 What is remarkable in the Phaedrus’ picture of the uplifting effect of beauty is not only its exuberant tone and imagery, which goes far beyond the Symposium’s unadorned scala amoris, but also its intricate interweaving of mythical and philosophical elements. For in the midst of his fanciful depiction of the different fates that are in store for different kinds of souls, Plato specifies, in quite technical terms, that the capacity “to understand speech in terms of general Forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity”, (249b–c), is the condition for the reincarnation of dead individuals as human beings. It is this capacity for abstract thought that he then calls “recollection of what the soul saw when it was traveling with god, when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly real instead.” The heavenly adventure seems to amount to no more than the employment of the dialectical method that Socrates is going to describe, without further mythical camouflage, in the dialogue’s second part. The ability to establish unity in a given subject-matter, and to divide it up according to its natural kinds, is the art that characterizes the ‘scientific rhetorician’ (265d–266b). Socrates professes the greatest veneration for such a master: “If I believe that someone is capable of discerning a single thing that is also by nature capable of encompassing many, I follow ‘straight behind, in his tracks, as if he were a god’.” So the heavenly voyage has a quite down-to-earth counterpart in the dialectical method – a method that Plato regards, as he is going to confirm in the Philebus, as a ‘gift of the gods’. At the same time, Plato’s esteem for taxonomy explains the inner unity of the Phaedrus’ seemingly incongruous two parts as two sides of one coin, and it also shows why Plato no longer treats the sensory as a distraction and disturbance of the mind per se. For the properly conditioned souls’ sensory impressions are its first incentives to the higher and better.