Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

400 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ANDit with the highest godhead. Thus the method toattain the knowledge of Ideas is dialectics, whichcomprehend the double path of rising to the generaland returning from the general to the particular.As to the generation44 of the doctrine of Ideas,Aristotle states it as the common product of thedoctrine of Heracleitus that everything whichmeets the senses is subject to change and flux,and of the Socratic view of the conception. FromSocrates Plato learnt that when once this is rightlyformed, it can be held fast unchangeably: he wouldnot then apply it to anything which meets thesenses, but inferred that there must be other beingswhich are the objects of the knowledge acquiredby the conception, and these objects henamed Ideas. The filiation,45 then, between Socratesand Plato is this: Socrates was the firstto require that all knowledge and all moral dealingO should proceed 1 from the knowing O of the conception,and endeavoured to execute this by hisinductive process, ** while with Plato the same convictionformed the starting-point of a philosophicalsystem : so that what with Socrates was simplya rule of scientific procedure was carried out byPlato to an objective intuition, and when Socratessaid, Only the knowing of the conception is trueknowledge, Plato added, Only the being of the conceptionis true being.44 Ueberweg, i. 120, from Aristotle, lletayli. i. 6 and 9, and xiii. 4., « Zeller, i. 119.