  Plato may be able to avoid this circle of individuation by not making form-copies depend on particulars for either their being or their individuation. If their status as individuals is primitive, form-copies will not be individuated by the particulars to which they belong. In this respect they are like the individual souls, which, since they pre-exist and postdate the particulars they inhabit, are not and cannot be individuated by them. A form-copy is, in the strict sense, a simple individual, incapable of possessing anything besides (the essence of) the Form of which it is a copy. Finally, they are not dependent on particulars, even for their individuation, because they can withdraw when necessary and thus continue to be what they are when the particular has perished. They can be said to perish, but only in the sense that the particular to which they temporarily attach can itself perish or change. (Were they dependent on the particular, form-copies would in fact perish.) The reason they survive is that a form-copy Is what it is. In so far as anything Is what it is, it cannot cease to be, i.e., cease to be what it Is. In this respect, too, they are like souls. Both souls and form-copies are then individuals in their own rights, apart from any particulars in which they inhere.