imperfectly learns, that he must disengage himself from the influence of
words. Nor are there wanting in Plato, who was himself too often the
victim of them, impressive admonitions that we should regard not words but
things (States.). But upon the whole, the ancients, though not entirely
dominated by them, were much more subject to the influence of words than
the moderns. They had no clear divisions of colours or substances; even
the four elements were undefined; the fields of knowledge were not parted
off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a small grain of
experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori notions. And yet,
probably, their first impressions, the illusions and mirages of their
fancy, created a greater intellectual activity and made a nearer approach
to the truth than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which
the time had not yet come, could have accomplished.

There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers were subject,
and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be struggling--the
tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that pure abstraction is only
negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction the greater the
truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them--the
(Greek), as it was technically termed--began at once to appear. Two are
truer than three, one than two. The words 'being,' or 'unity,' or
essence,' or 'good,' became sacred to them. They did not see that they had
a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of words. They did not
understand that the content of notions is in inverse proportion to their
universality--the element which is the most widely diffused is also the
thinnest; or, in the language of the common logic, the greater the
extension the less the comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole
without parts, of a subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has
been also the most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a priori
thought, and indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to conceive it, not