These questions were discussed by Socrates in a striking manner, and by a method peculiarly his own.  “Professing ignorance, he put perhaps this question:  What is law?  It was familiar, and was answered offhand.  Socrates, having got the answer, then put fresh questions applicable to specific cases, to which the respondent was compelled to give an answer inconsistent with the first, thus showing that the definition was 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 his inconsistencies, with an admission that he could make no satisfactory answer to the original inquiry which had at first appeared so easy.”  Thus, by this system of cross-examination, he showed the intimate connection between the dialectic method and the logical distribution of particulars into species and genera.  The discussion first turns upon the meaning of some generic term; the queries bring the answers into collision with various particulars which it ought not to comprehend, or which it ought to comprehend, but does not.  Socrates broke up the one into many by his analytical string of questions, which was a mode of argument by which he separated real knowledge from the conceit of knowledge, and led to precision in the use of definitions.  It was thus that he exposed the false, without aiming even to teach the true; for he generally professed ignorance on his part, and put himself in the attitude of a learner, while by his cross-examinations he made the man from whom he apparently sought knowledge to appear as ignorant as himself, or, still worse, absolutely ridiculous.

Thus Socrates pulled away all the foundations on which a false science had been erected, and indicated the mode by which alone the true could be established.  Here he was not unlike Bacon, who pointed out the way whereby science could be advanced, without founding any school or advocating any system; but the Athenian was unlike Bacon in the object of his inquiries.  Bacon was disgusted with ineffective logical speculations, and Socrates with ineffective physical researches.  He never suffered a general term to remain undetermined, but applied it at once to particulars, and by questions the purport of which was not comprehended.  It was not by positive teaching, but by exciting scientific impulse in the minds of others, or stirring up the analytical faculties, that Socrates manifested originality.  It was his aim to force the seekers after truth into the path of inductive generalization, whereby alone trustworthy conclusions could be formed.  He thus struck out from his own and other minds that fire which sets light to original thought and stimulates analytical inquiry.  He was a religious and intellectual missionary, preparing