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
ousia--_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: Within "the eikoton mython idea--the category of
probability."--"Phaedo."]

[Footnote 555: "Phaedo," Sec. 50-56.]

[Footnote 556: "Phaedrus," Sec. 58.]

[Footnote 557: See note on p. 349.]

All knowledge of truth and reality is, therefore, according to Plato, a
REMINISCENCE (anamnesis)--a recovery of partially forgotten ideas which
the soul possessed in another state of existence; and the _dialectic_ of
Plato is simply the effort, by apt _interrogation_, to lead the mind to
"_recollect_"[558] the truth which has been formerly perceived by it,
and is even now in the memory though not in consciousness. An
illustration of this method is attempted in the "_Meno_" where Plato
introduces Socrates as making an experiment on the mind of an uneducated
person. Socrates puts a series of questions to a slave of Meno, and at
length elicits from the youth a right enunciation of a geometrical
truth. Socrates then po