 However, the two extant books where Fârâbî tries to carry out this part of metaphysics, the Perfect City and the Political Regime, are of a rather different character from the texts that he wrote for an audience within the Baghdad philosophical school, engaging with Aristotle’s texts and trying to rewrite them for a modern audience. Neither of these books is devoted exclusively to metaphysics: each first gives a long account of God as first cause, and then an account of the heavenly and sublunar things that proceed from God, before focussing on the human soul, human societies and their governance, prophecy, and the conditions for the soul’s successful “return” to God or for more or less satisfactory approximations. Especially in the Perfect City it is clear that Fârâbî is adopting an overall sequence of topics from kalâm treatises, and is trying to show that the methods of falsafa allow him to give a scientific content to the knowledge of God, and a demonstrative resolution of the issues in dispute, which in his view the methods of kalâm cannot. The full titles of the two texts, the Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Perfect City and the Political Regime known as “Principles of Beings” suggest that he is trying to reconstruct and rewrite Plato’s Republic (about which he has only indirect information), or perhaps a sequence of several Platonic texts including the  Republic.[38]  In Plato, the thesis that the best society will be ruled by philosophers leads to a discussion of the objects the philosophers need to know, Platonic Forms and especially the Good-itself, and this may give Fârâbî a model for including in these treatises a metaphysical account of the first cause and how other things proceed from it: the rulers of the best society will know these truths, and other members of the society will either believe them without demonstration, or accept some imitation of  them.[39]  But while Plato starts with a discussion of the city and uses it to motivate digressions into metaphysics, Fârâbî starts at the top, with metaphysics (in the Political Regime with a classification of “principles” or non-bodily causes, in the Perfect City with the first cause), with no prior context or motivation. He does not frame the metaphysics by saying that this is what the people of the perfect city know or believe. Rather, he starts from the first cause, explains how the various types of being in the cosmos, including human souls, depend on it, and draws conclusions about what sort of city would further human perfection and what its rulers or other inhabitants would have to know or believe: this conforms to the structure of kalâm treatises, which typically start with God’s existence and unity and attributes and acts, then talk about God’s creation including human beings, and then about prophecy and the religious community and the afterlife (âkhira) or “return” (maʿâd) to  God.[40]