Plato carries out the same figure to explain different degrees of memory. “When the wax in one’s soul is deep, abundant, smooth, and of the right quality, the impressions are lasting. Such minds can easily retain and are not liable to confusion. But, on the other hand, when the wax is very soft, one learns easily and forgets as easily; if the wax is hard, the reverse is true; again, if the wax is hard or impure, the impressions are indistinct; and still more indistinct are they when jostled together in a little soul.”[6] This illustration must not be taken too seriously; for later on in the same dialogue Socrates calls it a “waxen figment” and substitutes for it the figure of the aviary of all kinds of birds—“some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary, flying anywhere and everywhere.” The receptacle is empty when we are young. The birds are kinds of knowledge. Learning is the process of capturing the birds and of detaining them in this enclosure. In acts of memory we re-catch them and take them out of the aviary. Plato’s views upon memory have a special interest on account of their connection with his metaphysical doctrines. Perception and recollection are the occasion of the minds turning away from the world of sense to the inner world of innate and universal ideas. These ideas we could never get from sense-perception. That gives us only the immediate and the individual. The ideas are of the essential and the universal. We could not conceive them if we did not already know them. Hence the power to know the universal in the individual proves a previous existence in which we had the intuitions of universal truths; and, accordingly, learning is but recollection.[7] The metaphysical aspects of memory, however, let us avoid as much as possible. They would soon lead far from a psychological study. But this doctrine of recollection lies at the heart of the Platonic philosophy, and it is necessary to note carefully the distinction between this and ordinary memory. The latter, as defined by Plato in the passage quoted above is the memory or recollection of what has been learned through the body, that is, through sense-perception, belongs to the world of appearances, and is liable to many errors. The former, on the other hand, is not concerned with things of sense. It is recollection of that higher world where we had an antenatal vision of intelligible realities. Its highest manifestation is the insight of the philosopher who sees the divine goodness, truth, and beauty.[8] II.