Note 204 — HYPOTHESIS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL KINGDOMS.
Reading edition
When I formed this idea, I was not aware of one which seems faintly to foreshadow it—namely, Socrates’s doctrine, afterwards dilated on by Plato, that “previous to the existence of the world, and beyond its present limits, there existed certain archetypes, the embodiment (if we may use such a word) of general ideas; and that these archetypes were models, in imitation of which all particular beings were created.”