doctrine of ideas is a poetical fancy, and that it is merely by a metaphor that things are said to be copies of ideas. And, sixthly, supposing the ideas to exist, they and the things which are their copies would require to be subsumed and reduced to unity under a higher idea, which is absurd; for example, if the idea man exists as something apart from actual men, we must have a higher idea to embrace both the ideal man and the actual men. This objection is called the argument of the τρίτος ἅνθρωπος, the third man; the other two being the idea of man and the reality of man. This argument, however, had been foreseen and stated by Plato himself. Such, stated shortly, is the tenor of Aristotle's argumentation against Plato's theory of ideas. All his objections are offshoots from his leading objection to the Platonic assertion (or what he regards as such), that the ideas are existences apart (χωριστὰ) from the things of which they are said to be the models.
6. But although Aristotle contested the Platonic doctrine, he advanced an ideal theory of his own. He did not hold that ideas were mere subjective conceptions, the fabrications of our own minds. He held that there was a correlative reality in the object answering to the conception in our minds, and this correlative reality he calls the form or essence, οὐσία. This essence is not an object of sense, but of intellect. It is, in fact, the Platonic idea under another name. So that we may say that Aristotle adopted the Platonic
