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552 I. 6. 4.): that what may be justly ascribed to Socrates, is that he introduced induction and general definitions; a testimony which bears every mark of impartiality and truth. Hence there is no reason to doubt that Socrates taught this art of framing and connecting notions correctly. Since however it is an art, abstract teaching was not sufficient, and therefore no doubt Socrates never so taught it: it was an art that required to be witnessed and practised in the most manifold applications, and one who was not firmly grounded in it, and left the school too early, lost it again, and with it almost all that was to be learnt from Socrates, as indeed is observed in Plato's dialogues. Now that this exercise and illustration was the main object of conversations held by Socrates even on general moral subjects, is expressly admitted by Xenophon himself, when, under the head: what Socrates did to render his friends more expert in dialectics, he introduces a great many such discourses and inquiries, which so closely resemble the rest, that all might just as well have been put in the same class.

It was with a view therefore to become masters in this art, and thereby to keep the faster hold of the idea of science, that men of vigorous and speculative minds formed a circle round Socrates as long as circumstances allowed, those who were able to the end of his life, and in the mean while chose to tread closely in their master's steps, and to refrain for a time from making a systematic application of his art in the different departments of knowledge, for the more elaborate cultivation of all the sciences. But when after his death the most eminent among them, first of all at Megara, began a strictly scientific train of speculation, and thus philosophy gradually ripened into the shape which, with slight variations, it ever after retained among the Greeks: what now took place was not indeed what Socrates did, or perhaps could have done, but yet it was undoubtedly his will. To this it may indeed be objected, that Xenophon expressly says (Mem. 1. 11.): that Socrates in his riper years not only himself gave up all application to natural philosophy, but endeavoured to withhold all others from it, and directed them to the consideration of human affairs; and hence many hold those only to be genuine Socratics, who did not include physics in their system. But this statement must manifestly be taken in a sense much less general, and