of them, or that they are the property only of the favoured few who have been highly gifted and highly educated. That, I say, is not what he means to inculcate, but rather this, that the mind being already in possession of ideas, it is the hardest of all tasks, and requires the most persevering meditation for the mind to make itself cognisant of these possessions, and to understand the nature of these ideas. From the manner, however, in which he frequently expresses himself, one might readily mistake his drift, and might suppose that he was pressing on his readers the necessity of their acquiring ideas, if they wished to be men of science or philosophers; whereas the truth is that he is merely pressing on them the necessity of their acquiring a knowledge of the ideas which they already possess, and which are at once the enlightening principle of their own minds, and the staple of the universe. The difference between the mind which is informed by dialectic, and the mind which is not so informed, is simply this: that the ordinary or uninformed mind has ideas, while the dialectic mind knows that it has them, and understands what they are. The other interpretation, that usually adopted by the Platonic expositors, seems rather to be this: that the ordinary mind has no ideas at all, but is informed by a lower species of knowledge, into which ideas do not enter, while the dialectic mind alone both has ideas and is cognisant of their presence and nature. This interpretation is, I conceive, quite wrong.
