TWO:In the workshop, mechanical knowledge of some kind is continually and often insensibly acquired by a learner, who observes the operations that are going on around him; he is continually availing himself of the experience of those more advanced, and learns by association the rules and customs of the shop, of the business, and of discipline and management. He gathers the technical terms of the fitting-shop, the forge and foundry; notes the operations of planing, turning, drilling, and boring, with the names and application of the machines directed to these operations. He sees the various plans of lifting and moving material, the arrangement and relation of the several departments to facilitate the course of the work in process; he also learns where the product of the works is sold, discusses the merits and adaptation of what is constructed, which leads to considering the wants that create a demand for this product, and the extent and nature of the market in which it is sold.Plotinus follows up his essay on the Virtues by an essay on Dialectic.498 As a method for attaining perfection, he places dialectic above ethics; and, granting that the apprehension of abstract ideas ranks higher than the performance of social duties, he is quite consistent in so doing. Not much, however, can be made of his few remarks on the subject. They seem to be partly meant for a protest against the Stoic idea that logic is an instrument for acquiring truth rather than truth itself, and also against the Stoic use or abuse of the syllogistic method. In modern phraseology, Plotinus seems to view dialectic as the immanent and eternal process of life itself, rather than as a collection of rules for drawing correct inferences from true propositions, or from propositions assumed to be true. We have seen how he regarded existence in the334 highest sense as identical with the self-thinking of the absolute Nous, and how he attempted to evolve the whole series of archetypal Ideas contained therein from the simple fact of self-consciousness. Thus he would naturally identify dialectic with the subjective reproduction of this objective evolution; and here he would always have before his eyes the splendid programme sketched in Plato��s Republic.499 His preference of intuitive to discursive reasoning has been quoted by Ritter as a symptom of mysticism. But here, as in so many instances, he follows Aristotle, who also held that simple abstraction is a higher operation, and represents a higher order of real existence than complex ratiocination.500

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