Commentary on Plato's Alcibiades

entirely ignorant of the manner of true science. And it is just that, while we philosophize about these matters, we should cleanse ourselves, and their inquiries should be resolved, and the forms of treatment appropriate to the soul should be applied. Therefore, saying these things, we will praise them as lovers of pre-eternal goods and as having become harmonious in their grasp of things, but we will not yet say that they themselves have performed the division of the text in a practical manner, without a second positing, and they have not yet fully mastered the clarity concerning the instruments. That method of his instruction, however, seems to me the most perfect of all, which also the philosopher Iamblichus a Neoplatonic philosopher approved, proceeding from the things themselves, and gathering the entire economy of the treatise into three chapters. And to these he refers the syllogistic methods and the verbal handlings, while the second points and the instruments are samples of the first and principal parts, and rules are provided in succession. How, then, do we say the parts of the generation of the good, the immediate and most principal ones, are divided? And how, again, are they as if aimed at a target, so that they might bring forth the contemplation of the intellect, and turn each of us back toward himself from the impulse that looks toward outward things, and from untimely busy-bodying curiosity, and how it is necessary for our reason to be purified from the things that obstruct it, and, by making this return, for us to be exceedingly educated and toward the things according to reason...