432 HISTORY OF GREECE. tant, that there is no such common attribute, and that the general- ization 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 1 calls, seeing the one in the many, and the many in the one. "Without any predecessor to copy, Sokrates, fell as it were instinctively into that which Aristotle 2 describes as the double track of the dialectic process ; breaking up the one into many, and recom- bining the many into one ; the former duty, at once the first and the most essential, Sokrates 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 generic terms, with clear under- standing of the attributes implied or connoted by each term, so as to discriminate those particulars to which it really applies. At a moment when such logical distribution was as yet novel as a subject of consciousness, it could hardly have been probed and laid out in the mind by any less stringent process than the cross- examining dialectics of Sokrates, applied to the analysis of some attempts at definition hastily given by respondents ; that "inductive discourse and search for (clear general notions or) definitions of general terms," which Aristotle so justly points out as his peculiar innovation. I have already adverted to the persuasion of religious mission under which Sokrates acted in pursuing this system of conversa- tion and interrogation. He probably began it in a tentative way, 3 1 Plato, Phaedrus, c. 109, p. 265, D : Sophistes, c. 83, p. 253, E. 2 Aristot. Topic, viii, 14, p. 164, b. 2. 'Earl /*ev -yap uf aTrTiuf eltretv diaheKTinof, o irpoTaTinbf nal ivarariKof. 'Eort <5e T& fisv npoTeiveadat, s v iroieiv TU nXeiu (6el y&p v o/lwf ^.Tj^dyvai trpbc b 6 Aoyof ) rb <5' iviaraa- &ai, Tb Sv TT o 3, 3, <r $ yup diaipel fj uvatpsi, TO HEV tiidovf, TO <5' oil, TUV irpOTELVOfiEVUV. It was from Sokrats that dialectic skill derived its great extension and development (Aristot. Metaphys. xiii, 4, p. 1078, b. 3 What Plato makes Sokrates say in the Euthyphron, c. 1 2, p. 1 1, D, AKUV tlfil ao<p6f, etc., may be accounted as true at least in the beginning of the active career of Sokrates; compare the Hippias Minor, c. 18, p. 376, B; Laches, c. 33, p. 200, E.
