At the preface of Icon and Idea Herbert Read presents us a hypothesis that "if the image always precedes the idea in the development of human consciousness, then not only must we rewrite the history of culture but we must also reexamine the postulates of all our philosophies". Instead of the word 'image' he uses 'icon' in the title, because he stresses that an icon is an image wrought out of the materia primordialis of the unconscious and its purpose is to provide an objective-correlative object with apprehensible form and colour that answers to an internal necessity. In short, Icon is an organic structure in which all the irreconcilable elements can be synthesized dynamically, and tracing the origin and development of Icon we get to a perspective of human awareness evolved in the history of artistic activities and finally another plane of aesthetics, that is, Vitalism. It is not from a preoccupation but from the direct contact with the visible world that we can acquire an organic and vitalistic image as Icon, which has survived through all the stages of creative activity, playing an important role as the first aesthetic principle.
