 Knowledge (epistêmê) is the ability to know the real as it is (477b). The context shows that when Socrates talks about the real, he is referring to the forms. In the Republic, the prominent forms are the forms for the beautiful, the good, and the just. In the Symposium, Socrates describes the form of the beautiful as neither coming to be nor passing away, as not changing in any other way, as never being or even appearing to anyone as anything but beautiful (211a–b). Since an analogous description applies to the good and the just, one can see that forms are very different from the sorts of things we experience through the sensory perception associated with the usual technai. After forms are introduced in the Republic, they are the objects of the most abstract and highest knowledge, afforded by the power of dialectic. At the end of Book VI, Socrates uses the words for knowledge that we have found in other contexts— understanding (gnôsis) and knowledge (epistêmê). However, in the Divided Line passage a new vocabulary is introduced, as though the conception of knowledge has changed in a fundamental way. As he has in other places, Socrates divides the visible world (horaton) from the intelligible (noêton). Whereas before the intelligible had been the undivided field of gnôsis and epistêmê, now it is subdivided into the fields of mathematical or deductive reasoning (dianoia) and the grasping of the unhypothetical beginning point (nous). The latter is the goal of dialectic (511a–b).