Plato the man who set Western science back 2000 years

The anemia of the human spirit reached its metaphsyical status in Platonism, and as Benard Russell argued, "set Western science back
2000 years."

From Plato we learned that truth and reality can never be directly perrceived, they must always have the intermediary of representation. You are not seeing the 'real' they are only shadows on the cave wall.