The other is composite ideas...

The other is composite ideas, which are the conceptions that result from a combination of simple conceptions. Thus, you may conceive 'a mountain of soil', and then conceive 'a piece of gold'. After that, you combine these two conceptions. Thus, deriving from this combination a third conception which is (p. 59) 'a mountain of gold'. This third conception is in reality composed of the previous two conceptions; hence, all composite conceptions are reduced to simple conceptual units.

The issue under consideration is the attempt to know the real source of these units and the cause of the arising of these simple conceptions in human knowledge. This issue has an important history in the various stages of Greek, Islamic and European philosophy. Throughout the history of philosophy, it received a number of solutions. These solutions can be summarized in the following theories. I.

The Platonic Theory of Recollection This theory states that knowledge is a function of the recollection of previous information.[^8] Plato was the founder of this theory. He based it on his specific philosophy of the archetypes.[^9] He believed that the soul has a prior existence. Thus, he believed that prior to the existence of the body, the human soul had existed independently of the body.

Since the soul's existence was completely free from matter and its restrictions, it was possible for it to be in touch with the archetypes - that is with the realities that are free from matter. Thus, it was also possible for is to know them.

However, when it became necessary for the soul to descend from its immaterial world in order to be conjoined to the body and linked to it in the world of matter, this caused it to lose all its knowledge of the archetypes and fixed realities, and to forget them completely. But the soul can begin to retrieve its knowledge by means of the sense perception of specific ideas and particular things.

This is because all such ideas and things are shadows and reflections of those eternal archetypes and realities that are everlasting in the world in which the soul had lived. When is perceives a specific idea, it immediately moves to the ideal reality that it had known before it became attached to the body. On this basis, our knowledge of the universal human being -that is, the universal idea of a human being - would be nothing but a recollection of an abstract reality that we had forgotten.