orms of all things and provided a solid basis for human knowledge, but he noted that Plato lacked an adequate doctrine of creation. He argued that Plato's metaphysical conception could be fulfilled by the Judaeo-Christian revelation of the supreme Creator. Augustine thus identified Plato's Ideas with the collective expression of God's Word, the Logos, and saw all archetypes as being contained within and expressing of the being of Christ.
Aquinas borrowed some from Plato and some from Aristotle. As with Aristotle, Aquinas saw form as an active principle, something dynamic reaching toward realization. Aquinas drew on philosophical thought in the Arab and Christian Neoplatonist traditions and especially on the thought of the ancient Eastern Christian mystics. Aquinas followed Aristotle in his regard for nature and for the importance of sense experience in gaining knowledge. Plato and Augustine believed that we understand universals first and can then know concrete things, while Aquinas and Aristotle held that first we know the concrete and then we learn the universals.
2. Aristotle believes that every art and inquiry is aimed at some good, that everything has as its goal some good. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies political science as the discipline that has as its goal the study of what is good for mankind. Ethics are actually a branch of political science, and personal ethical science is at one level while political ethical science is at a higher level of inquiry. For Aristotle, statecraft holds a primary position because it employs all the other sciences. It must therefore embrace as its aims the aims of all the others. The purpose of political science is to secure the good. This is on a higher level for the state than it is for the individual because while the securing of the good for the individual is itself a good, the securing of the good for an entire nation of people is of a higher order. Aristotl...