the human mind at one and the same time. The Idea is the foundation of reality itself.
Central to Plato's thought is the power of reason to reveal the intelligibility and order governing the changing world of appearance, with the purpose of creating, at both the political and the individual level, a harmonious and happy life. Plato seeks a harmony between reason and passion, a life of self mastery in which reason governs the will as its natural guide and source. Plato's doctrine of recollection holds that learning is the remembering of a wisdom that the soul enjoyed prior to its incarnation, another aspect of the idea that there are ideal forms "remembered" by the soul in this world, and this is actually a mythical statement of this view that neither reason nor the intelligible order that it reveals is alien to the human soul. Plato is seen as a rationalist in that he finds the good, the beautiful, and the just all contained in the true, in what can be deduced or distilled from experience by p
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