 Other connections between the Platonic and the other persons strands, not necessarily incompatible with the ones mentioned, have been proposed. Clarke suggests that the Good is a perfectionist principle in Murdoch, so that seeing other persons in light of the Good is just an expression of her perfectionism, pushing the agent to achieve a more and more just, loving, and complete perception of that person (Clarke 2012). Dorothy Emmet, an older contemporary and friend of Murdoch presses a similar view, that the Good should be thought of as a “regulative ideal” in the Kantian sense, “an indefinable standard towards which we can turn in appreciation of” what is Good (or Beautiful). But Emmet differs from Clarke in denying that this is a moral principle (Emmet 1994 [this book was dedicated to Murdoch]: 65–66; see also 1979 for one of the first scholarly engagements with Murdoch). Emmet likely also influenced Murdoch’s resistance to British philosophy’s jettisoning of metaphysics in its analytic and linguistic modalities in the 1950s, through Emmet’s defense of metaphysics in her 1945 The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking; which Murdoch read, and in her and Murdoch’s attempts starting in the 1950s (and in all of Murdoch’s subsequent writings) to bring religion and philosophy closer together. Murdoch acknowledges that the Christian conception of God influences her understanding of the Good. “I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention” and that we should retain a non-theistic concept [i.e., Good] with those characteristics (OGG: 55/344). This semi-religious dimension relates to the idea Murdoch occasionally expresses, and more so in Metaphysics, that the Good is a source of energy that is not found within our “natural psychology” (OGG: 71/358).