It is obvious that any attempt to reform society on Socratic principles must proceed, not from society itself, but from some person or persons in whom these principles are realized, and who act upon it from without. These persons will be the philosophers or, rather, the sages. Two distinct questions, therefore, present themselves at the outset: (1) How does a man become a sage? (2) How can the sage organize human life, and secure a succession of sages to continue his work after him? To the first of these questions, dialectics gives the answer; to the second, practics; while theoretics exhibits to us at once the origin and the end, that is, the meaning, of all existence, the human included. In the teaching of Plato we find, for the first time recognized and exhibited, the extra-civic or super-civic man, the man who is not a mere fragment of a social whole, completely subordinated to it, but who, standing above society, moulds it in accordance with ideas derived from a higher source. Forecasts of this man, indeed, we find in all Greek literature from Homer down,--in Heraclitus, Sophocles, etc., and especially, as we have seen, in Pythagoras;--but it is now for the first time that he finds full expression, and tries to play a conscious part. In him we have the promise of the future Church. But to return to the first of our two questions, How does a man become a sage? We found the answer to be, By the dialectic method. Of this, however, not all men have the inclination to avail themselves, but only a chosen few, to whom the gods have granted the inspiration of Love (ἔρως)--a longing akin to madness (μανία), kindled by physical beauty, but tending to the Supreme Good. This good, as we shall see, consists in the vision (θεωρία) of eternal truth, of being, as it is. The few men who are blessed with this love are the divinely appointed reformers and guides of mankind, the well-being of which depends upon submission to them. The dialectic method is the process by which the inspired mind rises from the beauty of physical things, which are always particulars, to the beauty of spiritual things, which are always universals, and finally to the beauty of the Supreme Good, which is _The Universal_. The man who has reached this last, and who sees its relation to all other universals, so that they form together a correlated whole, sees all truth, and is the sage. What we call universals Plato called "ideas" (ἰδέαι = forms or species). These ideas he regards as genera, as numbers, as active powers, and as substances, the highest of which is God.