The picture of man, taught for the first time by Aristotle, still required about twice four hundred years - from the fourth pre-Christian to the fourth post-Christian century - before it became so far the common possession of men that the Church Father Augustine (354-430) could base his teaching on it - a teaching which moulded man's outlook on himself for the coming centuries right up to our own time.

It is thus that in modern philosophy, and finally in ordinary modern usage, 'idea' came to be a word with many meanings. Sometimes it signifies a sense-impression, sometimes a mental representation, sometimes the thought, concept or essential nature of a thing. The only thing common to these various meanings is an underlying implication that an idea is a purely subjective item in human consciousness, without any assured correspondence to anything outside.

'Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostacy, I collected again by the highest reason. I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be the heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?' (Ill, 1, 2.)

Further detail is added to this picture by the description, given in the poem The Praeparative, of the soul's non-experience of the body at that early stage. The description is unmistakably one of an experience during the time between conception and birth.

If our view of the interdependence of the Platonic conception of the Idea with the picture man has of himself is seen rightly, then Goethe must have been the bearer of such a picture. Our expectation is shown to be right by the following two passages from Goethe's autobiography, Truth and Fiction.

'But what if these profound disquisitions into the first principles of human nature, do naturally and necessarily plunge a man into this abyss of scepticism? May we not reasonably judge from what hath happened? Des Cartes no sooner began to dig in this mine, than scepticism was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to shut it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the difficulty of keeping out this enemy still to increase; but they laboured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on the work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an expedient: By giving up the material world, which he thought might be spared without loss, and even with advantage, he hoped by an impregnable partition to secure the world of spirits. But, alas! the Treatise of Human Nature wantonly sapped the foundation of this partition and drowned all in one universal deluge.' (Chapter I, Sections vi-vii.)

'It is by natural signs chiefly that we give force and energy to language; and the less language has of them, it is the less expressive and persuasive. ... Artificial signs signify, but they do not express; they speak to the understanding, as algebraic characters may do, but the passions and the affections and the will hear them not: these continue dormant and inactive, till we speak to them in the language of nature, to which they are all attention and obedience.'

The following passage from Augustine's Confessions shows clearly how he was compelled to think about the nature of the little child:

It was against this view of the idea that Reid took the field, going so far as to label the philosophy holding it the 'ideal system'. He failed to see, however, that in attacking the abstract use of the term he was actually in a position to restore to it its original, genuine meaning. If, instead of simply throwing the word overboard, he had been able to make use of it in its real meaning, he would have expressed himself with far greater exactitude and consistency.⁵ He was prevented from doing this by his apparent ignorance of the earlier Greek philosophers, Plato included. All he seems to have known of their teachings came from inferior, second-hand reports of a later and already decadent period.

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In a different form the same experience comes to expression in the opening lines of Traherne's poem, Wonder: