y existing state can philosophy grow
naturally; planted in a suitable state, her divinity will be apparent.

I need no longer hesitate to say that we must make our guardians
philosophers. The necessary combination of qualities is extremely rare.
Our test must be thorough, for the soul must be trained up by the
pursuit of all kinds of knowledge to the capacity for the pursuit of the
highest--higher than justice and wisdom--the idea of the good. "But what
is the good--pleasure, knowledge?" No. To see and distinguish material
things, the faculty of sight requires the medium of light, whose source
is the sun. The good is to the intellectual faculty what the sun is to
that of vision: it is the source and cause of truth, which is the light
whereby we perceive ideas; it is not truth nor the ideas, but above
them; their cause, as the sun is the source of light and the cause of
growth.

Again, as the material things with which the eye is concerned are in two
categories--the copies, reflections or shadows of things, and actual
things--correspondingly the things perceived by the intellect are in a
secondary region--as the mathematical--where everything is derived from
hypotheses which are assumed to be first principles; or in a supreme
region, in which hypotheses are orly the steps by which we ascend to the
real ultimate first principles themselves. And it will follow further
that the mind has four faculties appropriate to these four divisions,
which we call respectively pure reason (the highest), understanding,
conviction, and perception of shadows; the first pair being concerned
with being, the field of the intellect; the second pair with becoming,
the field of opinion.

_V.--Of Shadows and Realities_

Let me speak a parable. Humanity--ourselves--are as people dwelling ever
bound and fettered in a twilit cave, with our backs to the light. Behind
us is a parapet, and beyond the parapet a fire; all that we see is the
shadows thrown on the wall that faces us by figures passing along the
parapet behind us; all we hear is the echo of their voices. Now, if some
of us are turned round to face the light and look on the real figures,
they will be dazzled at first, and much more if they are taken out into
the light, and up to face the sun himself; but presently they will see
perfectly, and have all the joy thereof. Now send them back into the
cave, and they will be apparently much blinder than the folk who have
been there all the ti