senses as ours. I have explained this point sufficiently on former occasions. Matter was thus put out of court, as being not the absolutely true. This, we may say, was the verdict of philosophers generally, and pronounced at a very early period in speculation.
9. II.—Matter being set aside as not the absolutely real, the absolute had now to be looked for elsewhere, and accordingly philosophers proceeded to search for it, not in the region of sense, but in that of intellect. Pythagoras proclaimed number as the truth for all. The Eleatics took their stand upon Being. Heraclitus contended for Becoming or change. Plato advanced his theory of ideas (resemblance, difference, the good, &c.) It is obvious, however, that these are rather the objects of thought than thought itself. There is some distinction between number and the thought of number, between being and the thought of being; and on this ground it might be argued that number, being, and the others, might perhaps not be absolute truths. Whatever is different from thought is not necessarily true for all thought. Number, being, and other universals, are different from thought, and are therefore not true for all thought. The subject and the object are here separated, and Scepticism takes advantage of the separation to represent the objective as uncertain. This position, indeed, the separation of subject and object, was the stronghold of Scepticism, the fortress from which it strove to
