There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul. For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the highest point, passed out and stood (as you might stand upon the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky. And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky. That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily. And thus it is: for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate, especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking. For the colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason alone as one's guide. Centered about that, the generation, or seed, genos,+--the people, of true knowledge inhabits this place. As, then, the intelligence of God, which is nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akêratô,+ unmixed with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also, which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it, beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] it (that's the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings it round again to the same place. And in that journey round it looks upon justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay) attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing, another in another, of those things which now we speak of as being; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is (tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan)+ and having beheld, after the same manner, all other things that really are, and feasted upon them, being passed back again to the interior of the sky, the soul returned home. Phaedrus, 247.+ Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile. There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of discourse, in some other passages like it, Plato has gone beyond his master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult.