Dr WHEWELL, ON PLATO'S NOTION OF DIALECTIC. 591 



Dialectic appears rather to imply a certain method of investigation; — to describe the form rather 

 than the matter of discussion ; and it will perhaps be worth while to compare these different 

 accounts of Dialectic. 



(Pkcedrus.) One of the cardinal passages on this point is in the Phaedrus, and may be 

 briefly quoted. Phaedrus, in the Dialogue which bears his name, appears at first as an admirer of 

 Lysias, a celebrated writer of orations, the contemporary of Plato. In order to expose this 

 writer's style of composition as frigid and shallow, a specimen of it is given, and Socrates not 

 only criticizes this, but delivers, as rival compositions, two discourses on the same subject. Of 

 these discourses, given as the inspiration of the moment, the first is animated and vigorous ; 

 the second goes still further, and clothes its meaning in a gorgeous dress of poetical and 

 mythical images. Phaedrus acknowledges that his favourite is outshone; and Socrates then 

 proceeds to point out that the real superiority of his own discourse consists in its having a 

 dialectical structure, beneath its outward aspect of imagery and enthusiasm. He says : 

 ($ 109, Bekker. It is to be remembered that the subject of all the discourses was Love, 

 under certain supposed conditions.) 



" The rest of the performance may be taken as play : but there were, in what was thus 

 thrown out by a random impulse, two features, of which, if any one could reduce the effect to 

 an art, it would be a very agreeable and useful task. 



" What are they ? Phaedrus asks. 



" In the first place, Socrates replies, the taking a connected view of the scattered elements 

 of a subject, so as to bring them into one Idea; and thus to give a definition of the subject, so 

 as to make it clear what we are speaking of; as was then done in regard to Love. A 

 definition was given of it, what it is : whether the definition was good or bad, at any rate 

 there was a definition. And hence, in what followed, we were able to say what was clear and 

 consistent with itself. 



" And what, Phaedrus asks, was the other feature ? 



" The dividing the subject into kinds or elements, according to the nature of the thing 

 itself : — not breaking its natural members, like a bad carver who cannot hit the joint. So the 

 two discourses which we have delivered, took the irrational part of the mind, as their common 

 subject ; and as the body has two different sides, the right and the left, with the same names 

 for its parts ; so the two discourses took the irrational portion of man ; and the one took the 

 left-hand portion, and divided this again, and again subdivided it, till, among the subdivisions, 

 it found a left-handed kind of Love, of which nothing but ill was to be said. While the 

 discourse that followed out the right-hand side of phrenzy, (the irrational portion of man's 

 nature,) was led to something which bore the name of Love like the other, but which is divine, 

 and was praised as the source of the greatest blessing." 



" Now I," Socrates goes on to say, " am a great admirer of these processes of division and 

 comprehension, by which I endeavour to speak and to think correctly. And if I can find any 

 one who is able to see clearly what is by nature reducible to one and manifested in many 

 elements, I follow his footsteps as a divine guide. Those who can do this, I call — whether 

 rightly or not, God knows — but I have hitherto been in the habit of calling them dialectical 

 men. 



Vol. IX. Part IV. 76 



