But those sciences, however widely cultivated, have
never formed the basis of intellectual education in any society. It is
with philosophy as with religion: men marvel at the absurdity of other
people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own,
and the same man is unaffectedly astonished that words can be mistaken
for things, who is treating other words as if they were things every
time he opens his mouth to discuss. No one, unless entirely ignorant of
the history of thought, will deny that the mistaking of abstractions for
realities pervaded speculation all through antiquity and the middle
ages. The mistake was generalized and systematized in the famous Ideas
of Plato. The Aristotelians carried it on. Essences, quiddities, virtues
residing in things, were accepted as a _bona fide_ explanation of
phaenomena. Not only abstract qualities, but the concrete names of
genera and species, were mistaken for objective existences. It was
believed that there were General Substances corresponding to all the
familiar classes of concrete things: a substance Man, a substance Tree,
a substance Animal, which, and not the individual objects so called,
were directly denoted by those names.
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