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What does "idea" in the following text mean?
Smith concluded the letter by declaring that his unbelieving friend approached ‘as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.
None of the meaning that I could find for "idea" (concept, notion, point, thought, belief, estimate, ...) means anything in the above text. And how could someone approach an "idea"?
In this case, idea is being used to mean a concept (Look at definition 1-b), specifically
an idealized concept of 'a perfectly wise and virtuous man'
If you're having trouble parsing that, it refers to the mental image a person would conjure if they were told to think of a wise and virtuous man. The passage is implying that the 'unbelieving friend' comes close to this conjured ideal.
