INTRODUCTION.
Euthydemus.
Introduction
The Euthydemus, though apt to be regarded by us only as an
elaborate jest, has also a very serious purpose. It may fairly
claim to be the oldest treatise on logic ; for that science originates
in the misunderstandings which necessarily accompany the first
efforts of speculation. Several of the fallacies which are satirized
in it reappear in the Sophistic! Elenchi of Aristotle and are re-
tained at the end of our manuals of logic. But if the order of
history were followed, they should be placed not at the end but
at the beginning of them ; for they belong to the age in which the
human mind was first making the attempt to distinguish thought
from sense, and to separate the universal from the particular or
individual. How to put together words or ideas, how to escape
ambiguities in the meaning of terms or in the structure of proposi-
tions, how to resist the fixed impression of an 'eternal being' or
'perpetual flux,' how to distinguish between words and things—
these were problems not easy of solution in the infancy of
philosophy. They presented the same kind of difficulty to the
half-educated man which spelling or arithmetic do to the mind of
a child. It was long before the new world of ideas which had
been sought after with such passionate yearning was set in order
and made ready for use. To us the fallacies which arise in the
pre-Socratic philosophy are trivial and obsolete because we are
no longer liable to fall into the errors which are expressed by
them. The intellectual world has become better assured to us,
and we are less likely to be imposed upon by illusions of words.
The logic of Aristotle is for the most part latent in the dialogues of Plato. The nature of definition is explained not by rules but by examples in the Charmides, Lysis, Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthyphro, Theaetetus, Gorgias, Republic ; the nature of division is likewise illustrated by examples in the Sophist (p. 219 ff.) and
