Appendix 15. - (230)

One cannot expect someone like Plato, who was the first to explore the origin of ideas in such depth, to have honed the doctrines he discovered to the ultimate degree of linguistic precision. Original thinkers who first make a discovery are so content and exultant over their success, are so captivated by the new truths which fill their minds with such freshness, that they make no further effort to purge them of any error or inaccuracy they may and often do contain. Such thinkers have no doubts about their own discoveries and, entranced by their unexpected beauty, have no further vigour to work at them, or to entertain any doubts about their perfection. They accept their discoveries as they are and idolise them. Systems originate in this way and I think that something of this kind happened to Plato over the origin of ideas.

Nevertheless, reason in such men, working imperceptibly in their quiet moments, guides them unconsciously nearer the truth. In certain passages, Plato comes so very close to it that, if these were the only ones to survive, we would have no doubt that he had found it

In the Theaetetus, to explain how we bear our cognitions around with us, yet still have to investigate them, he says that they can be possessed without being had. We are, in this respect, like someone who keeps birds in an aviary without actually having them in his hands. Take the example he gives of someone who knows arithmetic or the art of calculation. This art comprises all our cognitions of numbers; it represents, so to speak, the aviary of such information. So the person who knows only the art of arithmetic possesses all the results that can be obtained from numbers but does not have them to hand. He possesses them as a person possesses the birds he feeds in an aviary. They flutter about freely and belong to him only in the sense that he is able to catch them when he wishes.

But let us listen to Plato himself:

By this system of his, Socrates explained this contradiction and showed it to be merely apparent. The arithmetician knows all the results of his art but only in potency. He does not know them actually and therefore, when he wants to know them, has to try to go looking for them, using all his skill. The ambiguity hinges entirely on the word know. Saying that the arithmetician knows all the results of his art is not an accurate expression, as Aristotle later stated. In strict accuracy, we can only say that he can know them. In other words, he has the means to get to know them, the art of discovering them. This linguistic inaccuracy led to Plato's system being discredited. His desire to assign to the word know the meaning possess knowledge of, that is, have full control of it, instead of assigning to it the meaning have knowledge of, that is, have it at its own, true level of meaning, led him to state that we know from birth, that is, we have innate ideas.

Leaving aside such an inaccuracy and the error into which it led Plato, and accepting only the spirit of the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus, we can see how close Plato came to the truth. In the dialogue, it is irrefutably demonstrated that there must be in man some innate knowledge which potentially comprises all other knowledge, just as arithmetic comprises the whole science of number. This knowledge contains, in a word, the art of distinguishing and recognising truth wherever we encounter truth, and consequently a full explanation of the cognitive faculty or reason, which is only the art of discovering different cognitions.
Having reached this stage, what else should Plato have done to bring the theory of the origin of ideas to perfection?

He needed only to discover the nature of this primal art or originating knowledge which virtually comprises all other cognitions, just as arithmetic comprises all the information about number. He had grasped perfectly well that, to discover some knowledge about arithmetic, to solve arithmetical problems, some art was needed. In other words, it is necessary to possess principles and know how to pass from such principles to the desired results. And what is true about arguments concerned with limited subject of numbers is true about arguments concerned with any other subject. Any use of reason is merely the exercise of an innate, primal art which cannot be learned; all other arts are learned by reasoning. Presupposing, therefore, complete ignorance of reasoning, it would be quite impossible to learn the art of reasoning. Plato had clearly realised that prior to any knowledge acquired through reasoning, there has to be some innate knowledge providing us with the mode of reasoning. The study of this primal knowledge was the path Plato still had to travel to arrive at the full discovery of truth.