ABSTRACT
In the following remarks about Aristotle, no claim to such a complete analysis is made or intended. The De Anima, which contains Aristotle's fullest account of the process of thinking, rests fundamentally upon an analogy between thought and touch. Contrary to the impression given by the opening lines of the Metaphysics, Aristotle rejects the Platonic interpretation of thinking as a kind of seeing. This rejection is inseparable from Aristotle's conception of ta onta, the 'beings' or things about which one thinks, and it underlies Aristotle's critical revision of Plato's theory of eide. One of the fundamental problems in philosophy is whether man sees or touches reality as it is, or whether he makes the objects which he sees and touches or decisively forms them in the process of perceiving them. But we can neither see clearly nor make well the things or beings of the world and the world itself as the order of its things.
