which ever governs our immediate perception of internal and external things they could not in Plato’s time, nor indeed in that of many subsequent philosophers, remain as simple intellectual signs of the process of reason.  This faculty influenced these conceptions, these psychical forms, whether particular, specific, or general, and they became living subjects, like phenomena, objects, shades, images in dreams, normal and abnormal hallucinations.  Thus the Ideas in Plato became, reflectively and theoretically, entities with an intrinsic existence, eternal, divine, and absolute essences.  But the fetish, the anthropomorphic idol, was not only regarded as a living but as a causative subject; the same power was likewise infused into the Ideas, and they were held to be causes of particular things, of which they were the earlier and eternal type.  Thus the myth in the Platonic Ideas became scientific, but it continued to be a myth; the substance varied, but the form was the same.  The objective phenomena of the world had first been personified, or their fanciful images were assumed to be objective; now the world of reason was personified, and mythology became intellectual instead of cosmic.

Those who opposed Plato’s theory of ideas said that he realized abstractions, or personified ideas; but no one, as I think, perceived the natural process which led him to do so, nor explained the faculty by which he was necessarily influenced.  Plato’s theory was only an ultimate phase of the evolution of the vague and primitive animation of the world, which had passed through fetishism, polytheism, and the worship of the elements of nature, and had reached the entification and subjectivity of ideas, which was also attained by natural science, after passing through its mythical envelopment.  We have noted the causes, which in the case of the earlier philosophers happened to be objective, while they were in Plato’s case subjective, owing to the character and temperament of his mind; both conduced to the development and aesthetic splendour of this teaching among the Greeks.  The teaching of Plato, which had more or less influence on all the earlier civilized peoples, of his own and subsequent times, and which was also involved in the mythical representations of later savages, assumed an aspect which varied with the special history, the ethnic temperament, the geographical and extrinsic conditions of different peoples; but considered in itself, it is always the same, and is the necessary result of the evolution of myth and of thought.  Since the evolution of myth leads to the gradual genesis of science, which becomes more rational as myth is transformed from the material to the ideal, ideas are substituted for myths, and laws, as Vico well observes, for the canons of poetry.