WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

Otto Willmann
"Idealism in life is the characteristic of those who regard the ideas of truth and right, goodness and beauty, as standards and directive forces. This signification betrays the influence of Plato, who made idea a technical term in philosophy. According to him the visible world is simply a copy of a supersensible, intelligible, ideal world, and consequently "things" are but the impress stamped on reality by that which is of a higher, spiritual nature.

Platonism is the oldest form of idealism, and Plato himself the progenitor of idealists. It is usual to place in contrast Plato's idealism and Aristotle's realism; the latter in fact denies that ideas are originals and that things are mere copies; he holds that the essence is intelligible, but that it is immanent in the things of nature, whereas it is put into the products of art. It is more correct, therefore, to call his teaching an immanent idealism as contrasted with the transcendental idealism of Plato. Both these thinkers reveal the decisive influence of that moral and aesthetic idealism which permeated Greek life, thought, and action; but for both, what lies deepest down in their philosophy is the conviction that the first and highest principle of all things is the one perfect spiritual Being which they call God, and to which they lead back, by means of intermediate principles--essence and form, purpose and law--the multifarious individual beings of the visible world."