We shall have many occasions to stress the importance of the individual, considered from the viewpoint of totality in human life. Sometimes our term is the particular, or the personal. But that seldom makes any essential difference to the general trend of our ideas.
Now we all know what quite special part the question of the individual versus the universal plays in Platonic idealism. The highest statement that can be allowed here, regarding the individual things, is that they become. Only somewhere far, far beyond all those many individuals the philosopher perceives the one real thing, the universal form, the general idea. Beyond--or rather above--the many beautiful individuals, for instance, is the one Beautiful. And this superior model is the only thing that really and indisputably is. The lower world of the senses and of the individual impressions is in a flowing state of changing and becoming. But as such it never has any chance of ever reaching the happy harbour of permanent being.
However, precisely because Plato thus obstinately denies the being of individual things, he is not able to pass beyond a stage of a problematic hypothesis affording no sure explanation of either being or truth or goodness. For outside those supernatural models of the natural individuals he is unable to see anything whatsoever. Here there is neither being nor truth nor goodness.
In this respect Aristotle goes defiantly against his teacher. To him all things have an existence as separate individuals. Each thing is an individual substance. That applies both to the natural, for instance the earth, and to the supernatural, for instance God. It cannot be denied, however: with the Aristotelians the point of gravity has definitely been moved down to the natural. With Platonism it had been more in the ethereal heights of the supernatural. With Aristotle the concrete has won a decisive battle over the abstract.