  However we account for the inadequacy of perception the task remains to explore how we get from perception, which stimulates the recollective process, to belief and eventually to recollect or otherwise know Forms. Plato is less than forthcoming about how one moves from one stage to the next. The elenctic method probably plays some role in advancing one's understanding, especially the step from perception to belief. At a certain point, we naturally begin to offer reasons for our beliefs. The elenchus questions our reasons, typically by revealing an inconsistency in our accounts of why we believe what we do. But we can also place Plato in a tradition that seeks a systematic explanation of the natural phenomena. One aim of the Presocratics, as Socrates narrates in the Phaedo (95a4ff), is to find a single explanation, or a single kind of explanation, to save the phenomena. Socrates complains that the Presocratics had mistakenly looked to material causes. Such explanations fail to meet minimal standards: the same explanation (aitia) accounts for opposite phenomena, e.g., ‘by a head’ explains both why something is tall and something else is short; or sometimes the same phenomenon is subject to explanations by opposite causes, being two by ‘division and addition.’ However, Socrates reports, Anaxagoras' nod towards Mind was at least a step in the right direction (though Anaxagoras failed to follow the path). The best account is teleological in nature, in terms of the Good. Thus the Phaedo gestures at the critical role assigned to this Form in the Republic. In the Phaedo Plato begs off from directly investigating the nature of the good or teleological explanations. Instead he turns to what he describes as a method of hypothesis, the first of which is the hypothesis of Forms as causes (see $sect;2 supra), and its ‘first corollary’, that particulars are/come-to-be what each is in virtue of partaking in Forms.