But all doubt disappears before the following passages from the _Phaedrus_, neglected, as it would seem designedly, by the detractors of Plato: "In this transition, (the soul) contemplates justice, contemplates wisdom, contemplates science, not that wherein enters change, nor that which shows itself different in the different objects which we are pleased to call beings, but science as it exists in that which is called being, _par excellence_...."[51]--"It belongs to the soul to conceive the universal, that is to say, that which, in the diversity of sensations, can be comprehended under a rational unity. This is the remembrance of what the soul has seen during its journey _in the train of Deity_, when, disdaining what we improperly call beings, it looked upwards to the only true being. So it is just that the thought of the philosopher should alone have wings; for its remembrance is always as much as possible with _the things which make God a true God, inasmuch as he is with them_."[52] So the objects of the philosopher's contemplation, that is to say, Ideas, are in God, and it is by these, by his essential union with these, that God is the true God, the God who, as Plato admirably says in the _Sophist_, participates in _august and holy intelligence_.[53] It is therefore certain, that, in the true Platonic theory, Ideas are not beings in the vulgar sense of the word, beings which would be neither in the mind of man, nor in nature, nor in God, and would subsist only by themselves. No, Plato considers Ideas as being at once the principles of sensible things, of which they are the laws, and the principles also of human knowledge, which owes to them its light, its rule, and its end, and the essential attributes of God, that is to say, God himself. Plato is truly the father of the doctrine which we have explained, and the great philosophers who have attached themselves to his school have always professed this same doctrine. The founder of Christian metaphysics, St. Augustine, is a declared disciple of Plato: everywhere he speaks, like Plato, of the relation of human reason to the divine reason, and of truth to God. In the _City of God_, book x., chap. ii., and in chap. ix. of book vii. of the _Confessions_, he goes to the extent of comparing the Platonic doctrine with that of St. John. He adopts, without reserve, the theory of Ideas. _Book of Eighty-three Questions_, question 46: "Ideas are the primordial forms, and, as it were, the immutable reasons of things; they are not created, they are eternal, and always the same: they are contained in the divine intelligence; and without being subject to birth and death, they are the types according to which is formed every thing that is born and dies."[54]