That which is eternal and immutable, to Plato, is therefore not a physical
“basic substance,” as it was for Empedocles and Democritus. Plato’s
conception was of eternal and immutable patterns, spiritual and abstract in
their nature that all things are fashioned after.
Let me put it like this: The pre-Socratics had given a reasonably good
explanation of natural change without having to presuppose that anything
actually “changed.” In the midst of nature’s cycle there were some eternal and
immutable smallest elements that did not dissolve, they thought. Fair enough,
Sophie! But they had no reasonable explanation for how these “smallest
elements” that were once building blocks in a horse could suddenly whirl to-
gether four or five hundred years later and fashion themselves into a
completely new horse. Or an elephant or a crocodile, for that matter. Plato’s
point was that Democritus’ atoms never fashioned themselves into an “eledile”
or a “crocophant.” This was what set his philosophical reflections going.
If you already understand what I am getting at, you may skip this next
paragraph. But just in case, I will clarify: You have a box of Lego and you
build a Lego horse. You then take it apart and put the blocks back in the box.
You cannot expect to make a new horse just by shaking the box. How could
Lego blocks of their own accord find each other and become a new horse
again? No, you have to rebuild the horse, Sophie. And the reason you can do
it is that you have a picture in your mind of what the horse looked like. The
Lego horse is made from a model which remains unchanged from horse to
horse.
How did you do with the fifty identical cookies? Let us assume that you
have dropped in from outer space and have never seen a baker before. You
stumble into a tempting bakery—and there you catch sight of fifty identical
gingerbread men on a shelf. I imagine you would wonder how they could be
exactly alike. It might well be that one of them has an arm missing, another
has lost a bit of its head, and a third has a funny bump on its stomach. But
after careful thought, you would nevertheless conclude that all gingerbread
men have something in common. Although none of them is perfect, you would
suspect that they had a common origin. You would realize that all the cookies
were formed in the same mold. And what is more, Sophie, you are now seized
by the irresistible desire to see this mold. Because clearly, the mold itself must
be utter perfection—and in a sense, more beautiful—in comparison with these
crude copies.
If you solved this problem all by yourself, you arrived at the philosophical
solution in exactly the same way that Plato did.
Like most philosophers, he “dropped in from outer space.” (He stood up
on the very tip of one of the fine hairs of the rabbit’s fur.) He was astonished
at the way all natural phenomena could be so alike, and he concluded that it
had to be because there are a limited number of forms “behind” everything we
see around us. Plato called these forms ideas. Behind every horse, pig, or hu-
man being, there is the “idea horse,” “idea pig,” and “idea human being.” (In
the same way, the bakery we spoke of can have gingerbread men,
gingerbread horses, and gingerbread pigs. Because every self-respecting
bakery has more than one mold. But one mold is enough for each type of
gingerbread cookie.)
Plato came to the conclusion that there must be a reality behind the
“material world.” He called this reality the world of ideas; it contained the