rts truth to knowable things, and gives the knower his power of
knowing truth, is the _idea of the good_, and you are to conceive of
this as the source of knowledge and of truth."[515]

[Footnote 513: "Laws," bk. v. ch. i.]

[Footnote 514: Ibid., bk. x.]

[Footnote 515: "Republic," bk. vi. ch. xviii.]

And now we are prepared to form a clear conception of the Platonic
doctrine of Ideas. Viewed in their relation to the Eternal Reason, as
giving the primordial thought and law of all being, these principles are
simply eide auta kath auta--_ideas in themselves_--the essential
qualities or attributes of Him who is the supreme and ultimate Cause of
all existence. When regarded as before the Divine imagination, giving
definite forms and relations, they are the tupoi, the paradeigmata--_the
types_, _models, patterns, ideals_ according to which the universe was
fashioned. Contemplated in their actual embodiment in the laws, and
typical forms of the material world, they are eikones--_images_ of the
eternal perfections of God. The world of sense pictures the world of
reason by a participation (methexis) of the ideas. And viewed as
interwoven in the very texture and framework of the soul, they are
omoiomata--copies of the Divine Ideas which are the primordial laws of
knowing, thinking, and reasoning. Ideas are thus the nexus of relation
between God and the visible universe, and between the human and the
Divine reason.[516] There is something divine in the world, and in the
human soul, namely, _the eternal laws and reasons of things_, mingled
with the endless diversity and change of sensible phenomena. These ideas
are "the light of the intelligible world;" they render the invisible
world of real Being perceptible to the reason of man. "Light is the
offspring of the Good, which the Good has produced in his own likeness.
Light in the visible world is what the _idea of the Good_ is in the
intelligible world. And this offspring of the Good--light--has the same
relation to vision and visible things which the Good has to intellect
and intelligible things."[517]

[Footnote 516: "Now, Idea is, as regards God, a mental operation by him
(the notions of God, eternal and perfect in themselves); as regards us,
the first things perceptible by mind; as regards Matter, a standard; but
as regards the world, perceptible by sense, a pattern; but as considered
with reference to itself, an existence."--Alcinous, "Introduction to the
Doctrines of Pl