.

And an absolute beauty and absolute good?

Of course.

But did you ever behold any of them with your eyes?

Certainly not.

Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sense?--and I speak not
of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength,
and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them
ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not
the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made
by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact
conception of the essence of each thing which he considers?

Certainly.

And he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the
mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight
or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the
mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each; he who
has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the
whole body, these being in his opinion distracting elements which when
they infect the soul hinder her from acquiring truth and knowledge--who,
if not he, is likely to attain the knowledge of true being?

What you say has a wonderful truth in it, Socrates, replied Simmias.

And when real philosophers consider all these things, will they not be
led to make a reflection which they will express in words something like
the following? 'Have we not found,' they will say, 'a path of thought
which seems to bring us and our argument to the conclusion, that while
we are in the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the
body, our desire will not be satisfied? and our desire is of the truth.
For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere
requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and
impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and
lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and
in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all.
Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body
and the lusts of the body? wars are occasioned by the love of money, and
money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body;
and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to
philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and
betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always b