For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the Socratic "universals," the notions of Justice and the like, are become, first, things in themselves--the real things; and secondly, persons, to be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the visible perfections, we might say--intellectually visible--of [167] their being. "It looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance; upon Knowledge." Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason--those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the instruments by which we tabulate and classify and record our experience--mere "marks" of the real things of experience, of what is essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of all true knowledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience to the "absolute." In proportion as they lend themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are become--Justice and Beauty, and the perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible [168] instances thereof, but which no two equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever--separate (chôristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they remain for ever--those eternal "forms," of Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth.