struct others, rather than to require instruction for himself. On such questions as these: What is justice? What is piety? What is a democracy? What is a law? every man fancied that he could give a confident opinion, and even wondered that any other person should feel a difficulty. When Socrates, professing ignorance, put any such question, he found no difficulty in obtaining an answer, given off-hand, and with very little reflection. The answer purported to be the explanation or definition of a term - familiar, indeed, but of wide and comprehensive import-given by one who had never before tried to render to himself an account of what it meant. Having got this answer, Socrates put fresh questions, applying it to specific cases, to which the respondent was compelled to give answers inconsistent with the first; thus showing that the definition was either 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 the inconsistencies, with an admission that he could make no satisfactory answer to the original query, which had at first appeared so easy and familiar. Or, if he did not himself admit this, the hearers at least felt it forcibly. The dialogue, as given to us, commonly ends with a result purely negative, proving that the respondent was incompetent to answer the question proposed to him, in a manner consistent and satisfactory even to himself. Socrates, as he professed from the beginning to have no positive theory to support, so he maintains to the end the same air of a learner, who would be glad to solve the difficulty if he could, but regrets to find himself disappointed of that instruction which the respondent had promised.

We see by this description of the cross-examining path of this remarkable man, how intimate was the bond of connection between the dialectic method and the logical distribution of particulars into species and genera. The discussion first raised by Socrates turns upon the meaning of some large generic term; the queries whereby he follows it up bring the answer given into collision with various particulars which it ought not to comprehend, yet does; or with others, which it ought to comprehend, but does not. It is in this manner that the latent and undefined cluster of association, which has grown up round a familiar term, is as it were penetrated by a fermenting leaven, forcing it to expand into discernible portions, and bringing the appropriate function which the term ought to fulfil, to become a subject of distinct consciousness. The inconsistencies into which the hearer is betrayed in his various answers, proclaim to him the fact that he has not yet acquired any thing like a clear and full conception of the common attribute which binds together the various particulars embraced under some term which is ever upon his lips; or perhaps enable him to detect a different fact, not less important, that there is no such common attribute, and that the generalization is merely nominal and fallacious. In either case, he is put upon the train of thought which leads to a correction of the generalization, and lights him on to that which Plato calls, seeing the one in the many, and the many in the one. Without any predecessor to copy, Socrates, fell as it were instinctively into that which Aristotle describes as the double track of the dialectic process; breaking up the one into many, and recombining the many into one; the former duty, at once the first and the most essential, Socrates performed directly by his analytical string of questions; the latter, or synthetical process, was one which he did not often directly undertake, but strove so to arm and stimulate the hearer's mind, as to enable him to do it for himself. This one and many denote the logical distribution of a multifarious subject-matter under