These ideas therefore are immanent in man: for they are the basis of human nature. But to name, to disentangle them, to measure out their bounds and describe their connexions--that is no easy work. And that is the work of Platonic recollection. That is the process of historical experience. But it is a small thing for Plato to say that these ideas are innate in man. What he is more concerned to make clear is that in the possession or vision of these eternal forms, the human soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens. In less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic, moral, and religious being, is not a mere accidental on-looker on the surface of things, but near their central and abiding truth. The forms of his mind, to speak after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences of the real world of experience. Degrees there may be in the reality which they possess--less or larger measures of truth to full experience--but true and real they are: never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often tried. At one time it seems as if the Good were in his estimate the form of forms, the real of reals: but when we look closely, we see that it is a goodness which is synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At another time truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all: at another, beauty: and again he seems to confess his inability to lay down the order of precedence in this hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly clear: and that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of reason. But he has no doubts as to the central truth that in the good, the true, and the beautiful, there is a higher reality--a more far-reaching and deep-piercing influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the mere multitude of sensible fact.