THREE:Before entering on our task, one more difficulty remains to be noticed. Plato, although the greatest master of prose composition that ever lived, and for his time a remarkably voluminous author, cherished a strong dislike for books, and even affected to regret that the art of writing had ever been invented. A man, he said, might amuse himself by putting down his ideas on paper, and might even find written178 memoranda useful for private reference, but the only instruction worth speaking of was conveyed by oral communication, which made it possible for objections unforeseen by the teacher to be freely urged and answered.117 Such had been the method of Socrates, and such was doubtless the practice of Plato himself whenever it was possible for him to set forth his philosophy by word of mouth. It has been supposed, for this reason, that the great writer did not take his own books in earnest, and wished them to be regarded as no more than the elegant recreations of a leisure hour, while his deeper and more serious thoughts were reserved for lectures and conversations, of which, beyond a few allusions in Aristotle, every record has perished. That such, however, was not the case, may be easily shown. In the first place it is evident, from the extreme pains taken by Plato to throw his philosophical expositions into conversational form, that he did not despair of providing a literary substitute for spoken dialogue. Secondly, it is a strong confirmation of this theory that Aristotle, a personal friend and pupil of Plato during many years, should so frequently refer to the Dialogues as authoritative evidences of his master��s opinions on the most important topics. And, lastly, if it can be shown that the documents in question do actually embody a comprehensive and connected view of life and of the world, we shall feel satisfied that the oral teaching of Plato, had it been preserved, would not modify in any material degree the impression conveyed by his written compositions.

THREE:"I never want another woman like you to deal with," he said. "I prefer a man, however great a scoundrel he may be. But you would have robbed me; I have turned the tables on you. And I am going to squeeze you. Give me those diamonds, take a receipt for the sum I mentioned, and I wait a fortnight."Hear, mother, undisguised my whole resolve!

THREE:2. Plans of adaptation and arrangement of the component parts of the machinery, or organisation as it may be called.

THREE:Disjunction is, in truth, the primordial form of all reasoning, out of which the other forms are successively evolved; and, as such, it is common to man with the lower animals. You are taking a walk in the country with your dog. You come to a stream and jump over it. On measuring the distance with his eye, the animal is afraid to follow you. After waiting a little, he first runs up stream in search of a crossing, and, finding none, returns to look for one in the opposite direction. Failing there also, he comes back once more, and either ventures on the leap or makes his way home by some other route. Now, on considering the matter a little more382 closely, we shall find that hypothetical reasoning takes its rise from the examination of each separate alternative presented by a disjunctive premise. A plurality of courses being open to us, we consider what will ensue on the acceptance or rejection of each. The dog in our illustration thinks (after a canine fashion) that if he jumps he may fall in; if he does not, he will be left behind. Hector will not take refuge within the walls, because, if he does, Polydamas will triumph over him; nor will he offer terms of peace, because, if he does, Achilles will refuse them. Once more, categorical reasoning is developed out of hypothetical reasoning by the necessity of deducing consequences from a general rule. Hector must have argued from the known characters of Polydamas and Achilles, that in certain circumstances they would act after a certain manner. We may add, that this progress of conscious reasoning is a reproduction of the unconscious logic according to which life itself is evolved. All sorts of combinations are spontaneously produced, which, in consequence of the struggle for existence, cannot all survive. Those adapted to the conditions of life are selected, on trial, at the expense of the rest; and their adaptation or non-adaptation is determined in accordance with categorical laws. Furthermore, the framing of a disjunctive proposition necessitates the systematic distribution of possibilities under mutually exclusive heads, thus involving the logical processes of definition, division, and classification. Dialectic, as Plato understood it, consisted almost entirely in the joint performance of these operations;��a process which Aristotle regards as the immediate but very imperfect precursor of his own syllogistic method.276 You cannot, he says, prove anything by dividing, for instance, all living things into the two classes, mortal and immortal; unless, indeed, you assume the very point under discussion��to which class a particular species belongs. Yet this is how he constantly reasons himself; and even demonstrative reason383ing, as he interprets it, implies the possession of a ready-made classification. For, according to him, it consists exclusively of propositions which predicate some essential attribute of a thing��in other words, some attribute already included in the definition of the subject; and a continuous series of such definitions can only be given by a fixed classification of things.