Plato, of course, does not always use the term ‘nature’ in the same sense. The most important meaning which he attaches to it is, I believe, practically identical with that which he attaches to the term ‘essence’. This way of using the term ‘nature’ still survives among essentialists even in our day; they still speak, for instance, of the nature of mathematics, or of the nature of inductive inference, or of the ‘nature of happiness and misery’19. When used by Plato in this way, ‘nature’ means nearly the same as ‘Form’ or ‘Idea’; for the Form or Idea of a thing, as shown above, is also its
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