Anamnesis
Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses
Those, in a word, who like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision.
The sphere of sense, the Soul in its slumber; for all of the Soul that is in body is asleep and the true getting-up is not bodily but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed; the veritable waking or rising is from corporeal things.
We are thus brought back to the nature of that underlying matter and the things believed to be based upon it; investigation will show us that Matter has no reality and is not capable of being affected.
Matter must be bodiless — for body is a later production, a compound made by Matter in conjunction with some other entity. Thus it is included among incorporeal things in the sense that body is something that is neither Real-Being nor Matter. Matter is not Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is not Ideal-Principle, not Reason-Principle; it is not limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination.
It is not a power, for what does it produce?
It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no tide to the name of Being. It will be more plausibly called a non-being, and this in the sense not of movement (away from Being) or station (in Not-Being) but of veritable Not-Being,
Its every utterance, therefore, is a lie; it pretends to be great and it is little. It claims to be more when it is less; and the Existence with which it masks itself is not Existence, but a passing trick making trickery of all that seems to be present in it: phantasms within a phantasm.
It is like a mirror showing things as in itself when they are really elsewhere, filled in appearance — but actually empty, containing nothing, pretending everything.
