Only the Truth-Seer Becomes Human
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Socrates — οὐ γὰρ ἥ γε μήποτε ἰδοῦσα τὴν ἀλήθειαν εἰς τόδε ἥξει τὸ σχῆμα. δεῖ γὰρ ἄνθρωπον συνιέναι κατʼ εἶδος λεγόμενον,
Socrates draws a boundary line around the human. In the great cycle of rebirths souls can sink into animal bodies and climb back out, but there is one thing no soul can do: enter a human body without having once seen the truth. The reason is a fact about thinking. To be human is to be able to understand what is spoken 'according to a kind' — to take a scatter of particular perceptions and gather them under one universal idea, an eidos. That power to see the one in the many is not something the mind manufactures; it is the fossil trace of a soul that once looked directly at the Forms themselves. A creature that never saw them could grasp particulars but never rise to the kind, and so could never be human at all.
Socrates explains a rule of the cycle. Souls can pass into animal bodies and back; but no soul that has never seen the truth will ever take human shape. To be human, one must be able to understand things gathered under a single kind — and that capacity is the trace of having once beheld the Forms.
This is where the myth turns into a theory of the mind, and the pivotal word is eidos — 'kind, form, Form.' Socrates says a human being must be able to understand things kat' eidos, 'according to a kind': to hear the word 'triangle' or 'justice' and grasp not this or that instance but the single form that binds all the instances together. This gathering of many perceptions into one — which the next lines name outright as recollection — is, for Plato, the defining act of human reason, and it is only possible because the soul once beheld the eide, the Forms, face to face before birth. So the capacity to think in universals is itself the proof and the residue of the vision the whole myth described. It also quietly sets up the dialogue's later, more technical concern. What Socrates is describing here — collecting a manifold under one form — is the first half of the method of 'collection and division' he will present, in the rhetoric section to come, as the real art behind all good speaking and thinking. The soul's power to gather the many into one, born of its lost sight of the Forms, is the same power that, disciplined, becomes dialectic. Recollection and method are the same faculty, seen from two sides: the myth's account of how we can think at all, and the philosopher's account of how to think well.
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