Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/369

 SPECULATION AND PRACTICE. 347 if called before the court of justice. On the other hand, the dialectic business had no direct reference to public life, to tho judicial pleading, or to any assembled large number. It was a dialogue carried on by two disputants, usually before a few hearers, to unravel some obscurity, to reduce the respondent to silence and contradiction, to exercise both parties in mastery of the subject, or to sift the consequences of some problematical assumption. It was spontaneous conversation 1 systematized and turned into some predetermined channel ; furnishing a stimulus to thought, and a means of improvement not attainable in any other manner; furnishing to some, also, a source of profit or display. It opened a line of serious intellectual pursuit to men of a speculative or inquisitive turn, who were deficient in voice, in boldness, in continuous memory, for public speaking ; or who desired to keep themselves apart from the political and judicial animosities of the moment. Although there were numerous Athenians, who combined, in various proportions, speculative with practical study, yet gen- erally speaking, the two veins of intellectual movement one towards active public business, the other towards enlarged opin- ions and greater command of speculative truth, with its evidences continued simultaneous and separate. There subsisted between them a standing polemical controversy and a spirit of mutual detraction. If Plato despised the sophists and the rhetors, Isokrates thinks himself not less entitled to disparage those who employed their time in debating upon the unity or plurality of virtue. 2 Even among different teachers, in the same intellectual walk, also, there prevailed but too often an acrimonious feeling of personal rivalry, which laid them all so much the more open 1 See Aristotel. De Sophist. Elcnchis, c. 11, p. 172, c<l. Bekkcr; and his Topica, ix, 5, p. 154 ; where the different purposes of dialogue are enumer- ated and distinguished. 2 Sec Isokrates, Orat. x ; Helenas Encomium, sects. 2-7 ; compare Orat. xv, De Permutatione, of the same author, s. 90. I hold it for certain, that the first of these passages is intended as a criticism upon the Platonic dialogues (as in Or. v, ad Philip, s. 84), prob- ably the second passage also. Isokrates, evidently a cautious and timid man, avoids mentioning the names of contemporaries, that he may provoke the less animosity.