[Footnote 553: ][ (return) ] Not, however, fully in this life. The consummation of the intellectual struggle into "the intelligible world" is death. The intellectual discipline was therefore µελέτη θανατου, a preparation for death.
CHAPTER XI.
THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (continued.)
THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (continued).
PLATO.
II. THE PLATONIC DIALECTIC.
The Platonic Dialectic is the Science of Eternal and Immutable Principles, and the method (ὄργανον) by which these first principles are brought forward into the clear light of consciousness. The student of Plato will have discovered that he makes no distinction between logic and metaphysics. These are closely united in the one science to which he gives the name of "Dialectic" and which was at once the science of the ideas and laws of the Reason, and of the mental process by which the knowledge of Real Being is attained, and a ground of absolute certainty is found. This science has, in modern times, been called Primordial or Transcendental Logic.
We have seen that Plato taught that the human reason is originally in possession of fundamental and necessary ideas--the copies of the archetypal ideas which dwell in the eternal Reason; and that these ideas are the primordial laws of thought--that is, they are the laws under which we conceive of all objective things, and reason concerning all existence. These ideas, he held, are not derived from sensation, neither are they generalizations from experience, but they are inborn and connatural. And, further, he entertained the belief, more, however, as a reasonable hypothesis [554] than as a demonstrable truth, that these standard principles were acquired by the soul in a pre-existent state in which it stood face to face with ideas of eternal order, beauty, goodness, and truth. [555] "Journeying with the Deity," the soul contemplated justice, wisdom, science--not that science which is concerned with change, and which appears under a different manifestation in different objects, which we choose to call beings; but such science as is in that which alone is indeed being. [556] Ideas, therefore, belong to, and inhere in, that portion of the soul which is properly οὐσία--essence or being; which had an existence anterior to time, and even now has no relation to time, because it is now in eternity--that is, in a sphere of being to which past, present, and future can have no relation. [557]
[Footnote 554: ][ (return) ]: Within "the εἰκότων µύθων ἰδέα--the category of probability."--"Phædo."