148 ARISTOTLE
the things around us and among the everlasting things. What’s more, of those ways by
which we show that there are forms, it is not evident by any of them. For from some of
them no necessary conclusion results, while from others there turn out to be forms of
those things which we believe do not have them. For as a result of the arguments from
the kinds of knowledge, there will be forms of all those things of which there is knowl-
edge, and as a result of the one-over-many there will even be forms of negations, while
as a result of the thinking of something that has been destroyed, there will be forms of
things that have passed away, since there is an image of these things. On top of this,
some of the most precise of the arguments produce forms of relations, which we claim
is not a kind in its own right, while other ones imply the third man.*
And in general, the arguments about the forms abolish things which we want there
to be, more than we want there to be forms. For it turns out that not the dyad, but number,
is primary, and that what is relative is more primary than what isin its own right, as well
as all those things which certain people who took the opinions about the forms to their
logical conclusions showed to be opposed to the original sources of things. What’s more,
by the assumption by which we say there are forms, there will be forms not only of beings
but also of many other things. (For the object of the intellect is one thing not only as con-
cerns beings but also as applied to other things, and there is demonstrative knowledge not
only about thinghood but also about other sorts of being, and vast numbers of other such
conclusions follow.) But both necessarily and as a result of the opinions about them, if the
forms are shared in, there must be forms only of independent things. For things do not
share in them incidentally, but must share in each by virtue of that by which it is not attrib-
uted to an underlying subject. (I mean, for example, if something partakes of the double,
then this also partakes of the everlasting, but incidentally, since it is incidental to the dou-
ble to be everlasting.) Therefore, the forms will be the thinghood of things, and the same
things will signify thinghood there as here. Otherwise, what would the something be that
is said to be apart from the things around us, the one-over-many? And if the forms and the
things that participate in them have the same form, there would be something common.
(For why is twoone and the same thing as applied both to destructible pairs and to those
that are many but everlasting, more so than as applied both to itself and to something?)
But if the form is not the same, there would be ambiguity, and it would be just as if some-
one were to call both Callias and a block of wood “human being” while observing nothing
at all common to them.
But most of all, one might be completely at a loss about what in the world the
forms contribute to the perceptible things, either to the everlasting ones or to the ones
that come into being and perish. For they are not responsible for any motion or change
that belongs to them. But they don’t assist in any way toward the knowledge of the other
things either (for they are not the thinghood of them, since in that case they would be in
them), nor toward their being, inasmuch as they are not present in the things that partake
of them. In that manner they might perhaps seem to be causes, after the fashion of the
white that is mingled in white things, but this argument, which Anaxagoras first,
Eudoxus later, and some others made, is truly a pushover (for it is easy to collect many
impossibilities related to this opinion). But surely it is not true either that the other things*[“The third man” refers to a problem with Plato’s theory of forms. If we say that two things are
instances of the same characteristic because they share in a “form,” and if the “form” itself has characteristics,
then there must be a third thing (“the third man”) whose characteristics the original two things and the “form”
share. And this third thing, if it also has characteristics, must share with the original two objects and the
“form” some fourth thing, and so on, ad infinitum. Plato was aware of this problem, pointing it out himself
(but without a solution) in Parmenides132a–133a.]102030991 a
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