Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/451

IMPROVEMENT OF FORMAL LOGIC. 429 to be deduced; which he hoped to find, but did not find, in Anaxagoras. But it was a still greater advance to seize, and push out in conscious application, the essential features of that logical process, upon the correct performance of which all our security for general truth depends. The notions of genius, subordinate genera, and individuals as comprehended under them, we need not here notice the points on which Plato and Aristotle differed from each other and from the modern concep- tions on that subject, were at that time newly brought into clear consciousness in the human mind. The profusion of logical distribution employed in some of the dialogues of Plato, such as the Sophistes and the Politicus, seems partly traceable to his wish to familiarize hearers with that which was then a novelty, as well as to enlarge its development, and diversify its mode of applica- tion. He takes numerous indirect opportunities of bringing it out into broad light, by putting into the mouths of his dialogists answers implying complete inattention to it, exposed afterwards in the course of the dialogue by Sokrates. 1 What was now begun by Sokrates, and improved by Plato, was embodied as part in a comprehensive system of formal logic by the genius of Aristotle; a system which was not only of extraordinary value in reference to the processes and controversies of its time, but which also, having become insensibly worked into the minds of instructed men, has contributed much to form what is correct in the habits 1 As one specimen among many, see Plato, Theaetet. c. 11, p. H6, D. It is maintained by Brandis, and in part by C. Hcyder (see Ileydcr, Kritischo Parstellung und Verglcichung der Aristotelischen und Hegelschcn Dialek- tik, part i, pp. 85, 129), that the logical process, called division, is not to be considered as having been employed by Sokrates along with definition, but begins with Plato : in proof of which they remark that, in the two Pla- tonic dialogues called Sophistes and Politicus, wherein this process is most abundantly employed, Sokrates is not the conductor of the conversation. Little stress is to be laid on this circumstance, I think ; and the terms in which Xenophon- describes the method of Sokrates (diahe-yovrac KaTii yfvrj TU Trpuyfiara, Mem. iv, 5, 12) seem to imply the one process ns well as tho other : indeed, it was scarcely possible to keep them apart, with so abun- dant a talker as Sokrates. Plato doubtless both enlarged and systematized the metiod in every way, and especially made greater use of the process of division, because he pushed the dialogue further into positive scientific research than Sokrates.