he Sophist class,
that Plato thought it necessary to recall attention to the good old
perennial source of instruction, the home, the trade, and the society.
He pointed out that the pretenders to teach virtue by moral lecturing,
were as yet completely outrivalled by the influence of the family and
the social pressure of the community. In like manner, the arts of life
were all originally handed down by apprenticeship and imitation. The
greatest statesmen and generals of early times had simply the education
of the actual work. Philip of Macedon could have had no other teaching;
his greater son was the first of the line to receive what we may call
a liberal, or a general education, under the educator of all Europe.

[LOGIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES.]

THE MIDDLE AGE AND BOETHIUS.

I must skip eight centuries, to introduce the man that linked the
ancient and the modern world, and was almost the sole luminary in the
west during the dark ages, namely, Boethius, minister of the Gothic
Emperor Theodoric. As much of Aristotle as was known between the 6th and
the 11th centuries was handed down by him. During that time, only the
logical treatises existed among the Latins; and of these the best parts
were neglected. Historical importance attaches to a small circle of them
known as the Old Logic (_vectus logica_), which were the pabulum of
abstract thought for five dreary centuries. These consisted of the two
treatises or chapters of Aristotle called the "Categories," and the "De
Interpretatione," or the Theory of Propositions; and of a book of
Porphyry the Neo-Platonist, entitled 'Introduction' (_Isagoge_), and
treating of the so-called Five Predicables. A hundred average pages
would include them all; and three weeks would suffice to master them.

Boethius, however, did much more than hand on these works to the
mediaeval students; he translated the whole of Aristotle's logical
writings (the Organon), but the others were seldom taken up. It was he
too that handled the question of Universals in his first Dialogue on
Porphyry, and sowed the seed that was not to germinate till four
centuries afterwards, but which, when the time came, was to bear fruit
in no measured amount. And Boethius is the name associated with the
scheme of higher education that preceded the University teaching, called
the _quadrivium_, or quadruple group of subjects, namely, Arithmetic,
Geometry, Music and Astronomy. This, together with the _trivium_, or
preparatory g