In a sense, the thought of the earlier Greek philosophers may be said to have reached its consummation, its very fullest expression, in the writings of Plato. Among the words which are first found in his works are the Greek originals of _analogy_, _antipodes_, _dialectic_, _enthusiasm_, _mathematical_, _synthesis_, and _system_; while he imparted a new and special meaning to many others like _method_, _musical_, _philosopher_, _sophist_, _theory_, _type_, _irony_ (the name he gave to Socrates’s peculiar method of simulating ignorance in order to impart knowledge), and, of course, _idea_ and _ideal_. Before Plato used it, the word ἰδέα meant simply the form or semblance of anything. It is connected with ‘idein’, ‘to see’[28], and when Cicero came to translate it, he had to use the Latin word ‘species’, which had a similar meaning, being connected with ‘specere’, ‘to see’ and ‘speculum’, ‘a mirror’. To-day _idea_ does not mean to us quite what ἰδέα did to Plato; but tracing the whole history of the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative use of these four letters, began to make it possible for us to get outside our thoughts and look at them, to separate our “ideas” about things from the things themselves. Thus, it was not only Greek words of which he was to alter the meanings, nor only Greek and Latin words. _Love_ and _good_, for instance, are neither Greek nor Latin, and _beauty_ is only Latin remotely, yet the spirit of Plato really works more amply in them, and in a thousand others bearing on the presence or absence of these qualities, than it does in such specifically Platonic terms as _idea_ and _dialectic_. Let us try and trace the origin of some of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word _love_. As in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato’s lucid mind brought to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual “types” or “ideas”—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions, are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away. The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality. The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object