The Platonic concept of the constant spiritual entity surrounding all concrete realities is at the heart of Joshua Reynolds admonishment to his students to search out the inner truth of the things they paint.⁶  Real objects are "defective models" of the pure essence which characterizes each mani­festation, and the lot of the painter is to seek the essence and portray it - to paint "a tree in general" rather than "any tree in particular."Presumably, this concept of "what is a tree in general" allows a person to determine that this six foot specimen with thin red leaves, and that sixty foot specimen with broad green leaves are both trees.  Somehow 'treeness' is captured in either form.  But is it not also captured in the remains of a tree that has been struck by lightning?  And how is that collection of forms on a two dimensional surface recognized as a tree, if it does not possess some aspect of "treeness?" It might be said that the remains of the tree are recognized as such only because that is what they used to be, while the two dimensional arrangement of forms only represents a tree.  In this way, the argument could be made, these manifestations are merely pieces of abstractions of the real thing, and they really do not embody any sort of "treeness" at all. 

This position has been clearly outlined by E.B. Gombrich,⁷ but it leaves open the question of where "treeness" would begin. When does an object become whole enough, or non-abstracted enough, to capture its essence? Reflecting on what Gombrich had to say about the child's hobbyhorse might help to supply a solution to this problem. The extension of Reynolds logic into the realm of toys is denied by Gombrich, and he instead puts forth the idea of a substitute.  Rejecting the idea that the stick could possibly represent a horse, he postulates that it is instead a surrogate. By virtue of the child's wanting it to do so, the stick acts as a horse, in the same way that a ball might, or just as the stick would become a gun for some young boys playing army.  The significance, however, of "what the child wants it to be" is paramount.  Although the stick may only provide what Gombrich calls "the minimum requirement for the performance of the function"⁸ it is this very property which, for the child, creates the horseness.

Gombrich tacitly assumes that for the stick to be a representation, it would have to "represent the most generalized idea of horseness."⁹ But this horseness can not possibly be an inherent property of the stick.  Though it may exist by virtue of the stick, it is a concept peculiar only to the child and anyone else who may be playing his game."  You can not possibly apprehend those constant entities," says Plato, "except by thinking."¹⁰  It is the mind of the child which finds horseness in the stick. It is his imagination that turns the stick into a horse.

Now the stick may be an abstraction of the horse in that it possesses some aspect - "the minimum requirement for the performance of the function" - which the horse also possesses.  But this stretches a point, and credibility takes leave if there is an attempt to call the stick a representation.  In light of Gombrich's argument, the stick is a horse, at least for the child.  Significant, however, is the use of the imagination to create the surrogate horse. In at least one sense the stick is just like the ruin - it serves as a framework for  an imaginary construction of an idea.  In the same way that the ruin served as a receptacle for the observer’s projection of buildingness, so does the stick serve as a receptacle for the child's projection of horseness.  So too, does that arrangement of forms on a two dimensional surface serve as a receptacle for the viewer's projection of treeness.

Such a representation, an abstraction, no matter how real it seems to be, relies on the viewer to fill in the blanks between what he actually sees and what he thinks he sees.  Whereas the ruin provided a framework for the observer's projection by actually possessing properties of the whole (since it was a piece) and the stick provided a framework by virtue of its possession of the "minimum requirement for the performance of the function," the abstract representation must be imbued by its creator with sufficient keys to allow the viewer to project an image into it. 

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