The aim of this hypothesis, moreover, was to found the divine authority of an infallible tradition by making it go back to the earliest times. These revealed ideas, by the very fact that they are the ideas of God, have an absolute and eternal value. Man finds them guaranteed in the religious caste, to which the deposit has been confided, and which has preserved them intact. Thus arose the idea of an infallible authority. So they say. But the idea of dogmatic authority never appears in early times; it is of very late date; it is elaborated very slowly, according to a psychological law that we have already discovered. Everywhere, and in the traditions of all religions and Churches, it appears after all other doctrines as the keystone which closes and binds together the arch. It is an ultimate dogma logically derived from other dogmas, and afterwards used as a warrant for them. Such was the dogma of Papal Infallibility promulgated at the Vatican Council of 1870; such, in Protestantism, was the dogma of Biblical infallibility, completed by the theologians of the seventeenth century. To base the value of religious notions on a supernatural authority, with a view to rendering them indisputable, is a vicious circle; the authority, it is evident, is the product of these notions themselves. All systems of authority end by shutting themselves up in this circle and perishing in it. The idealist theory of the origin of ideas is but the philosophical form of the preceding one. It also is an endeavour to trace back our general ideas to the divine understanding as their primary source. Pure ideas, type-ideas, according to Plato, constitute the intelligible Cosmos of which material phenomena are but the unreal and ephemeral shadows. Clearly to conceive these divine ideas is to reach the transcendent reality of things--it is to possess true knowledge. From Platonism to the realism of scholasticism, from this to the geometry of Spinoza and the dialectic of Hegel, the form of the theory has varied constantly; the substance of it has remained the same. Hegel always said: "The rational is the real," and, for him, as for Plato, absolute knowledge resolved itself into perfect logic.