In the second place, _conception gets a new value_. What was conception to Socrates? It was the common content of opinions and perceptions; it was the universal that was developed inductively out of many particulars. Socrates brought many particulars together in order to reveal their common qualities. The abode of conceptions was to Socrates the half-formed individual opinions and experiences in which conception lay, as in an envelope; and the conversation was needed to bring it forth. The concept to Socrates was the logical “nature” of perceptions. But now since Plato admitted the relative reality of all perceptions, he was obliged to look elsewhere to account for conceptions. If the conceptions are true reality, they cannot be the common quality in opinions, nor the logical “nature” of changing perceptions. The true conception cannot be contained in the perception. Accordingly the conception must exist in an incorporeal world and possess an independent reality. The concepts are hypostasized by Plato. They become Ideas. Thus the Socratic concept became the Platonic Idea, and _for the first time in European thought, reality is conceived as immaterial_. The conceptual world grows under Plato’s hands to be “other than” the perceptual world, and this was his first step beyond Socrates. The conceptual world is the perfect reality that cannot be contained in any material thing nor in the sum of all material things. The immaterial Ideas are the object of thought, as nature phenomena are the objects of perception. Ideas are not the abstractions of perceptions, for the process of thought is not an analysis nor an abstraction, but an intuition of reality presented in single instances. Ideas are the reality of which perceptions are the copies or shadows. Perceptions do not contain the truth. They are only the suggestions or promptings by which the soul bethinks itself of the Ideas. Material things merely hint to the soul of the existence of the Ideas. It is important in this connection to point out that Plato’s conception of immateriality is not to be taken as what we mean in modern times by the spiritual or psychical; for, according to Plato, our psychical functions belong to the world of Becoming, just as the functions of our body and other perceptual things belong to it. Besides, even the Ideas of sense qualities have reality. Plato does not identify the human mind with the incorporeal world of Ideas, nor does he make the modern dualistic division of the world into mind and matter. The immaterial world is “other than” the world of perception, and bears the relation to the material world of the unchanging to the changing, of the simple to the manifold, of Being to Becoming.