This has the incidental advantage, that weaving and the web furnish us with
a figure of speech, which we can afterwards transfer to the State.
There are two uses of examples or images--in the first place, they suggest
thoughts--secondly, they give them a distinct form. In the infancy of
philosophy, as in childhood, the language of pictures is natural to man:
truth in the abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the
mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on
thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new
directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness
of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him
as well as the comparison of particular arts--weaving, the refining of
gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of
the pilot--all of which occur in this dialogue alone: though he is also
aware that 'comparisons are slippery things,' and may often give a false
clearness to ideas. We shall find, in the Philebus, a division of sciences
into practical and speculative, and into more or less speculative: here we
have the idea of master-arts, or sciences which control inferior ones.
Besides the supreme science of dialectic, 'which will forget us, if we
forget her,' another master-science for the first time appears in view--the
science of government, which fixes the limits of all the rest.
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