[181] Such, in its full scope, is the journey or pilgrimage, the method (hodos, kinêsis, methodos)+ of the Socratic, of the perfected Platonic dialectic, towards the truth, the true knowledge, of Bravery or Friendship, for instance; of Space or Motion, again, as suggested in the seventh book of The Republic; of the ideal City, of the immaculate Beauty. You are going about Justice, for example--that great complex elevation on the level surface of life, whose top, it may be, reaches to heaven. You fancy you have grasped its outline. Alla metathômetha.+ You are forced on, perhaps by your companion, a step further, and the view has already changed. "Persevere," Plato might say, "and a step may be made, upon which, again, the whole world around may change, the entire horizon and its relation to the point you stand on--a change from the half-light of conjecture to the full light of indefectible certitude." That, of course, can only happen by a summary act of intuition upon the entire perspective, wherein all those partial apprehensions, which one by one may have seemed inconsistent with each other, find their due place, or (to return to the Platonic Dialogue again, to the actual process of dialectic as there exposed) by that final impression of a subject, a theorem, in which the mind attains a hold, as if by a single imaginative act, through all the transitions of a long conversation, upon all the seemingly opposite contentions of all the various speakers at once. We see already why [182] Platonic dialectic--the ladder, as Plato thinks, by which alone we can ascend into the entirely reasonable world (noêtos topos)+ beginning with the boyish difficulties and crudities of Meno, for instance, is a process which may go on, at least with those gifted by nature and opportunity, as in the Perfect City,--may go on to the close of life, and, as Pythagorean theory suggests, perhaps does not end even then.