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is uncompounded, it has no parts to break down into." This
is called the argument from simplicity. A third argument,
among many, was the argument from recollection and he talks
about conversations with a slave boy in which he showed to
his satisfaction that learning is really recollection, that
the soul of this slave boy had a previous existence. He was
able to talk to this unschooled youth and have him deduce
that if a diagonal is drawn across a square and a square is
constructed with sides the length of the diagonal, that the
second square has twice the area of the first. To him this
could not be possible unless the boy’s (or his soul) had had
some previous experience with the pathagarian. This boy's
soul knew equality itself, beauty itself, justice itself.
Of course, the allegory of the cave: the four levels of
consciousness. First of all the reflections on the cave, the
things, the visible, the image, the likeness, the least
permanent. Then the men walking in front of the fire. They
correspond to the general categories. The beliefs sufficient
guides to action, what you might call common sense homilies.
In the third, the outside, his even higher level of abstraction
which he would relate to mathematics. The fourth, the sun,
is reality itself. The forms, God.

In kind of a way, William Wordsworth's poem "The Ode to
Immortality" is similar. Socrates had this boy recall from
the past and his recollection of his previous life was generated
more and more as he got into his teens. The Wordsworth theory

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