se it elides into a description of human experience. Justice, he says, is concerned "not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man . . . [H]e sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and own law, and at peace with himself" (329). Conceptualization of justice, experienced as order, is its ideal form. Plato resolves any tension between mind and body, thought and materiality, in favor of Idea, or more exactly gives precedence to the reality of Idea over contingent, everyday existential reality.
If Plato's reality proceeds from unassailable first principles, Aristotle looks to tangible examples of reality to identify it. His metaphysics distinguishes between the actual and the potential, and he sees the actual as more real, because extant, than the potential. He also distinguishes three kinds of actuality, i.e., three kinds of substance, sensory, tangible, and immovable. The first two, he says, are physical, and the third is eternal, but he says that "nothing is gained by supposing substances that are eternal, as the believers in ideas [e.g., Plato] do" (Aristotle 35). A third substance gets into a discussion of the mind of God (33ff), which is outside the scope of this research. What is relevant is that human thought, which can momentarily mimic the mind of God, is considered by Aristotle to be (materially) indivisible: "everything that is free of matter is indivisible" (Aristotle 36).
The mind-body/universal-particular debate begun by the Greeks continued into the medieval period, formulated chiefly as the problem of universals in Christian metaphysics. That debate was concerned partly with the nature of the reality of God and partly with the nature of human experience in the material world and in the nonmaterial afterlife. Fremantle sums up the issues:
It is a problem . . . battled today to and fro between positivists, idealists, existentialists and neo-Thomists, as i...