he members must think far more of the theological issues than of the
cultivation of mental and logical science; and a purely metaphysical
debate can seldom be pursued with profit under these conditions.

* * * * *

[POLEMICS IN GREECE.]

I now pass to the POLEMICAL handling of the metaphysical subjects. We
owe to the Greeks the study of philosophy through methodised debate; and
the state of scientific knowledge in the age of the early Athenian
schools was favourable to that mode of treatment. The conversations of
Socrates, the Dialogues of Plato, and the Topics of Aristotle, are the
monuments of Greek contentiousness, turned to account as a great
refinement in social intercourse, as a stimulus to individual thought,
and a means of advancing at least the speculative departments of
knowledge. Grote, both in his "Plato," and in his "Aristotle," while
copiously illustrating all these consequences, has laid extraordinary
stress on still another aspect of the polemic of Socrates and Plato,
the aspect of _free-thought_, as against venerated tradition and the
received commonplaces of society. The assertion of the right of private
judgment in matters of doctrine and belief, was, according to Grote, the
greatest of all the fruits of the systematised negation begun by Zeno,
and carried out in the "Search Dialogues" of Plato. In the "Exposition
Dialogues" it is wanting; and in the "Topica," where Eristic is reduced
to method and system by one of Aristotle's greatest logical
achievements, the freethinker's wings are very much clipt; the execution
of Socrates probably had to answer for that. It is to the Platonic
dialogues that we look for the full grandeur of Grecian debate in all
its phases. The Plato of Grote is the apotheosis of Negation; it is not
a philosophy so much as an epic; the theme--"The Noble Wrath of the
Greek Dissenter".

At all times, there is much that has to be achieved by solitary
thinking. Some definite shape must be given to our thoughts before we
can submit them to the operation of other minds; the greater the
originality, the longer must be the process of solitary elaboration.
The "Principia" was composed from first to last by recluse meditation;
probably the attempt to discuss or debate any parts of it would have
only fretted and paralysed the author's invention. Indeed, after an
enormous strain of the constructive intellect, a man may be in no humour
to have his work carped