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, ideas are
the eternal model (_paradigm_) according to which things are made; these
are the images (_idoli_) of which t