But how does he commence?
"I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my reason in the
speculation which lies before me, and having kindled in me the pure
light of truth, to direct my mind upward to the very knowledge of the
things which are, and to open the doors of my soul to receive the divine
guidance of Plato, and, having directed my knowledge into the very
brightness of being, to withdraw me from the various forms of opinion,
from the apparent wisdom, from the wandering about things which do not
exist, by that purest intellectual exercise about the things which do
exist, whereby alone the eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as
Socrates says in the Phaedrus; and that the Noetic Gods will give to me
the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the power which leads up to
this, and that the rulers of the Universe above the heaven will impart
to me an energy unshaken by material notions and emancipated from them,
and those to whom the world is given as their dominion a winged life,
and the angelic choirs a true manifestation of divine things, and the
good daemons the fulness of the inspiration which comes from the Gods,
and the heroes a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and
the whole divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in
Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to
us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics,
but which he (i.
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