Note (return) — Chapter XI
Reading edition
The final effort of Plato's Dialectic was to ascend from these ideas of Absolute Truth, and Absolute Beauty, and Absolute Goodness to the Absolute Being, in whom they are all united, and from whom they all proceed. "He who possesses the true love of science is naturally carried in his aspirations to the real Being; and his love, so far from suffering itself to be retarded by the multitude of things whose reality is only apparent, knows no repose until it have arrived at union with the essence of each object, by the part of the soul which is akin to the permanent and essential; so that this divine conjunction having produced intelligence and truth, the knowledge of being is won." 585