hat the professors of education are strange beings.
Socrates consoles him with the remark that the good in all professions
are few, and recommends that 'he and his house' should continue to serve
philosophy, and not mind about its professors.

...

There is a stage in the history of philosophy in which the old is dying
out, and the new has not yet come into full life. Great philosophies
like the Eleatic or Heraclitean, which have enlarged the boundaries of
the human mind, begin to pass away in words. They subsist only as forms
which have rooted themselves in language--as troublesome elements
of thought which cannot be either used or explained away. The same
absoluteness which was once attributed to abstractions is now attached
to the words which are the signs of them. The philosophy which in
the first and second generation was a great and inspiring effort of
reflection, in the third becomes sophistical, verbal, eristic.

It is this stage of philosophy which Plato satirises in the Euthydemus.
The fallacies which are noted by him appear trifling to us now, but they
were not trifling in the age before logic, in the decline of the earlier
Greek philosophies, at a time when language was first beginning to
perplex human thought. Besides he is caricaturing them; they probably
received more subtle forms at the hands of those who seriously
maintained them. They are patent to us in Plato, and we are inclined to
wonder how any one could ever have been deceived by them; but we must
remember also that there was a time when the human mind was only with
great difficulty disentangled from such fallacies.

To appreciate fully the drift of the Euthydemus, we should imagine a
mental state in which not individuals only, but whole schools during
more than one generation, were animated by the desire to exclude the
conception of rest, and therefore the very word 'this' (Theaet.) from
language; in which the ideas of space, time, matter, motion, were proved
to be contradictory and imaginary; in which the nature of qualitative
change was a puzzle, and even differences of degree, when applied to
abstract notions, were not understood; in which there was no analysis of
grammar, and mere puns or plays of words received serious attention;
in which contradiction itself was denied, and, on the one hand, every
predicate was affirmed to be true of every subject, and on the other,
it was held that no predicate was true of any subject, and that nothing