 Sober philosophers have a tendency to ignore such visionary talk as too elevated and lacking in substance to be worth serious thought. That Plato, appearances notwithstanding, is not indulging in a god-besotted rêverie in the Phaedrus is indicated by his interweaving of the mythical description in the dialogue’s first part, and his description and exploration of the dialectical method in the later part (259e-279c), where Socrates attempts to determine the requirements of ‘scientific rhetoric’ (259e–279c). Artful speaking (and even artful deception) presupposes knowledge of the truth, especially where the identity of the phenomena is difficult to grasp, because similarities can be deceptive. This applies in particular to concepts like the good and the just, as witnessed by the wide disagreement about their nature (263a–c). The development of the ‘sharp eye’ that is needed to assign each object to the right class is the aim of Plato’s method of collection and division, a method on which he expounds at some length in the Phaedrus. Plato discusses the care that is needed in order to (265d–e) “see together things that are scattered about everywhere, and to collect them into one kind (mia idea)”, as well as “to cut the unity up again according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do.” That this method is supposed to serve an overall ethical purpose is confirmed by the fact that rhetoric based on truth must reflect the speaker’s knowlege not only of the different types of souls and the types of speech that fit them (271d), but also of the truth about just and good things (272d).