3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged
already and not like those others, in need of disengagement,
stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way,
needs only a guide. He must be shown, then, and instructed, a
willing wayfarer by his very temperament, all but self-directed.

    Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very
easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to
faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he
must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he
must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the
science.

    4. But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three
classes alike, what, in sum, is it?

    It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power
of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of
things- what each is, how it differs from others, what common
quality all have, to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each
stands in its Kind and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many
Beings there are, and how many non-Beings to be distinguished from
Beings.

    Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-Good, and of the
particulars that fall under each, and of what is the Eternal and
what the not Eternal- and of these, it must be understood, not by
seeming-knowledge ["sense-knowledge"] but with authentic science.

    All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of
sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies
its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and
falsity, and pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs
the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the
Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]:
it establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in
all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire
Intellectual Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars
once more, it returns to the point from which it starts.

    Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that
sphere, it is no longer busy about many things: it has arrived at
Unity and it contemplates: it leaves to another science all that
coil of premisses and conclusions called the art of reasoning, much as
it leaves the art of writing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt,
it considers necessary- to clear the ground- but it makes itself the
judge, here as in everything else; where it sees use, it uses;
anything it finds superfluous, it leaves to whatever department of
learning or practice may turn that matter to account.

    5. But whence does this science derive its own initial laws?

    The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain
for any soul that is able to apply them. What else is necessary,
Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it
has reached perfect Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the purest
[perfection] of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom." And, being the
noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with
Authentic-Existence, The Highest there is: as Contemplative-Wisdom [or
true-knowing] it deals with Being, as Intellection with what
transcends Being.

    What, then, is Philosophy?

    Philosophy is the supremely precious.

    Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?

    It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it
as the mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic does not consist of
bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it
were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards
Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions
and of the realities.

    Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature,
but merely as something produced outside itself, something which it
recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the
falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of
truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions-
collections of words- but it knows the truth, and, in that
knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows
above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this
knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether
the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether
propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it
attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty
precisions of process to what other science may care for such
exercises.

    6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialectic is its precious
part: in its study of the laws of the universe, Philosophy draws on
Dialectic much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic, though,
of course, the alliance between Philosophy and Dialectic is closer.

    And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic: by Dialectic it
comes to contemplation, though it originates of itself the moral state
or rather the discipline from which the moral state develops.

    Our reasoning faculties employ the data of Dialectic almost as