The Metaphysics of Aristotle

In this last-mentioned dialogue, Plato thus unfolds the employment of his dialectic: “Guest. Do we not say that to divide according to genera, and neither to think that the same species is different, nor a different species the same, is the business of the dialectic science? Theaetetus. We do say so. Guest. He, therefore, who is able to do this, sufficiently perceives one idea every way extended through many things, the individuals of which are placed apart from each other, and many ideas different from each other externally comprehended under one, and one idea through many wholes conjoined in one; and lastly, many ideas every way divided apart from each other. This is to know scientifically how to distinguish, according to genus, in what respect particulars communicate, and how far they do not communicate, with each other.” It also ascends through well-ordered gradations to being itself. It also terminates the wandering of the soul about sensibles sensibles: Objects perceivable by the senses; the material world.; and explores everything by methods which cannot be refuted, till it arrives at the ineffable principle of things.

“The multitude, however, are unacquainted with the power of dialectic, and are ignorant that the end of this scientific wandering is truth and intellect: for it is not possible for us to recur from things last to such as are first, except by a progression through the middle forms of life. For, as our descent into the realms of mortality was effected through many mediums, the soul always proceeding into that which is more composite, in like manner our ascent must be accomplished through various mediums, the soul resolving her composite order of life. In the first place, therefore, it is requisite to despise the senses, as able to know nothing accurate, nothing sane, but possessing much of the confused, the material, and the passive, in consequence of employing certain instruments of this kind. After this, it follows that we should dismiss imaginations, those winged Stymphalidae In Greek mythology, the Stymphalian birds were pests that fouled the land; here used as a metaphor for intrusive, distracting mental images. of the soul, as alone possessing a figured intellection of things, but by no means able to apprehend unfigured and impartible form, and as impeding the pure and immaterial intellection of the soul, by intervening, and disturbing it in its investigations. In the third place, we must entirely extirpate multiform opinions, and the wandering of the soul about these; for they are not conversant with the causes of things, nor do they procure for us science, nor the participation of a separate intellect. In the fourth place, therefore, we must hastily return to the great sea of the sciences, and there, by the assistance of dialectic, survey the divisions and compositions of these, and, in short, the variety of forms in the soul, and, through this survey unweaving our vital order, behold our dianoetic dianoetic: Pertaining to discursive reasoning or the process of moving step-by-step through logical thoughts. part. After this, in the fifth place, it is requisite to separate ourselves from composition, and contemplate by intellectual energy true beings: for intellect is more excellent than science; and a life according to intellect is preferable to that which is according to science. Many, therefore, are the wanderings of the soul: for one of these is in imaginations, another in opinions, and a third in the dianoetic power. But a life according to intellect is alone inerratic. And this is the mystic port of the soul, into which Homer conducts Ulysses, after an abundant wandering of life.”