Note (return) — Chapter XI
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To determine what these principles or ideas are, Plato now addresses himself to the analysis of thought. "It is the glory of Plato to have borne the light of analysis into the most obscure and inmost region; he searched out what, in this totality which forms consciousness, is the province of reason; what comes from it, and not from the imagination and the senses--from within, and not from without." 578 Now to analyze is to decompose, that is, to divide, and to define, in order to see better that which really is. The chief logical instruments of the dialectic method are, therefore, Division and Definition. "The being able to divide according to genera, and not to consider the same species as different, nor a different as the same," 579 and "to see under one aspect, and bring together under one general idea, many things scattered in various places, that, by defining each, a person may make it clear what the subject is," is, according to Plato, "dialectical." 580