The standpoint of the Academics is that they express the truth as a subjective conviction of self-consciousness; and this tallies with the subjective idealism of modern times. The truth, in so far as it is only a subjective conviction, has hence been called, by the New Academy, the _probable_. Although followers of Plato, and hence, Platonists, the Academicians did not remain at the standpoint of Plato, nor could they have done so. But we easily see the connection of this principle with the Platonic doctrines, if we recollect that with Plato the Idea has been the principle, and that, indeed, on the whole, in the form of universality. Plato remained, as we saw above (pp. 139, 140), in the abstract Idea; to him the one great matter in Philosophy is to combine the infinite and finite. Plato’s Ideas are derived from the necessities of reason, from enthusiasm for the truth, but they are in themselves devoid of movement, and only universal, while Aristotle demands actuality, self-determining activity. Plato’s dialectic has only attempted to assert the universal as such, and to demonstrate the determinate and particular to be null, thus leaving nothing at all but abstract universality. His dialectic has hence very often a negative result, in which determinations are merely done away with and annulled. With Plato the working out of the concrete has thus not gone far, and where he, as in the Timæus, proceeds into the determinate, _e.g._ of organic life, he becomes infinitely trivial and quite unspeculative, while with Aristotle matters are very different. The necessity for a scientific ground has necessarily caused us to be carried on beyond this Platonic point of view. The Stoics and Epicureans were imbued with the scientific necessity, not yet recognized by Plato, of giving a content to the universal of the Idea, _i.e._ of grasping particular determinateness, but the succeeding Academicians stand in a negative attitude to them in this regard. To the end they made a point of holding to the Platonic universality, uniting to this the Platonic dialectic also. The principle of the New Academy could thus, like the Platonic dialectic, possess a dialectic attitude and bearing which proceeded to nothing affirmative; as, indeed, in many of Plato’s dialogues, mere confusion is what is arrived at. But while with Plato the affirmative result is essentially the result of dialectic, so that with him we have really found the universal Idea as species, during all this time, on the other hand, the tendency to abstract apprehension is predominant; and as this showed itself in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, it has also extended to the Platonic Idea and degraded it into being a form of the understanding. Plato’s Ideas were thus torn from their rest through thought, because in such universality thought has not yet recognized itself as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness confronted them with great pretensions, actuality in general asserted itself against universality; and the rest of the Idea necessarily passed into the movement of thought. This movement now, however, in the New Academy turned dialectically against the determination of the Stoics and Epicureans, which rested on the fact that the criterion of the truth ought to be a concrete. For example, in the conception as comprehended by the Stoics, there is a thought which likewise has a content, although, again, this union still remains very formal. But the two forms in which the dialectic of the New Academy turns against this concrete, are represented by Arcesilaus and Carneades.