rdsworth, "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_.

[Footnote 553: Not, however, fully in this life. The consummation of the
intellectual struggle into "the intelligible world" is death. The
intellectual discipline was therefore melete thanatou, _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_ (organon) 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