The Essays of Adam Smith: THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS

The Essays of Adam Smith, by Adam Smith is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES; ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF THEANCIENT LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS.

THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES; ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF THEANCIENT LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS.

IN every transmutation, either of one element into another, or of one compound body either into the elements out of which it was composed, or into another compound body, it seemed evident, that both in the old and in the new species, there was something that was the same, and something that was different. When Fire was changed into Air, or Water into Earth, the Stuff, or Subject-matter of this Air and this Earth, was evidently the same with that of the former Fire or Water; but the Nature or Species of those new bodies was entirely different.

When, in the same manner, a number of fresh, green, and odoriferous flowers were thrown together in a heap, they, in a short time, entirely changed their nature, became putrid and loathsome, and dissolved into a confused mass of ordure, which bore no resemblance, either in sensible qualities or in its effects, to their former beautiful appearance. But how different soever the species, the subject-matter of the flowers, and of the ordure, was, in this case too, evidently the same. In every body therefore, whether simple or mixed, there were evidently two principles, whose combination constituted the whole nature of that particular body.

The first was the Stuff, or Subject-matter, out of which it was made; the second was the Species, the Specific Essence, the Essential, or, as the schoolmen have called it, the Substantial Form of the Body.  and even to have supposed, that they had a particular place of existence, beyond the sphere of the visible He calls them, indeed, Ideas, a word which, in him, in Aristotle, and all the other writers of earlier antiquity, signifies a Species, and is perfectly synonymous with that other word Ειδος, more frequently made use of by Aristotle. As, by some of the later sects of philosophers, particularly by the Stoics, all species, or specific essences, were regarded as mere creatures of the mind, formed by abstraction, which had no real existence external to the thoughts that conceived them, the word Idea came, by degrees, to its present signification, to mean, first, an abstract thought or conception; and afterwards, a thought or conception of any kind; and thus became synonymous with that other Greek word, Εννοια, from which it had originally a very different meaning.

When the later Platonists, who lived at a time when the notion of the separate existence of specific essences was universally exploded, began to comment upon the writings of Plato, and upon that strange fancy that, in his writings, there was a double doctrine; and that they were intended to seem to mean one thing, while at bottom they meant a very different, which the writings of no man in his senses ever were, or ever could be intended to do; they represented his doctrine as meaning no more, than that the Deity formed the world after what we would now call an Idea, or plan conceived in his own mind, in the same manner as any other artist.

But, if Plato had meant to express no more than this most natural and simple of all notions, he might surely have expressed it more plainly, and would hardly, one would think, have talked of it with so much emphasis, as of something which it required the utmost reach of thought to comprehend. According to this representation, Plato’s notion of Species, or Universals, was the same with that of Aristotle.

Aristotle, however, does not seem to understand it as such; he bestows a great part of his Metaphysics upon confuting it, and opposes it in all his other works; nor does he, in any one of them, give the least hint, or insinuation, as if it could be suspected that, by the Ideas of Plato, was meant the thoughts or conceptions of the Divine Mind. Is it possible that he, who was twenty years in his school, should, during all that time, have misunderstood him, especially when his meaning was so very plain and obvious? Neither is this notion of the separate existence of Species, distinct both from the mind which conceives them, and from the sensible objects which are made to resemble them, one of those doctrines which Plato would but seldom have occasion to talk of.

However it may be interpreted, it is the very basis of his philosophy; neither is there a single dialogue in all his works which does not refer to it. Shall we suppose, that that great philosopher, who appears to have been so much superior to his master in every thing but eloquence, wilfully, and upon all occasions, misrepresented, not one of the deep and mysterious doctrines of the philosophy of Plato, but the first and most fundamental principle of all his reasonings; when the writings of Plato were in the hands of every body; when his followers and disciples were spread all over Greece; when almost every Athenian of distinction, that was nearly of the same age with Aristotle, must have been bred in his school; when Speusippus, the nephew and successor of Plato, as well as Xenocrates, who continued the school in the Academy, at the same time that Aristotle held his in the Lyceum, must have been ready, at all times, to expose and affront him for such gross disingenuity.

Does not Cicero, does not Seneca understand this doctrine in the same manner as Aristotle has represented it? Is there any author in all antiquity who seems to understand it otherwise, earlier than Plutarch, an author who seems to have been as bad a critic in philosophy as in history, and to have taken every thing at second-hand in both, and who lived after the origin of that eclectic philosophy, from whence the later Platonists arose, and who seems himself to have been one of that sect? Is there any one passage in any Greek author, near the time of Aristotle and Plato, in which the word Idea is used in its present meaning, to signify a thought or conception? Are not the words, which in all languages express reality or existence, directly opposed to those which express thought, or conception only? Or, is there any other difference betwixt a thing that exists, and a thing that does not exist, except this, that the one is a mere conception, and that the other is something more than a conception?

