But this is not all. For as, when we form a minor class, as man, there is a certain ONE, the object of intellect, complete in every individual; MANY, therefore, and at the same time, ONE; so when we form a larger class, animal, there is a certain ONE, the object of intellect, complete in every one of those individuals. And when we go still higher, as to the grand class, BODY, there is always a ONE, the object of intellect, complete in every one of those more numerous individuals. When we mount up to the very summit, and embrace all things in one class, BEING, there is in like manner a ONE, the object of intellect, complete in every individual that exists. This is the grand ONE; the ONE pre-eminently. This is the ONE; τό ἕν; ONENESS; ONE in the abstract. This was a conception deemed truly SUBLIME. The loftiest epithets were bestowed upon τό ἕν, the ONE. It was DIVINE; it was more than that; for being not concrete, but abstract, it was DIVINITY. All things were contained in the ONE; and the ONE was in all things. The ONE was the source and principle of Being. It was immutable, eternal.
253 These ONES they also called by the names of Internal Forms, and Intelligible Forms. Thus Harris: “Let us suppose any man to look for the first time upon some Work of Art; as, for example, upon a Clock; and, having sufficiently viewed it, at length to depart. Would he not retain, when absent, an Idea of what he had seen? And what is it, to retain such Idea? It is to have A FORM INTERNAL correspondent to THE EXTERNAL; only with this difference, that the Internal Form is devoid of the Matter; the External is united with it, being seen in the metal, the wood, and the like. Now, if we suppose this Spectator to view many such Machines, and not simply to view, but to consider every part of them, so as to comprehend how those parts all operate to one End, he might be then said to possess a kind of INTELLIGIBLE FORM, by which he would not only understand and know the clocks, which he had seen already, but every Work, also, of like Sort, which he might see hereafter.”
We might here remark upon the mystical jargon, which is thus employed to obscure the simple fact, that after a man has seen an individual of a particular kind he has the idea of that individual; and after he has seen various individuals of the same kind, he has ideas of the various individuals, and has them combined by association. But we must hear Mr. Harris a little further.
After telling us that there are two orders of these immutable INTELLIGIBLE FORMS; one belonging to the Contemplator of objects, and subsequent to their existence; another belonging to the Maker of them, being the archetype, according to which they were formed; he thus proceeds: “The WHOLE VISIBLE 254 WORLD, exhibits nothing more than so many passing pictures of these IMMUTABLE ARCHETYPES. Nay, through these it attains even a Semblance of Immortality, and continues throughout ages to be SPECIFICALLY ONE, amid those infinite particular changes, that befall it every moment. May we be allowed then to credit those speculative men, who tell us, it is in these permanent and comprehensive FORMS that the DEITY views at once, without looking abroad, all possible productions both present, past, and future; that this great and stupendous view is but a view of himself, where all things lie enveloped in their Principles and Exemplars, as being essential to the fulness of this universal Intellection?”
I shall exhibit but one other specimen of the mode of speculating about these imaginary Beings, from another great master of the ancient philosophy, Cudworth. Both Aristotle and Plato, he says, “acknowledged two sorts of Entities, the one mutable, or subject to flux and motion, such as are especially individual corporeal things; the other immutable, that always rest or stand still, which are the proper objects of certain, constant, and immutable knowledge, that therefore cannot be mere nothings, non-entities.
“Which latter kind of being, that is, the immutable essence, as a distinct thing from individual sensibles, Aristotle plainly asserts against Heraclitus, and those other flowing philosophers in these words: ‘We would have these philosophers to know, that besides sensible things that are always mutable, there is another kind of being or entity of such things as are neither subject to motion, corruption, nor generation.’ And elsewhere he tells us, that this immovable essence 255 is the object of theoretical knowledge, of the first philosophy, and of the pure mathematics.
“Now these immutable entities are the universal rationes, or intelligible natures and essences of all things, which some compare to unities, but Aristotle to numbers; which formally considered, are indivisible: saith he, ‘The essences of things are like to numbers;’ because if but the least thing be added to any number, or subtracted from it, the number is destroyed.
“And these are the objects of all certain knowledge. As for example, the objects of geometry are not any individual material triangles, squares, circles, pyramids, cubes, spheres, and the like; which because they are always mutable, nothing can be immutably affirmed of them; but they are those indivisible and unchangeable rationes of a triangle, square, circle; which are ever the same to all geometricians, in all ages and places, of which such immutable theorems as these are demonstrated, as that a triangle has necessarily three angles equal to two right angles.
“But if any one demand here, where this ἀκίνητος οὐσία, these immutable entities do exist? I answer, first, that as they are considered formally, they do not properly exist in the individuals without us, as if they were from them imprinted upon the understanding, which some have taken to be Aristotle’s opinion; because no individual material thing is either universal or immutable. And if these things were only lodged in the individual sensibles, then they would be unavoidably obnoxious to the fluctuating waves of the same reciprocating Euripus, in which all individual material things are perpetually whirled. But because 256 they perish not together with them, it is a certain argument that they exist independently upon them. Neither in the next place, do they exist somewhere else apart from the individual sensibles, and without the mind, which is that opinion that Aristotle justly condemns, but either unjustly or unskilfully attributes to Plato. For if the mind looked abroad for its objects wholly without itself, then all its knowledge would be nothing but sense and passion. For to know a thing is nothing else but to comprehend it by some inward ideas that are domestic to the mind, and actively exerted from it. Wherefore these intelligible ideas or essences of things, those forms by which we understand all things, exist no where but in the mind itself; for it was very well determined long ago by Socrates, in Plato’s Parmenides, that these things are nothing but noëmata: these species or ideas are all of them nothing but noëmata, or notions that exist no where but in the soul itself.’ Wherefore, to say that there are immutable natures and essences, and rationes of things, distinct from the individuals that exist without us, is all one as if one should say, that there is in the universe above the orb of matter and body, another superior orb of intellectual being, that comprehends its own immediate objects, that is, the immutable rationes and ideas of things within itself, by which it understands and knows all things without itself.
“And yet notwithstanding though these things exist only in the mind, they are not therefore mere figments of the understanding: for if the subjects of all scientifical theorems were nothing but figments, then all truth and knowledge that is built upon them would 257 be a mere fictitious thing; and if truth itself, and the intellectual nature be fictitious things, then what can be real or solid in the world? But it is evident, that though the mind thinks of these things at pleasure, yet they are not arbitrarily framed by the mind, but have certain, determinate, and immutable natures of their own, which are independent upon the mind, and which are not blown away into nothing at the pleasure of the same being that arbitrarily made them.