20;now you may take, a corresponding to the four sections, these four states of mind, intelligence for the highest, thinking for the second, belief for the third and for the last imagining. These you may arrange in terms as the terms in a proportion, assigning to each a degree of clearness and certainty corresponding to the measure in which their object pose a reality”. When discussing the Divided Line, The Forms are the highest levels of “reality”. Plato concludes here that the “real world” is not what we see but what we understand or feel in a “intelligible world” because it is made up of eternal Forms. The Forms take on the explanation of existence. They are “changeless, eternal, and nonmaterial essences or patterns of which the actual visible objects we see are only poor copies”. Plato uses a person discovering the quality of beauty to explain this, “he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will…deem a small thing and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that there beauty of the mind is more honorable that there beauty of outward form. Drawing towards and contemplating the vast see of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere”. There are many Forms but not everything has a Form, if this were so then there would be a parallel world. Forms are not something we can touch but something we hold in our minds, Plato described them as “real existence, colorless, formless, and intangible, visible only to the intelligence”. Forms do not exist per se; they just are but can’t be touched. Plato said, “the Forms are the cause of the essence of all other things, and the One is the caus...