With what propriety, therefore, could Plato talk of those eternal species, as of the only things which had any real existence, if they were no more than the conceptions of the Divine Mind? Had not the Deity, according to Plato, as well as according to the Stoics, from all eternity, the idea of every individual, as well as of every species, and of the state in which every individual was to be, in each different instance of its existence? Were not all the divine ideas, therefore, of each individual, or of all the different states, which each individual was to be in during the course of its existence, equally eternal and unalterable with those of the species? With what sense, therefore, could Plato say, that the first were eternal, because the Deity had conceived them from all eternity, since he had conceived the others from all eternity too, and since his ideas of the Species could, in this respect, have no advantage of those of the individual?

Does not Plato, in many different places, talk of the Ideas of Species or Universals as innate, and having been impressed upon the mind in its state of pre-existence, when it had an opportunity of viewing these Species as they are in themselves, and not as they are expressed in their copies, or representatives upon earth? But if the only place of the existence of those Species was the Divine Mind, will not this suppose, that Plato either imagined, like Father Malbranche, that in its state of pre-existence, the mind saw all things in God: or that it was itself an emanation of the Divinity? That he maintained the first opinion, will not be pretended by any body who is at all versed in the history of science.

That enthusiastic notion, though it may seem to be favoured by some passages in the Fathers, was never, it is well known, coolly and literally maintained by any body before that Cartesian philosopher. That the human mind was itself an emanation of the Divine, though it was the doctrine of the Stoics, was by no means that of Plato; though, upon the notion of a pretended double doctrine, the contrary has lately been asserted.

According to Plato, the Deity formed the soul of the world out of that substance which is always the same, that is, out of Species or Universals; out of that which is always different, that is, out of corporeal substances; and out of a substance that was of a middle nature between these, which it is not easy to understand what he meant by. Out of a part of the same composition, he made those inferior intelligences who animated the celestial spheres, to whom he delivered the remaining part of it, to form from thence the souls of men and animals.

The souls of those inferior deities, though made out of a similar substance or composition, were not regarded as parts or emanations of that of the world; nor were those of animals, in the same manner, regarded as parts or emanations of those inferior deities: much less were any of them regarded as parts, or emanations of the great Author of all things.

The more the soul was accustomed to the consideration of those Universal Natures, the less it was attached to any particular and individual objects; it approached the nearer to the original perfection of its nature, from which, according to this philosophy, it had fallen. Philosophy, which accustoms it to consider the general Essence of things only, and to abstract from all their particular and sensible circumstances, was, upon this account, regarded as the great purifier of the soul.

As death separated the soul from the body, and from the bodily senses and passions, it restored it to that intellectual world, from whence it had originally descended, where no sensible Species called off its attention from those general Essences of things. Philosophy, in this life, habituating it to the same considerations, brings it, in some degree, to that state of happiness and perfection, to which death restores the souls of just men in a life to come.

Such was the doctrine of Plato concerning the Species or Specific Essence of things. This, at least, is what his words seem to import, and thus he is understood by Aristotle, the most intelligent and the most renowned of all his disciples. It is a doctrine, which, like many of the other doctrines of abstract Philosophy, is more coherent in the expression than in the idea; and which seems to have arisen, more from the nature of language, than from the nature of things.

With all its imperfections it was excusable, in the beginnings of philosophy, and is not a great deal more remote from the truth, than many others which have since been substituted in its room by some of the greatest pretenders to accuracy and precision. Mankind have had, at all times, a strong propensity to realize their own abstractions, of which we shall immediately see an example, in the notions of that very philosopher who first exposed the ill-grounded foundation of those Ideas, or Universals, of Plato and Timæus.

To explain the nature, and to account for the origin of general Ideas, is, even at this day, the greatest difficulty in abstract philosophy. How the human mind, when it reasons concerning the general nature of triangles, should either conceive, as Mr. Locke imagines it does, the idea of a triangle, which is neither obtusangular, nor rectangular, nor acutangular; but which was at once both none and of all those together; or should, as Malbranche thinks necessary for this purpose, comprehend at once, within its finite capacity, all possible triangles of all possible forms and dimensions, which are infinite in number, is a question, to which it is surely not easy to give a satisfactory answer.

Malbranche, to solve it, had recourse to the enthusiastic and unintelligible notion of the intimate union of the human mind with the divine, in whose infinite 

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