ABSTRACT
Socrates observes that to deal with Cebes objection he must go into the whole question of the causes of being and destruction. When young, he had been attracted by the theories of the physical philosophers, who attempted to explain things in terms, of physical cause and effect. Socrates explains how he abandoned the direct method of studying physical phenomena, for the reasons given, and began to seek truth by means of verbal accounts or definitions of things. Plato himself, of course, regarded both definitions and physical phenomena as images of the true reality, i.e. of the forms. The Forms are in fact the only true causes, for mechanistic and similar explanations do not penetrate to the root of the matter; indeed the same non-teleological cause is often given as the explanation of two quite different phenomena and sometimes two different causes are alleged to give the same result.
