At first, if any one should pretend that in Plato Ideas are beings subsisting by themselves, without interconnection and without relation to a common centre, numerous passages of the _Timaeus_ might be objected to him,[47] in which Plato speaks of Ideas as forming in their whole an ideal unity, which is the reason of the unity of the visible world.[48] Will it be said that this ideal world forms a distinct unity, a unity separate from God? But, in order to sustain this assertion, it is necessary to forget so many passages of the _Republic_, in which the relations of truth and science with the Good, that is to say, with God, are marked in brilliant characters. Let not that magnificent comparison be forgotten, in which, after having said that the sun produces in the physical world light and life, Socrates adds: "So thou art able to say, intelligible beings not only hold from the _Good_ that which renders them intelligible, but also their being and their essence."[49] So, intelligible beings, that is to say, Ideas, are not beings that exist by themselves. Men go on repeating with assurance that the Good, in Plato, is only the idea of the good, and that an idea is not God. I reply, that the Good is in fact an idea, according to Plato, but that the idea here is not a pure conception of the mind, an object of thought, as the peripatetic school understood it; I add, that the Idea of the Good is in Plato the first of Ideas, and that, for this reason, while remaining for us an object of thought, it is confounded as to existence with God. If the Idea of the Good is not God himself, how will the following passage, also taken from the _Republic_, be explained? "At the extreme limits of the intellectual world is the Idea of the Good, which is perceived with difficulty, but, in fine, cannot be perceived without concluding that it is the source of all that is beautiful and good; that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, that in the invisible world it directly produces truth and intelligence."[50] Who can produce, on the one hand, the sun and light, on the other, truth and intelligence, except a real being?