PLATO’S EARLIER THEORY OF FORMS things cannot itself be one thing among many: ‘Things that are individual and numerically one are, without exception, not said of any subject.’ Numerical distinctness, however, is a necessary but not a suffi- cient condition for separation. At Categories, 1a, 24-25, Aristotle remarks that ‘By “in a subject” I mean what is in something, not as a part, and cannot exist separately (ywptc) from what it is in’. This text, along with Aristotle’s subsequent remark that ‘Nothing prevents [what is individual and one in number] from being present in a subject’ (1b 7-8), suggests that separation implies existential independence as well as numerical distinctness. This independence must be construed as distributive, not collective; for by ‘in a subject’ Aristotle means, not merely ‘cannot exist apart from some subject’, but ‘cannot exist apart from the par- ticular subject it is in’. In claiming that the Ideas are separate, then, Aristotle means that they are individuals, and that they exist independently of any given instances.* Since the existence of the Idea is a condition for the existence of its instances, separation, so defined, involves an asymmetrical relationship, that of ontological priority :+ Some things are called prior and posterior... in respect of nature and substance, i.e. those which can be without other things, while 1 Categories, tb, 6-7, trans, Ackrill. * See. J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, pp. 73-4. Professor Owen has recently questioned this interpretation (Phronesis, X (1965, PP. 97-105), but at the cost of collapsing the distinction between presence and predicability which 1a, 24-5, is meant to help explain; it is as true of what is said of a subject as it is of what is in a subject that it cannot exist apart from some subject. What is not true is that it cannot exist apart from this subject. * Thus W. F. R. Hardic’s claim (A Study in Plato, p. 73) that “To say that a form is “separate” is to say that there can be a form without there being particulars to exemplify it’ is a mistaken account of Aristotle’s meaning. It further mistakes Plato, since the evidence cited to show that this was Plato’s view is drawn, not from texts implying lack of exemplification, but deficiency of exemplification. Plato may well. ught, as a matter of economy \¢ universe, that the ¢3 has been cited as evidence for empty essences; it is in fact evidence that essences such as justice are only deficiently realized, Sce also Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Il, 92, by-12, Metaphysics, VII, 10310, 12 f. * Metaphysics, V, 10192, 1 ff. 132