The immortality of the soul is demonstrated by many proofs; but to see it as it really is-not as we now behold it, marred by communion with the body and other miseries-you must contemplate it with the eye of reason in its original purity; and then its beauty will be revealed. ... When a person starts on the discovery of the Absolute by the light of the reason only, without the assistance of the senses, and never desists until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute Good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world...

(Plato)