The misapprehension of Plato’s Ideas takes two directions; one of these has to do with the thinking, which is formal, and holds as true reality the sensuous alone, or what is conceived of through the senses—this is what Plato asserts to be mere shadows. For when Plato speaks of the Universal as the real, his conception of it is met either by the statement that the Universal is present to us only as a property, and is therefore a mere thought in our understanding, or else that Plato takes this same Universal as substance, as an existence in itself, which, however, falls outside of us. When Plato further uses the expression that sensuous things are, like images (εἰκόνες), similar to that which has absolute existence, or that the Idea is their pattern and model (παραδεῖγμα), if these Ideas are not exactly made into things, they are made into a kind of transcendent existences which lie somewhere far from us in an understanding outside this world, and are pictures set up which we merely do not see; they are like the artist’s model, following which he works upon a given material, and thereon impresses the likeness of the original. And owing to their not only being removed from this sensuous present reality, which passes for truth, but also being liberated from the actuality of the individual consciousness, their subject, of which they are originally the representations, passes out of consciousness, and even comes to be represented only as something which is apart from consciousness.