Has had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home." [552]
[Footnote 552: ][ (return) ] Wordsworth, "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," vol. v.
Exiled from the true home of the spirit, imprisoned in the body, disordered by passion, and beclouded by sense, the soul has yet longings after that state of perfect knowledge, and purity, and bliss, in which it was first created. Its affinities are still on high. It yearns for a higher and nobler form of life. It essays to rise, but its eye is darkened by sense, its wings are besmeared by passion and lust; it is "borne downward, until at length it falls upon and attaches itself to that which is material and sensual," and it flounders and grovels still amid the objects of sense.
And now, with all that seriousness and earnestness of spirit which is peculiarly Christian, Plato asks how the soul may be delivered from the illusions of sense, the distempering influence of the body, and the disturbances of passion, which becloud its vision of the real, the good, and the true?
Plato believed and hoped this could be accomplished by philosophy. This he regarded as a grand intellectual discipline for the purification of the soul. By this it was to be disenthralled from the bondage of sense [553] and raised into the empyrean of pure thought "where truth and reality shine forth." All souls have the faculty of knowing, but it is only by reflection, and self-knowledge, and intellectual discipline, that the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty--that is, to the vision of God. And this intellectual discipline was the Platonic Dialectic.