being regarded as that which becomes universal so soon as it is judged of or
known, in virtue of the property under which it is known, it is connected with
the universal as a thing with the class to which it belongs. In this position it is
vain to deny its [i.e. the individual’s] priority and independence. Thus
individuals come to be regarded as one set of knowable things, universals
another. But the ‘sensible,’ according to the ideal theory, is the merely
individual. It is so because it is in no determinate relation to anything else, and
therefore nothing positive. The mere individual, however, having by the wrong
path just traced been raised to the position of a real entity, the ‘sensible’ is so
raised likewise. The ideal theory has built again that which it destroyed, and
the sensible thing becomes, as such, the determinate subject of properties.
76
On this account, then, one side of the Platonic and Aristotelian picture of
the univers al is responsible for leadi ng to the metaphysics of the ‘bare
individual’ and to the priority of sensation over thought, where the
argument behind this account is recognizably Hegel ian: once our view of
universality is ‘abstract’ and hence allows for the possibility that
individuality might be something over and abo ve universality, giving this
individuality ‘priority and independence’, the notion of the ‘bare individual’
will inevitably emerge, and with it the idea of treating ‘apprehension’ as
prior to and separable from ‘comprehension’ , ‘sensation’ from ‘thought’.
77
It is this side of the Platonic and Aristotelian position that Green sees as
leading to the emergence of full-blown nominalism, and thus eventually to
the Locke an position:
The fault of this crude ‘realism,’ it will be observed, whether Platonic,
Aristotelian, or scholastic, is that it is virtually nominalism. It holds the
universal to be real, but it finds the universal simply in the meaning of a
name ...[T]he realism of the ancient logic, taking for its reality the species
denoted by a common noun, is doubly at fault. It makes its universal a class
instead of a relation, and it takes as the essential attributes of the class those
only which are connoted by its name, i.e. the most superficial. Having thus
begun with a meagre conception as its first reality, it passes on in its process
of abstraction to which is more meagre still, ending in that which has no
properties at all.
78
However, Green argues, there is another side to the Platoni c and
Aristotelian position, which suggests a different picture, and ‘a more
thorough and therefore truer idealism’.
79
This can be seen, Green claims, in
Aristotle’s theory of matter: for, while on the one hand Aristotle treats
76
Ibid.
77
Cf. the account of Hegel’s argument concerning sense-certainty offered above, in section I.
78
Green, ‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’, 60–1.
79
Ibid., 62.
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 147
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