wise man, therefore, will
seek to free himself from the bonds of the body, and die while he lives
by philosophic contemplation, free as far as possible from the
disturbing influence of the senses. This process of _rational_
realisation Plato called Dialectic. The objects contemplated by the
reason, brought into consciousness on the occurrence of sensible
perception, but never caused by these, were not mere notions in the
mind of the individual thinker, nor were they mere properties of
individual things; this would be to make an end of science on the one
hand, of reality on the other. Nor had they existence in any mere
place, not even beyond the heavens. Their home was Mind, not this mind
or that, but Mind Universal, which is God.

In these 'thoughts of God' was the root or essence which gave reality
to the things of sense; they were the Unity which realised itself in
multiplicity. It is because things partake of the Idea that we give
them a name. The thing as such is seen, not known; the idea as such is
known, not seen.

[252]

The whole conception of Plato in this connection is based on the
assumption that there is such a thing as knowledge. If all things are
ever in change, then knowledge is impossible; but conversely, if there
is {165} such a thing as knowledge, then there must be a continuing
object of knowledge; and beauty, goodness, [253] reality are then no
dreams. The process of apprehension of these 'thoughts of God,' these
eternal objects of knowledge, whether occasioned by sensation or not,
is essentially a process of self-inquiry, or, as he in one stage called
it, of Reminiscence. The process is the same in essence, whether going
on in thought or expressed in speech; it is a process of _naming_. Not
that names ever resemble realities fully; they are only approximations,
limited by the conditions [254] of human error and human convention.
There is nevertheless an inter-communion between ideas and things. We
must neither go entirely with those who affirm the one (the Eleatics),
nor with those who affirm the many (the Heracliteans), but accept both.
There is a union in all that exists both of That Which _Is_, and of
that concerning which all we can say is that it is _Other_ than what
is. This 'Other,' through union with what is, attains to being of a
kind; while on the other hand, What Is by union with the 'Other'
attains to variety, and thus more fully realises itself.

[258]

That which Pl