FIRST CHAPTER.

Apology and Crito. Protagoras. Laches. Charmides.

The word ἰδέα idea, a firmly established term in the philosophical jargon of Plato, does not appear in his earliest writings. In these, the word is either entirely absent or appears only in a looser usage that adheres more closely to common speech. Derived as an abstract from the verbal root id- (vid-), meaning "to see," it usually signifies, like εἶδος form/eidos which originates from the same source, the shape in which a thing presents itself to the observer: the appearance or the sight it offers. From the external, sensory shape, the use of both words is transferred to the internal shape that presents itself to the mind's eye: the nature or quality in the broadest sense. This holds true if one can even speak of a transfer, and if the word—as its connection to εἰδέναι to know and derivations from the same root in related languages suggest—did not already signify the inner image of a thing just as much, if not more, than its outer appearance from its very origin. The memory of this verbal origin is, however, still potent in Plato's use of ἰδέα. Very often, with this word—in contrast to εἶδος—one must think not merely passively of what is seen, the sight that the thing offers, but at least simultaneously and actively of the "seeing," the view or perspective, the sight as an activity of the one who looks. Thus, this word seemed destined to express the discovery of the logical—that is, the inherent lawfulness by which thought, as it were, shapes its object while looking at it, rather than merely accepting it as something given—in all its originality and living impetus, and to hold it fast for consciousness.