True knowledge is a whole, and is at rest; consistency and universality are the tests of truth.

To this self-evidencing knowledge of the whole the faculty of mind is supposed to correspond.

But there is a knowledge of the understanding which is incomplete and in motion always, because unable to rest in the subordinate ideas.

Those ideas are called both images and hypotheses--images because they are clothed in sense, hypotheses because they are assumptions only, until they are brought into connexion with the idea of good.
The general meaning of the passage, 'Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight...And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible...' so far as the thought contained in it admits of being translated into the terms of modern philosophy, may be described or explained as follows:--There is a truth, one and self-existent, to which by the help of a ladder let down from above, the human intelligence may ascend.

This unity is like the sun in the heavens, the light by which all things are seen, the being by which they are created and sustained.