with Thales. Cicero said of him, "Socrates brought down philosophy from
the heavens to the earth." He did not disdain the subjects which chiefly
interested the Sophists,--astronomy, rhetoric, physics,--but he chiefly
discussed moral questions, such as, What is piety? What is the just and
the unjust? What is temperance? What is courage? What is the character
fit for a citizen?--and other ethical points, involving practical human
relationships.

These questions were discussed by Socrates in a striking manner, and by
a method peculiarly his own. "Professing ignorance, he put perhaps this
question: What is law? It was familiar, and was answered offhand.
Socrates, having got the answer, then put fresh questions applicable to
specific cases, to which the respondent was compelled to give an answer
inconsistent with the first, thus showing that the definition was too
narrow or too wide, or defective in some essential condition. The
respondent then amended his answer; but this was a prelude to other
questions, which could only be answered in ways inconsistent with the
amendment; and the respondent, after many attempts to disentangle
himself, was obliged to plead guilty to his inconsistencies, with an
admission that he could make no satisfactory answer to the original
inquiry which had at first appeared so easy." Thus, by this system of
cross-examination, he showed the intimate connection between the
dialectic method and the logical distribution of particulars into
species and genera. The discussion first turns upon the meaning of some
generic term; the queries bring the answers into collision with various
particulars which it ought not to comprehend, or which it ought to
comprehend, but does not. Socrates broke up the one into many by his
analytical string of questions, which was a mode of argument by which he
separated _real_ knowledge from the _conceit_ of knowledge, and led to
precision in the use of definitions. It was thus that he exposed the
false, without aiming even to teach the true; for he generally professed
ignorance on his part, and put himself in the attitude of a learner,
while by his cross-examinations he made the man from whom he apparently
sought knowledge to appear as ignorant as himself, or, still worse,
absolutely ridiculous.

Thus Socrates pulled away all the foundations on which a false science
had been erected, and indicated the mode by which alone the true could
be established. Here he was not unlike B