PLATO AND HIS THEORY OF FORMS.

Plato (428-348 BCE) was a philosopher, as well as mathematician, in classical Greece. He is considered an essential figure in the development of philosophy. Along with his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle, Plato laid the foundations of today Western Philosophy and Science.
At the heart of his philosophy is his Theory of Forms or Theory of Ideas. His views on knowledge, ethics, psychology, the political state, and art are all tied to this theory.
According to Plato, reality consisted of two realms. First, the realm made of eternal perfect forms or ideas, and second, the realm of the physical world, the world that we can observe with our five senses.
In his realm of forms or ideas, perfect templates were designed to exist that were the perfect ideal form of anything while its counterpart in the physical reality was really an imperfect representation of it.
For him, for example, a horse was really an imperfect representation of some ideal perfect model or template of an ideal horse that existed in the reality of Forms.
The realm made of these templates were for him the ultimate reference points for all things that we observe in the physical world. They were more real than the ones existed in the reality perceived only by our five senses.
Not all of Plato's contemporaries agreed with his philosophy. One of his critics said, "What I see when I observe particular things is his particularity but not the wholeness." Plato replied sharply, "That is because you have eyes controlled by the physical form but not intelligence that belongs to the realm of the non-physical, the realm of forms."
Plato's sharp distinction between the world of perceivable objects and the world of universal forms was seen in these facts : one can only have mere or simple opinions about things perceived only by the five senses of our physical body, but another fact was that one can have knowledge about the template from which that thing is only an imperfect representation of the form designed to existed in the universal world. For him it was not possible to have knowledge of anything that could change or was particular, since knowledge had to be forever unfailing and general. For that reason, his world of the forms was the most important one, like sunlight, while the world of the senses, the sensible one, was only imperfectly based on partiality, like shadows without knowing the source of it.