"There are those who, in order to verify these eternal truths which we have proposed, and others of the same nature, have figured to themselves eternal essences aside from deity--a pure illusion, which comes from not understanding that in God, as in the source of being, and in his understanding, where resides the art of making and ordering all things, are found primitive ideas, or as St. Augustine says, the eternally subsisting reasons of things. Thus, in the thought of the architect is the primitive idea of a house which he perceives in himself; this intellectual house would not be destroyed by any ruin of houses built according to this interior model; and if the architect were eternal, the idea and the reason of the house would also be eternal. But, without recurring to the mortal architect, there is an immortal architect, or rather a primitive eternally subsisting art in the immutable thought of God, where all order, all measure, all rule, all proportion, all reason, in a word, all truth are found in their origin. "These eternal verities which our ideas represent, are the true object of science; and this is the reason why Plato, in order to render us truly wise, continually reminds us of these ideas, wherein is seen, not what is formed, but what is, not what is begotten and is corrupt, what appears and vanishes, what is made and defective, but what eternally subsists. It is this intellectual world which that divine philosopher has put in the mind of God before the world was constructed, which is the immutable model of that great work. These are the simple, eternal, immutable, unbegotten, incorruptible ideas to which he refers us, in order to understand truth. This is what has made him say that our ideas, images of the divine ideas, were also immediately derived from the divine ideas, and did not come by the senses, which serve very well, said he, to awaken them, but not to form them in our mind. For if, without having ever seen any thing eternal, we have so clear an idea of eternity, that is to say, of being that is always the same; if, without having perceived a perfect triangle, we understand it distinctly, and demonstrate so many incontestable truths concerning it, it is a mark that these ideas do not come from our senses." _Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Self._[65] Chap. iv., sect. 5. _Intelligence has for its object eternal truths, which are nothing else than God himself, in whom they are always subsisting and perfectly understood._