Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/472

 450 HISTORY OF GREECE. Sokrates undertook to make them think, weigh, and examine themselves and their own judgments, until the latter were brought into consistency with each other, as well as with a known and venerable end. The generalizations embodied in their judgments had grown together and coalesced in a manner at once so intimate, so familiar, yet so unverified, that the particulars implied in them had passed out of notice : so that Sokrates, when he recalled these particulars out of a forgotten experience, presented to the hearer his own opinions under a totally new point of view. His conver- sations even as they appear in th3 reproduction of Xenophon, which presents but a mere skeleton of the reality exhibit the main feature* of a genuine inductive method, struggling against the deep-lying, but unheeded, errors of the early intellect acting by itself, without conscious march or scientific guidance, of the intettectus sibi permissus, upon which Bacon so emphatically dwells. Amidst abundance of instantice negatives, the scientific value of which is dwelt upon in the " Novum Organon," 1 and 1 1 know nothing so clearly illustrating both the subjects and the method chosen by Sokrates, as various passages of the immortal criticisms in the Novum Organon. When Sokrates, as Xenophon tells us, devoted his time to questioning others : What is piety ? What is justice ? What is temper- ance, courage, political government ? " etc., we best understand the spirit of his procedure by comparing the sentence which Bacon pronounces upon he first notions of the intellect, as radically vicious, confused, badly abstracted from things, and needing complete reSxamination and revision, without which, he says, not one of them could be trusted : " Quod vero attinet ad notiones primas intellects, nihil est eorum, quas intettectus sibi permissus congessit, quin nobis pro suspecto sit, nee ullo modo ratum nisi noro judicio se stiterit, et secundum illud pronuntiatum fuerit." (Distributio Operis, prefixed to the N. 0. p. 168, of Mr. Montagu's edition.) " Serum sane rebus perditis adhibetur remeditun, postquam mens ex quo- tidianii vita consuetudine, et auditionibus, et doctrinis inquinatis occnpata, et vanissimis idolis obsessa fuerit Restat nnica salus ac sanitas, ut oput mentis universum de integro resumatur ; ac mens, jam ab ipso principio, nuUo modo sibi permittatur, sed perpetuo regatnr." (Ib. Prafatio, p. 186.) " Syllo- gismus ex propositionibus constat, propositiones ex verbis, verba notioiium tessera sunt. Itaque si notiones ipsae (id quod basis rei est) confusae sint et temere a rebus abstractor, nihil in iis quae superstruuntur est firmitudinis. Itaque spes est una in inductione verA. In notionibus nihil sani est, nee in logicis, nee in physicis. Non Substantia, non Qualitas, Agere, Pati, ipsan Esse, bonce notiones sunt; multo minus Grave, Leve, Dersum, Tenue, Humi- inm, Siccum, Genera tio, Corruptio, Attrahere, Fngare, Elementum, Matena,