And the great aim of education is the cultivation of the habit of abstraction.

This is to be acquired through the study of the mathematical sciences.

They alone are capable of giving ideas of relation, and of arousing the dormant energies of thought.
Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part of that which is now included in them; but they bore a much larger proportion to the sum of human knowledge.

They were the only organon of thought which the human mind at that time possessed, and the only measure by which the chaos of particulars could be reduced to rule and order.

The faculty which they trained was naturally at war with the poetical or imaginative; and hence to Plato, who is everywhere seeking for abstractions and trying to get rid of the illusions of sense, nearly the whole of education is contained in them.