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which constitutes your real being. _Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore all the manifold relations of life,--the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform activities of life,--labour and speech and art and literature and {114} law; all the sentiments of life,--friendship and love and reverence and courage and hope,--all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through individuals, and in the same process realising them. {115} CHAPTER XII SOCRATES (_concluded_) _The dialectic method--Instruction through humiliation--Justice and utility--Righteousness transcending rule_ It must not be imagined that anywhere in the recorded conversations of Socrates can we find thus in so many words expounded his fundamental doctrine. Socrates was not an expositor but a questioner; he disclaimed the position of a teacher, he refused to admit that any were his pupils or disciples. But his questioning had two sides, each in its way leading people on to an apprehension of the ideal in existence. The first side may be called the negative or destructive, the second, the positive or constructive. In the first, whose object was to break down all formalism, all mere regard for rules or traditions or unreasoned maxims, his method had considerable resemblance to that of the Sophists; like them he descended not infrequently to what looked very like quibbling and word-play. As Aristotle observes, the dialectic method differed from that of the Sophists not so much in its form, as in the purpose for which it was employed. The end of the {116} Sophists was to confuse, the end of Socrates was through confusion to reach a more real, because a more reasoned certainty; the Sophists sought to leave the impression that there was no such thing as truth; he wished to lead people to the conviction that there was a far deeper truth than they were as yet possessed of. A specimen of his manner of conversation preserved for us by Xenophon (_Memor_. IV. ii.) will make the difference clearer. Euthydemus was a young man who had shown great industry in forming a collection of wise sayings from poets and others, and who prided himself on his superior wisdom because of his knowledge of these. Socrates skilfully manages to get the ear of this young man by commending him for his collection, and asks him what he expects his learning to help him to become? A physician?
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