l
only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the
Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about
harmony. For they too are in error, like the astronomers; they
investigate the numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they
never attain to problems-that is to say, they never reach the natural
harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and
others not.

That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.

A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if
sought after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in
any other spirit, useless. Very true, he said.

Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and
connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual
affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them
have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.

I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.

What do you mean? I said; the prelude or what? Do you not know that
all this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to
learn? For you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a
dialectician?

Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who
was capable of reasoning.

But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason
will have the knowledge which we require of them?

Neither can this be supposed.

And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of
dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but
which the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for
sight, as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold
the real animals and stars, and last of all the sun himself. And so
with dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute
by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and
perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of
the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the
intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.

Exactly, he said.

Then this is the progress which you call dialectic?

True.

But the release of the prisoners from chains, and their translation
from the shadows to the images and to the light, and the ascent from
the underground den to the sun, while in his presence they are vainly
tryi