gradual recognition of itself by reason. When the soul
perceives that the beauty in all objects is the same, that it is the
common element amid the many, this is nothing but the process of
inductive reasoning. And this development ends at last in the complete
rational cognition of the world of Ideas, in a word, philosophy. Love
is but an instinctive reason. The animal has no feeling of the
beautiful, just because it has no reason. Love of the beautiful is
founded upon the nature of man, not as a percipient or feeling being,
but as a rational being. And it must end in the complete recognition
of reason by itself, not in the feeling and intuition, but in the
rational comprehension, of the Idea.

One can imagine what Plato's answer would be to the sort of vulgarians
and philistines who want to know what the use of philosophy is, and in
what way it is "practical." To answer such a question is for Plato
impossible, because the question itself is illegitimate. For a thing
to have a use involves that it is a means towards an end. Fire has
use, because it may be made a means towards the cooking of food. Money
is useful, because it is a means to the acquisition of goods. That
which is an end in itself, and not a means towards any further end,
cannot possibly have any use. To suggest that philosophy ought to have
use is, therefore, to put the cart before the horse, to invert the
whole scale of values. It suggests that philosophy is a means towards
some further end, instead of being the absolute end to which all other
things are means. Philosophy is not _for_ anything. Everything else is
_for_ it. And, if this seems an exaggerated or unpractical view, we may
at least {207} remember that this is the view taken by the religious
consciousness of man. Religion makes the supreme end of life the
knowledge of, and communion with, God. God is for religion what the
Idea is for philosophy. God is a figurative name for the Idea. To
place the end of life in the knowledge of the Absolute, or the Idea,
is therefore the teaching both of philosophy and religion.

4. Physics, or the Theory of Existence.

Dialectic is the theory of reality, physics the theory of existence,
dialectic of that which lies behind things as their ground, physics of
the things which are thus grounded. That is to say, physics is
concerned with phenomena and appearances, things which exist in space
and time, as opposed to the timeless and non-spatial Ideas. Things of