Plato, impelled by the foregoing evolution, and by the large and exquisitely aesthetic character of his genius, accomplished the second and altogether intellectual stage of evolution by inverting the problem; he affirmed that the final and intrinsic result of the exercise of thought was its earlier and eternal essence, extrinsic and objective.  The types which were first fetishes and then polytheistic were transformed into the physical and intellectual principles of the world, divested of all mythical and extrinsic form as far as their material organization was concerned.  Plato held that such types were really ideal, as in fact they had unconsciously been from the first; that is, that it was simply a logical conception of species and genera which is natural to human thought; a conception necessary for the spontaneous as well as for the reflex and scientific processes of thought.  From the type, the specific idea, the generalization into the idea of each special object was easy, since each object has its psychical representation in the mind.  Special and specific ideas were then arranged in a certain order, and those which are more general in a concentric and systematic classification; this had been also the case in the earlier polytheistic system, since the process of the intelligence naturally arranges all its representations.  But he did not stop here, nor indeed was it possible for him to do so.

We know that the intelligence does not only understand objects, but their relations to each other, by means of its comparative faculty; these relations were, as in the case of animals, at first intuitively perceived by direct observation and the alternate and reciprocal motion of the images, and they were first presented to the imagination and then embodied in speech.  We have said in the foregoing chapters that in primitive thought these relations involved an active entity, and were in a word entified.  Plato, pursuing his intellectual process of reasoning, and the reciprocal properties of ideas, noted the ideality of these relations so far as they are a psychical representation, and hence he was constrained by the unconscious evolution of thought to affirm that an idea was present in every relation, and thus the great, the little, the less, the more, had their ideal representatives in the general construction of his theory.  But man is not only an intellectual, but an active, sentient, living being, tending to an object as an individual and a social subject.  So that he not only attains to the understanding of ideal truth, but also of the good and the beautiful.  According to Plato, the Good and the Beautiful must also necessarily be Ideas of a general character, like those which embrace all ideal relations whatever.  Since they are universal, and due to the innate impulse of thought towards concentric ascension, they must rank as the sum and apex of ideas, so that the Good is emphatically the Idea, or God.  On turning to the world of sensations, or of particular objects,