The true dialectical process begins with the contemplation of the real stars, and not mere reflections of them, and ends with the recognition of the sun, or idea of good, as the parent not only of light but of warmth and growth.
To the divisions of knowledge the stages of education partly answer:--first, there is the early education of childhood and youth in the fancies of the poets, and in the laws and customs of the State;--then there is the training of the body to be a warrior athlete, and a good servant of the mind;--and thirdly, after an interval follows the education of later life, which begins with mathematics and proceeds to philosophy in general.
There seem to be two great aims in the philosophy of Plato,--first, to realize abstractions; secondly, to connect them.

According to him, the true education is that which draws men from becoming to being, and to a comprehensive survey of all being.

He desires to develop in the human mind the faculty of seeing the universal in all things; until at last the particulars of sense drop away and the universal alone remains.

He then seeks to combine the universals which he has disengaged from sense, not perceiving that the correlation of them has no other basis but the common use of language.

He never understands that abstractions, as Hegel says, are 'mere abstractions'-- of use when employed in the arrangement of facts, but adding nothing to the sum of knowledge when pursued apart from them, or with reference to an imaginary idea of good.