its ground even in mere potentiality?

    And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in
scope and province? Where, for example, Sophrosyne would allow certain
acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them
off altogether? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once
Contemplative-Wisdom comes into action?

    The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has
to give: thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every
several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and
other standards these in turn will define his conduct: for example,
Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work
for the final Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life
of the good man- such as Civic Virtue commends- but, leaving this
beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.

    For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must
look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an
image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness
to the Supreme Exemplar.

                        THIRD TRACTATE.

                 ON DIALECTIC [THE UPWARD WAY].

    1. What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us
there where we must go?

    The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed: we have
established elsewhere, by many considerations, that our journey is
to the Good, to the Primal-Principle; and, indeed, the very
reasoning which discovered the Term was itself something like an
initiation.

    But what order of beings will attain the Term?

    Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most
things, those who at their first birth have entered into the life-germ
from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover,
the metaphysician taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the
nature peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside guidance.

    But how lies the course? Is it alike for all, or is there a
distinct method for each class of temperament?

    For all there are two stages of the path, as they are making
upwards or have already gained the upper sphere.

    The first degree is the conversion from the lower life; the
second- held by those that have already made their way to the sphere
of the Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint there but must
still advance within the realm- lasts until they reach the extreme
hold of the place, the Term attained when the topmost peak of the
Intellectual realm is won.

    But this highest degree must bide its time: let us first try to
speak of the initial process of conversion.

    We must begin by distinguishing the three types. Let us take the
musician first and indicate his temperamental equipment for the task.

    The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty,
drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to stir of his own
impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are
sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that
offends against unison or harmony in melodies and rhythms repels
him; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.

    This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a
man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design in things of
sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the
Authentic-Existent which is the source of all these correspondences
and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led
to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be
shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the
Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape
of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of
philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that
which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths
are we will show later.

    2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain-
and then either come to a stand or pass beyond- has a certain memory
of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it:
spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His
lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before
some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental
discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle
underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing
from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for
example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized
social system may be pointed out to him- a first training this in
the loveliness of the immaterial- he must learn to recognise the
beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and
particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the
explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the
Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he
treads the upward way.