The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche—psyche being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand. Plato, as Havelock puts it, is trying for the first time in history to identify this group of general mental qualities, and seeking for a term which will label them satisfactorily
