-being and multiplicity of the absolute reality that they were unable to explain the world of existence, and were forced to deny it altogether. The same problem arises for Plato. Is Being...