As in science, so also in creative art, there is a synthetical as well as an analytical method.

One man will have the whole in his mind before he begins; to another the processes of mind and hand will be simultaneous.
3.

There is no difficulty in seeing that Plato's divisions of knowledge are based, first, on the fundamental antithesis of sensible and intellectual which pervades the whole pre-Socratic philosophy; in which is implied also the opposition of the permanent and transient, of the universal and particular.

But the age of philosophy in which he lived seemed to require a further distinction;--numbers and figures were beginning to separate from ideas.

The world could no longer regard justice as a cube, and was learning to see, though imperfectly, that the abstractions of sense were distinct from the abstractions of mind.
Between the Eleatic being or essence and the shadows of phenomena, the Pythagorean principle of number found a place, and was, as Aristotle remarks, a conducting medium from one to the other.