Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/452

430 HISTORf OF GREECE. of modern thinking. Though it has been now enlarged and recast, by some modern authors especially by Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his admirable System of Logic into a structure com- mensurate with the vast increase of knowledge and extension of positive method belonging to the present day, we must recollect that the distance, between the best modern logic and that of Aristotle, is hardly so great as that between Aristotle and those who preceded him by a century, Empedokles, Anaxagoras, and the Pythagoreans ; and that the movement in advance of these latter commences with Sokrates. By Xenophon, by Plato, and by Aristotle, the growth as well as the habitual use of logical classification is represented as con- current with and dependent upon dialectics. In this methodized discussion, so much in harmony with the marked sociability of the Greek character, the quick recurrence of short question and answer was needful as a stimulus to the attention, at a time when the habit of close and accurate reflection on abstract subjects had been so little cultivated. But the dialectics of Sokrates had far greater and more important peculiarities than this. We must always consider his method in conjunction with the subjects to which he applied it. As those subjects were not recondite or special, but bore on the practical life of the house, the market- place, the city, the dikastery, the gymnasium, or the temple, with which every one was familiar, so Sokrates never presented him- self as a teacher, nor as a man having new knowledge to commu- nicate. On the contrary, he disclaimed such pretensions, uniformly and even ostentatiously. But the subjects on which he talked were just those which every one professed to know perfectly and thoroughly, and on which every one believed himself in a con- dition to instruct 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 Sokrates, 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 compre- hensive import given by one who had never before tried to