Idea
a mental image, form, or representation of anything. The word idea has been taken in very many and very different senses, the history of which would be a history of philosophy. Aristotle (384-322 B. C.) taught that though the One, apart from and beside the many, does not exist, none the less must a unity be assumed as (objectively) present in the many; and the Stoics (Zeno, 355-263 в. c.) maintained the doctrines of subjective concepts formed through abstraction. According to Plutarch of Chæronea (toward the end of the 1st century), the ideas were intermediate between God and the world; they were the pattern and God the efficient cause. For Plotinus (203-270) the primordial essence was elevated above the Platonic ideas, which were emanations from the One. St. Thomas of Aquin (1227-1274) recognizes a form in which the universal exists before things-viz., as ideas in the divine mind.
For Descartes (1596-1650), "ideas are the forms of things received into the soul"; for Spinoza (1632-1677) the "concepts epts formed by the mind as a thinking thing"; and Locke (1632-1704) says, "whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call an idea." In the philosophy of Leibnitz (1646-1716) ideas are the active forces of his monads; Berkeley (1684-1753) used the word as equivalent to phenomenon; Hume (1711-1776) defines ideas as "copies of perceptions," and Condillac (1715-1780) as "mental representations of objects of apprehension." Kant (1724-1804) gives the name of ideas to those "necessary conceptions of the reason for which no corresponding real objects can be given in the sphere of the
According to Erasmus Darwin senses." A (1731-1802), an idea is a "contraction, or motion, or configuration of the fibers which constitute the immediate organs of sense." James Mill (1773-1836) calls ideas "what remain after sensation has gone," and Herbart (1776-1841) "typiof the Commission to establish civil gov-cal conceptions." Schopenhauer (1788ernment in the Philippines in 1900, and was Secretary of Finance and Justice in the Philippines in 1901. He acted as Vice-Governor in 1904-1905, acting governor in 1905-1906, and Governor-General in 1906. He was Minister to Spain from 1909 to 1913. He wrote several volumes on the administration and government in the Philippines and contributed articles to various publications. 1860) posits as intermediate between the universal will and the individual in which it appears, various ideas as real species forming stages in the objectification of the will.