Talks with Socrates about Life Author:Plato Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE REPUBLIC. BOOK VII. In the book which precedes this, Socrates maintains that only by living the life of a philosopher can a knowledge of the intellectu... more »al world, where alone true being resides, be gained. The supreme idea of this higher world, the ideal form of Good, whose light illumines all other ideas in the intellectual world, he likens to the sun, whose light must illumine any object which the eye would see clearly in the visible world. The thought is carried out in the following allegory of a cave or lower world, which bears the same relation to the visible world in which we live that the latter bears to the world of pure ideas above it. The conversation is between Socrates and Glaucon, Socrates speaking in the first person. 514 " Picture to yourself a company of men in a kind of underground cavern-like dwelling, which has an opening towards the light extending all the way across one side; here from childhood they have been fastened by the legs and the neck, in such wise that they are kept ever in one position and see only what is in front of them, because by reason of the chains they cannot turn their heads round. Light, however, they have from a fire which is burning high up at some distance behind them; and between the fire and the prisoners there runs a raised road, along which you see a low wall built like the screens which the jugglers set up between themselves and their audience, over which to display their shows." M " I see it all," said Glaucon. " Imagine, furthermore, men who are carrying behind this wall images of men and all 515 sorts of animals, made of wood and stone and wrought in every fashion, and other articles of every kind, which project above the wall; and suppose, as would be natural, that some of those who carry the images are talk...« less