Gathering the Scattered Into One
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Socrates — εἰς μίαν ἰδέαν συνορῶντα ἄγειν τὰ πολλαχῇ διεσπαρμένα… ἕκαστον ὁριζόμενος δῆλον ποιῇ… τὸ σαφὲς ὁμολογούμενον.
Here Socrates finally lifts the method into full view and names its first movement. It is the act of 'bringing into one form,' eis mian idean agein — gathering into a single idea, by 'seeing them together,' synorōnta, 'the things scattered in many places,' ta pollachē diesparmena. The vocabulary is precise and beautiful. The instances of a thing lie diesparmena, 'scattered' — the word is the root of 'diaspora,' sown broadcast across experience like seed. The philosopher's first task is to synoraō them, to 'see them together' in one comprehensive glance (the root of 'synopsis'), and so to grasp the single idea, the one form, that runs through the many. The purpose of this gathering is definition: 'so that, defining each thing,' horizomenos, 'one may make clear,' dēlon poiē, what one means to teach. And Socrates points back to his own performance as proof: the speeches on love did exactly this — gathered love's scattered manifestations into a defined form — and that is why, whatever their merits, they at least achieved 'the clear and the self-consistent,' to saphes kai to homologoumenon, the two marks of speech grounded in a real definition.
Socrates now names the first of the two procedures whose power, mastered as an art, would be a fine thing to have. It is the movement of collection: seeing many scattered particulars together and bringing them under a single form, so that by defining each thing one can make clear what one is talking about. This, he says, is exactly what the speeches did with love — and it is why, whatever else, they managed to say something clear and self-consistent.
This is one of the most important passages in all of Plato, because it is where he names, in his own voice, the master-method of his mature philosophy: the procedure that later readers call collection, synagōgē, here paired in the next breath with its partner, division. Collection is the upward movement of thought, from the scattered many to the one. Everywhere in experience we meet dispersed particulars — this beautiful face, that noble law, this brave deed, that fit of inspired prophecy — and the philosophical mind gathers them by seeing what single form they instance, drawing the many into one idea so that the idea can be defined. It is the exact remedy for the disease diagnosed earlier in the dialogue. The disputed words, the ones about which minds wander, are precisely the ones whose instances are scattered and whose unifying form has never been fixed; collection is how you fix it, how you turn a wandering word into a defined one by seeing the one behind its many uses. And notice how the word for the goal, idea, and the word for the act, synoraō, quietly bind this dry-seeming method to the soaring vision of the first half. Idea and its cousin eidos are Plato's words for the Forms — literally 'the look' of a thing, what it shows to the eye of the mind — and to 'see together' the many under one idea is to perform, deliberately and by method, the very thing the palinode described the lover doing by inspiration. There the soul, struck by a beautiful face, was carried up in recollection to Beauty itself, the one Form glimpsed through the many beautiful things. Here the dialectician, gathering scattered particulars into one idea, is doing the same in the cool light of reason: seeing the one in the many, the form through the instances. Plato has been telling us all along that these are the same movement of soul — that recollection and collection, the lover's remembering gaze and the philosopher's synoptic method, are two faces of a single ascent from the dispersed world of appearances toward the unified world of the real. This is why the second half of the dialogue is not a change of subject from the first but its completion. The myth showed us the destination and the power that drives us there — desire, awakened by beauty, remembering the Forms. The method shows us the disciplined road: gather the many into one, define the form, and then, as the next passage will teach, divide it rightly into its kinds. Love drew the soul upward without its quite knowing how; dialectic is that same upward path walked with open eyes.
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