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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VI.————
kinds of existence. This path has been the highway on which systems have jostled systems and strewn the road with their ruins, since the days of Plato down through the middle ages, and on to the present time. And now, standing in the very source of the mistake which feeds the whole of them, and in which they all join issue—the misconception, namely, which has been already sufficiently described—we are in a position to unravel the controversies in which they were engaged, and to understand how none of them should have succeeded in establishing any truth of its own, however successful they may have been in refuting the errors of each other.
Misinterpretation of the Platonic analysis traced into its consequences.23. Our business, then, is to trace into its consequences, as manifested in the history of philosophy, the current misinterpretation of the Platonic analysis of knowledge and existence. Cognitions being supposed to be divided by Plato into two kinds or classes—a particular and a universal kind—and not into two elements—a particular and a universal element—the question immediately arose, What is the nature of the existences which correspond to these classes of cognition? In regard to the particular class there was little or no difficulty. The particular existences around us—this table, that chair, or book, or tree—these and the like particular things were held to correspond to our particular cognitions. In such a statement there may be no great novelty or