wavelets in a ceaseless surf..........

 

     Now Aristotle understands Plato to have held that the universals have objective existence, and indeed Plato had said that the universal is incomparably more lasting and important than the individual,—the latter being but a little wavelet in a ceaseless surf; men come and go, but man goes on forever.  Aristotle's is a matter-of-fact mind; as William James would say, a tough, not tender, mind; he sees the root of endless mysticism and scholarly nonsense in the Platonic "realism"; and he attacks it with all the vigor of a first polemic.  As Brutus loved not Caesar less but Rome more, so Aristotle says, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas—"Dear Plato, but dearer still is truth."

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy