"Socratical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minds with their refined, infinitesimal, homeopathic 'developments' of deity; metaphysical wolves in Socratic cloaks. Oh, they have much to answer for! 'Spring of philosophy!' ha! ha! They have made a frog pond of it, in which to launch their flimsy, painted toy barks. Have done with them, Beulah, or you will be ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... rebelled; but, with all her wit, how could she reason with Socrates, the most gifted and the wisest of all philosophers? He had a provoking way of practising upon her the exasperating methods of Socratic debate,—a system he had invented, and for which he still is revered. Never excited or angry himself, he would ply her with questions until she found herself entangled in a network of contradictions; ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... had fastened upon those winter months with Julian Wemyss to fill in the lacunes of Dominie McAll's instruction. A good good deal of classics, daily readings in the French and German tongues, conversation after the Socratic method—these were the pillars of Stair's temple of learning at the Bothy. And because the root of the matter had always been in him—which is the determination to excel—he progressed with a rapidity that ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... questions and definitions His contempt of theories Imperfection of contemporaneous physical science The Ionian philosophers Socrates bases truth on consciousness Uncertainty of physical inquiries in his day Superiority of moral truth Happiness, Virtue, Knowledge,—the Socratic trinity The "daemon" of Socrates His idea of God and Immortality Socrates a witness and agent of God Socrates compared with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius His resemblance to Christ in life and teachings Unjust charges of his enemies His unpopularity His trial and defence His audacity His condemnation ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Such is Neoplatonism. The pre-Socratic philosophers, declared by the followers of Socrates to be childish, had freed themselves from theology, that is, the mythology of the poets, and constructed a philosophy from the observation of nature, without troubling themselves about ethics and religion. In the systems of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... In the period Socratic every dining-room was Attic (Which suggests an architecture of a topsy-turvy kind), There they'd satisfy their twist on a RECHERCHE cold [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], Which is what they called their lunch - and so may you, if you're inclined. As they gradually got on, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... average for three or four hours a day, spending as much time in the libraries, from which they have the privilege of taking out books. As a completion to their lectures, the professors generally have Seminaren once or twice a week, or Exercitationes in history, philology, etc., in which the Socratic method of teaching in dialogue is made use of. Museums and scientific collections are richly provided in the larger institutions. In some of these lectures are held: thus, Lepsius explains Egyptian archaeology in the Egyptian halls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Manlius' year with me, Whate'er you bring us, plaint or jest, Or passion and wild revelry, Or, like a gentle wine-jar, rest; Howe'er men call your Massic juice, Its broaching claims a festal day; Come then; Corvinus bids produce A mellower wine, and I obey. Though steep'd in all Socratic lore He will not slight you; do not fear. They say old Cato o'er and o'er With wine his honest heart would cheer. Tough wits to your mild torture yield Their treasures; you unlock the soul Of wisdom and its stores ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... without offense. There is something Attic and aerial in them; they mingle grave and gay, fiction and truth, with a light grace of touch such as neither La Fontaine nor Alcibiades would have been ashamed of. Socratic badinage like this presupposes a free and equal mind, victorious over physical ill and inward discontents. Such delicate playfulness is the exclusive heritage of those rare natures in whom subtlety is the disguise ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... then for nearly a mile, when the man of the Socratic Method had an idea and burst out with, "But Lordy gracious, you do not need a mongoose to kill the snakes a fellow sees who has delirium tremens—for they are only imaginary snakes!" "I know," said the owner of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Rhetoric and Dialogue there was a feud, which had begun when Socrates five centuries before had fought his battles with the sophists. Rhetoric appeals to the emotions and obscures the issues (such had been Socrates's position); the way to elicit truth is by short question and answer. The Socratic method, illustrated by Plato, had become, if not the only, the accredited instrument of philosophers, who, so far as they are genuine, are truth-seekers; Rhetoric had been left to the legal persons whose object is not truth ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Tommy's threat has often been couched in modern language by grandsons of the boys from whom the Socratic Mr. Day wrote to expose the evils of too luxurious an education. His method of compilation of facts to be taught may best be given in the words of his Preface: "All who have been conversant in the education of very young children, have complained of the total want ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... countries,—they know all about the newest scientific discoveries (which, by-the-by, they smile at blandly, as though these last were mere child's play), and they discuss our modern social problems and theories with a Socratic-like incisiveness and composure such as our parliamentary howlers would do well to imitate. Their doctrine is.. but I will not bore you by a theological disquisition,—enough to say it is founded on Christianity, and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... The Socratic attitude is better than the high-bred attitude; it is better than the stoical attitude; it is even better than the pious attitude, because it depends upon living life to the uttermost, rather than ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Socratic philosopher Aristippus that, being shipwrecked and cast ashore on the coast of the Rhodians, he observed geometrical figures drawn thereon, and cried out to his companions: "Let us be of good cheer, for I see the traces of man." With that he made for the city of ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... Plato's dialogues, especially the Symposium and Phaedrus, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the speeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the Symposium (175-78), in which ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... mention may be made,[Sec.c][Sec.6] Who for the Junta modelled sapient laws, Taught them to govern ere they were obeyed: Certes fit teacher to command, because His soul Socratic no Xantippe awes; Blest with a Dame in Virtue's bosom nurst,— With her let silent Admiration pause!— True to her second husband and her first: On such unshaken fame ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... reckless energy. As I afterwards perceived, theory in this case had more weight with him than purely personal sentiment; and he talked much and expatiated freely on the matter. His general mode of discussion was the Socratic method, and he seemed quite at his ease when, stretched on his host's hard sofa, he could argue discursively with a crowd of all sorts of men on the problems of revolution. On these occasions he invariably got the best of the argument. It was impossible ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... line, namely, the practical usefulness of the virtue, the knowledge, or the method, for increasing the probability of a practical success in worldly affairs. Among the articles inculcating morality which he used to put into his newspaper was a Socratic Dialogue, "tending to prove that whatever might be his parts and abilities, a vicious man could not properly be called ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... day; but these pursuits should never encroach on gymnastic plays in the open air. The elements of religion, history, the history of man, and politics, might also be taught by conversations, in the socratic form. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... be one of bitter opposition, as when one's ideas or actions are subjected to social censure. As Mill argued over half a century ago, the forceful suppression of opinion produces a more violent manifestation of it. Socrates was put to death, but the Socratic philosophy rose like the sun in the heavens. A sense of injustice, of unfairness, will not only intensify a man's opinions but his consciousness of his own personality. To meet with opposition is to feel acutely the outlines of one's own person; to be forced ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... smile, or the land where the Spartan exile came to dwell, or the Sirens' home, let him devote his early years to poesy, and let his spirit drink in with happy omen a draught from the Maeonian fount. Thereafter, when his soul is full of the lore of the Socratic school, let him give himself free rein and brandish the weapons of great Demosthenes. Next let the band of Roman authors throng him round, and, but newly freed from the music of Greece, suffuse his soul and change its tone. Meanwhile, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... This Socratic reply made me see how misplaced my remark had been, and I felt some confusion. Finding a book to my hand I opened it ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... intercourse passed between the father and the boy may be gathered from an incident or two which he narrated as having impressed themselves permanently on the memory of his youth. He once asked his father what he thought was the oldest of all things. The father replied, after the Socratic method, by putting another question: 'And what do you yourself suppose is the oldest of all things?' The boy was not successful in his answers, thereon the old astronomer took up a small stone from the garden walk: 'There, my child, there is the oldest of all the things that ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... hast seen Satyron the Socratic, think of either Eutyches or Hymen, and when thou hast seen Euphrates, think of Eutychion or Silvanus, and when thou hast seen Alciphron think of Tropaeophorus, and when thou hast seen Xenophon, think of Crito or Severus, and when thou hast ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... be readily conceived that this vast area was not devoted exclusively to physical exercises. Logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics claimed their place in this common focus of the city's life, and were the delight of the subtile Greeks. The Socratic reasoning and the syllogisms of Aristotle met here on common ground. The Stoics, with their stern fatalism, derived their name from the stoae, or porticos; the Peripatetics imparted their ambulatory instructions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... professed Orthodox Judaism. A paradox this to Maimon, and roundly denied as impossible when he first heard of it. A man who could enter the lists with the doughtiest champions of Christendom, whose German prose was classical, who could philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion of Plato—such a man a creature of the Ghetto! Doubtless he took his Judaism in some vague Platonic way; it was impossible to imagine him the literal bond-slave of that minute ritual, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... conscious of their duties, and useful to families, to their fatherland, and to humanity." [5] We are therefore in the ambit of secondary schools. The lesson we cite is a practical application of the principle of giving lessons by means of interrogation (Socratic method), and deals with ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... Berlin she took them out, and for a time the little ones were taught at home. The unindustrious father was prevailed upon to divide with the mother the burden of teaching them and undertook the task with a mild protest, employing what he humorously designated the "Socratic method." He taught geography and history together, chiefly by means of anecdotes, with little regard for accuracy or thoroughness. Though his method was far from Socratic, it interested young Theodor and left an ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... all, that first essential of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric buffoon, Lucian is certainly the Socratic. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... to the best restaurant in the neighbourhood, and the three adventurers made a less Socratic dinner ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the soul we need, The old Socratic justice in the heart, The golden rule become the people's creed When years of training have performed their part For thus alone in home and church and mart Can evil perish and the ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... you mean by the Socratic method? I decline any lessons concerning art or anything else on that plan, for ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Gorgias, the Protagoras, and the Republic. There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... Nazarene, Socrates said, "The gods are on high Olympus, but you and I are here." And for this—and a few other similar observations—be was compelled to drink a substitute for coffee—he was an infidel! Within the last thirty years the churches of Christendom have, in the main, adopted the Socratic proposition that you and I are here. That is, we have made progress by getting away from narrow theology and recognizing humanity. We do not know anything about either Olympus or Elysium, but we do ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... your conference with us last Saturday, I have asked myself three or four Socratic questions the answers to which make me, personally, quite sure on which ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... nearly a twelvemonth, I returned by a natural impulse to the Greek authors of antiquity; I read with new pleasure the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, a large portion of the tragic and comic theatre of Athens, and many interesting dialogues of the Socratic school. Yet in the luxury of freedom I began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every book, and an object to every inquiry; the preface of a new edition announced my design, and I dropped without reluctance ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... philosophic bent, to the great delight of his grandfather, who used to hold Socratic conversations with him, in which the precocious pupil occasionally posed his teacher, to the ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... arithmetic, natural history, and some simple experiments in natural philosophy, might fill up the day; but these pursuits should never encroach on gymnastic plays in the open air. The elements of religion, history, the history of man, and politics might also be taught by conversations in Socratic form. ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the so-called Apology of Xenophon are not worth noticing, because the writing in which they are contained is manifestly spurious. The statements of the Memorabilia respecting the trial and death of Socrates agree generally with Plato; but they have lost the flavour of Socratic irony in the ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... with that playfulness which sits upon him so gracefully, and which draws its resources from a reading so extensive that not even John Gilpin has escaped its research, puts his argument to the people in a form where the Socratic and arithmetic methods are neatly combined, and asks, "How many States are there in the Union?" He himself answers his own question for an audience among whom it might have been difficult to find any political adherent capable of so arduous a solution, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... when she—" A bright idea occurred to Peter. "Don't you think, Clodd, as a practical man," suggested Peter insinuatingly, adopting the Socratic method, "that if we got her one of those dummy pianos—you know what I mean; it's just like an ordinary piano, only you don't ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... subject, afterwards pursued, in the original authorities, at Oxford. Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men's ideas so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had discovered the secret. We were physicists with Thales and that pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for whom Sydney Smith confessed his lack of admiration. We were now Empedocleans, now believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle. In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... There was something, too, in its order, by which it resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master. I will illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each. In Aristophanes's "Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic Phrontisterium, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the moon only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm about his ears with lunar exactness, (literally so, since ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... measure be preserved in the following survey; but regard for the continuity of the tradition of the doctrine will entail certain deviations. It will, that is to say, be natural to divide the material into four groups: the pre-Socratic philosophy; the Sophists; Socrates and the Socratics; Hellenistic philosophy. Each of these groups has a philosophical character of its own, and it will be seen that this character also makes itself felt in the relation to the gods of the ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... heinousness. I transgressed and repented; habit was all-powerful in me; and the only firm support I could have looked to for assistance was, unfortunately, very superficially attended to. Religion, for any good purposes, was scarcely in my thoughts. My system was a sort of Socratic heathen philosophy—a moral code, calculated to take a man tolerably safe through a quiet world, but not to extricate him from ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... were none of the brightest, had got himself, without perceiving it, completely into a premunire, by the Socratic mode of reasoning adopted by his more skilful antagonist, who at parting once more ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... that he lived in 'the hope and the faith that in course of time we shall see our way from the constituents of the protoplasm to its properties,' i.e. from carbonic acid, water, and ammonia to that mysterious thing which we call vitality or life—from the molecular motion of the brain to Socratic wisdom, Shakespearean genius, and ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... was never Jack or Jim— Names all unknown in ages pre-Socratic; And SHORTER could not have accosted him By sobriquets endearing or ecstatic; It would have certainly provoked a scene, For instance, to have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... I have a son, and would be glad to lay down my burden and kiss his hand as he sat on the throne. Are all fathers such as I? Nay, and are all mothers such as mine? I know not; and if there be any position that opens a man's mind to the Socratic wisdom of knowing his own ignorance it is that in which my life has been spent. But it can hardly be that the curious veiled opposition which from about this time began to exist between my mother and my sister was altogether singular. It was a feeling ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... greatest modern master of that indescribably delicate art in expression, which, from its illustrious ancient exemplar, has received the name of the Socratic irony. With this fine weapon, in great part, it was, wielded like a magician's invisible wand, that Pascal did his memorable execution on the Jesuitical system of morals and casuistry, in the "Provincial Letters." In ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes journals or autobiography. It is an introspection which talks; a psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the infallible result of his view of science and its problem, and is as original as that is. Whoever accepts Bacon's doctrine of cause must accept at the same time his theory of the way in which the cause may be sifted out from among the phenomena. It is evident that the Socratic search for the essence by an analysis of instances—an induction ending in a definition—has a strong resemblance to the Baconian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Moliere, like Bossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly later builders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams. Segrais, whose recollections of him are among the most precious which have come down to us, says that La Rochefoucauld never argued. He had the Socratic manner, and led others on to expose and expound their views. His custom was, in the course of the endless talks about morals and the soul, "to conceal half of his own opinion, and to show tact with an obstinate opponent, so ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... The Socratic mode of reasoning is frequently practised upon children. People arrange questions artfully, so as to bring them to whatever conclusion they please. In this mode of reasoning, much depends upon getting the first move; the child has very little chance of having it, his ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... root of Socratic teaching was the idea that wisdom is the attribute of the Godhead, and Plato, for twenty years the companion and most favoured pupil of Socrates, was imbued with that doctrine, and, having arrived at the conclusion that the impulse to find out TRUTH was ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... The Socratic and dogmatic dialogues—the Phaedo, the Gorgias, the Symposium, Protagoras, Ion, Phaedrus—abound in allegories, aphorisms, and in aspirations toward an ideal, more or less clearly defined, which end, however, not by any means in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was beginning when her mother, familiar with the Socratic nature of her daughter's conversation and its exhaustive effect upon the interlocutor, interposed a remark which guided the current of talk out of heavenly channels and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... had been an Athenian citizen towards the ninety-fifth Olympiad, he would have taken sides with Anytus and Meletus in the impeachment of Socrates. A popular author must, in a thorough-going way, take the accepted maxims for granted. He must suppress any whimsical fancy for applying the Socratic elenchus, or any other engine of criticism, scepticism, or verification, to those sentiments or current precepts of morals, which may in truth be very equivocal and may be much neglected in practice, but which the public opinion ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... a system of stoical endurance," "a kind of stoicism." But we must not let Xenophon, who is a Socratic, talk of the Stoa. If we knew certainly that the chapter was a much later production, the language ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... understand them when made, nor like them when understood, and are suspicious, testy, and angry with jokers. Have you ever watched an elderly male or female—an elderly "party," so to speak, who begins to find out that some young wag of the company is "chaffing" him? Have you ever tried the sarcastic or Socratic method with a child? Little simple he or she, in the innocence of the simple heart, plays some silly freak, or makes some absurd remark, which you turn to ridicule. The little creature dimly perceives that you are making fun of him, writhes, blushes, grows uneasy, bursts ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... low-ceilinged bungalow Winterman had to grope for the lamp on his desk, and as its light struck up into his face Bernald's sense of the rareness of his opportunity increased. He couldn't have said why, for the face, with its ridged brows, its shabby greyish beard and blunt Socratic nose, made no direct appeal to the eye. It seemed rather like a stage on which remarkable things might be enacted, like some shaggy moorland landscape dependent for form and expression on the clouds rolling over it, and the bursts of light between; ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... most important uses of this method is found in inductive teaching. The famous "Socratic method" was simply the question-and-answer method applied by Socrates to teaching new truths. This noted teacher would, by a series of skillful questions calculated to call forth what the pupil already knew, lead him on to new knowledge without ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... not popular in Boston in his last days there. New influences had come into his life. He had loved argument and disputation, and there is a subtile manner of discussion called the "Socratic method," which he had found in Xenophon, in which one confuses an opponent by asking questions and never making direct assertions himself, but using the subjunctive mood. It is an art of entanglement. The boy had delighted ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... savants on board his ship, "L'Orient," were discussing one of those questions which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: "Very ingenious, sirs, but who made all that?" As a retort to ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... dinner, but even now I must stipulate that the meal be short and frugal, and brimming over only with Socratic talk. Nay, even in this respect there must be a limit fixed, for there will be crowds of people going to make calls before day breaks, and even Cato did not escape when he fell in with them, though Caius Caesar, in telling the story, ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... rule always was—Fight fair; fall soft; know when you've got enough; and don't cry out when you've got it: but just go home; train again; and say—better luck next fight." And so old Mark's sermon ended (as most of them did) in somewhat Socratic allegory, savouring rather of the market than of the study; but Elsley understood him, and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... brilliance, but which represents a more consistent and a more useful life. We allude to Dr. Dick, of Broughty Ferry, a gentleman who has done more than any living author to popularize science—to accomplish the Socratic design of bringing down philosophy to earth—who has never ceased, at the same time, to exhale moral and religious feeling, as a fine incense, from the researches and experiments of science to the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... contain 186 dialogues, in which the Buddha, or in a few cases one of his leading disciples, is represented as engaged in conversation on some one of the religious, or philosophic, or ethical points in that system which we now call Buddhism. In depth of philosophic insight, in the method of Socratic questioning often adopted, in the earnest and elevated tone of the whole, in the evidence they afford of the most cultured thought of the day, these dialogues constantly remind the reader of the dialogues of Plato. But not in style. They have indeed a style of their own; always dignified, and occasionally ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... yes, a dilemma, no doubt, is the thing To stagger Big Bounce, in a fashion Socratic. I fancy I know now to plant a sharp sting, The success of my bayonet-play is emphatic. Remember a picture I once chanced to see, A Pompeian sentinel posed at a portal, And "faithful to death" though fire threatened. That's Me! As my country's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... conversion is passing out of Christian life and preaching under humanistic influence. We are accepting the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue. Hence we blur the distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian. Education supplants salvation. We bring the boys and girls into the church because they are ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... in the Socratic method. He feels that a question is its own excuse for being. The proper answer to a question is not a stupid affirmation that would close the conversation, but another question. The questions follow one another ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... compendium, on a scale large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely material, too artificial, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... girls of sixteen are thus far Socratic, But innocently so, as Socrates; And really, if the Sage sublime and Attic At seventy years had phantasies like these, Which Plato in his dialogues dramatic Has shown, I know not why they should displease In virgins—always in a modest way, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... or other general terms supply the common bond. The recognition of this fact was one of the great results of the Socratic discussion. This explains the immense importance which Socrates naturally attached to the criticism of general ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... earlier Platonic Dialogues, is a mixture of jest and earnest, in which no definite result is obtained, but some Socratic or Platonic truths are allowed ...
— Ion • Plato
... The Socratic character of Darwin's mind appears in his wariness in drawing the last consequences of his doctrine, in contrast both with the audacious theories of so many of his followers and with the consequences which his ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... ungainly appearing man, called Abe Lincoln. He was arguing the application of a statute of limitations to a defective tax title to land. He talked very much in a conversational way to the judges, and they gave attention, and in a Socratic way the discussion went on. I did not see anything to specially attract attention to Mr. Lincoln, save that he was awkward, ungainly in build, more than plain in features and dress, his clothes not fitting him, his trousers being several ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... step in an investigation must be to discover the criterion by which he classifies some literature as poetry and other as not poetry. The characteristic quality, according to Aristotle, which is possessed by the Socratic dialogs, by the Homeric epics, and by the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and which classifies them together as poetic, is not verse but mimesis, imitation.[13] Exactly what Aristotle meant by imitation has furnished subsequent critics with an excuse for writing many volumes. ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... that Canon Dallison, well known as friend, and sometime adviser, of a certain Victorian novelist. The Canon, who came of an old Oxfordshire family, which for three hundred years at least had served the Church or State, was himself the author of two volumes of "Socratic Dialogues." He had bequeathed to his son—a permanent official in the Foreign Office—if not his literary talent, the tradition at all events of culture. This tradition had in turn been handed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see little point. I told him so, and he laughed. "'I am not sure that I am very clear myself. But yes—there IS a point. Supposing you knew-not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... hearth, fearing that Theaetetus will bite him, comparing his conceptions to wind-eggs, asserting an hereditary right to the occupation. There is also a serious side to the image, which is an apt similitude of the Socratic theory of education (compare Republic, Sophist), and accords with the ironical spirit in which the wisest of men ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... speculative interest was feeble from the first, and tended to become feebler as time went on. Both were new departures from pre-existent schools. Stoicism was bred out of Cynicism, as Epicureanism out of Cyrenaicism. Both were content to fall back for their physics upon the pre-Socratic schools, the one adopting the firm philosophy of Heraclitus, the other the atomic theory of Democritus. Both were in strong reaction against the abstractions of Plato and Aristotle, and would tolerate nothing but concrete reality. The Stoics were quite as materialistic ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... The Socratic method can be employed to great advantage in handling difficult inferences. The children discuss in class the principle under which an inference comes, and the teacher guides the discussion, when necessary, by skillfully placed questions designed ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... resolution, but of the revolution. He corrected the slip with great rapidity, but he was not quick enough for his watchful enemies, and loudly—discordantly—triumphantly—they repeated the word after him—Revolution—Revolution. However, Mr. Gladstone, after his Socratic fashion, lowered his eyes for a moment and went off into one of those abstract reveries whither he always allows his fancy to wend its way whenever his opponents are particularly rancorous. Then he described the resolution—not the revolution—as in the interest of the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... speech. Through his own questions he sought to arouse the questioning spirit, which should weigh the import of words, and be satisfied with nothing short of a definite and consistent judgment. In the Platonic dialogues the Socratic method obtains a place in literature. In the "Theaetetus," which is, perhaps, the greatest of all epistemological treatises, Socrates is represented as likening his vocation to that ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... road to the next nearest water-holes (Mr. Gilmore's station), and having rendered me the service he promised, I gave him the tomahawk, pipe, and two figs of tobacco promised him, and also took a sketch of his singularly Socratic face. This native got a bad name from various stockmen, as having been implicated in the murder of Mr. Cunningham. Nothing could be more unfounded; and it must indeed require in a man so situated the wisdom of a Socrates ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... that Mrs. Atterbury had spent many of her recent summers there. Their devotion to the Confederacy must be shown by deeds. It was true they had given twenty thousand dollars to the cause, but what was that to threefold millionaires? General Lee, their kinsman, had shaken his Socratic head solemnly when Rosa, at the War Department, told him, as an excellent joke, the strange chance that had brought Vincent's college chum and his family under ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... shadowy Marlow, a "cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic manner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh. In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourth ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... IRONY, SOCRATIC, the name given to a practice of Socrates with pretentious people; "affecting ignorance and pretending to solicit information, he was in the habit of turning round upon the sciolist and confounding his presumption, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Natural Theology, and tracts about the inspiration of the Bible, touched the sore-hearted unbelief of the man no nearer than the clangour of negro kettles affects the eclipse of the sun. Falconer stood watching his opportunity. Nor was the eager disputant long in affording him one. Socratic fashion, Falconer asked him a question, and was answered; followed it with another, which, after a little hesitation, was likewise answered; then asked a third, the ready answer to which involved ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... as ready to learn from the practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... critics, arguing from Cicero's silence and known opposition to the Epicurean tenets, have thought that Jerome referred to Q. Cicero the orator's brother, but for this there is no authority. The poem is entitled De Rerum Natura, an equivalent for the Greek peri physeos, the usual title of the pre-Socratic philosophers' works. The form, viz. a poem in heroic hexameters, containing a carefully reasoned exposition, in which regard was had above all to the claims of the subject-matter, was borrowed from the Sicilian thinker Empedocles ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... point either sitting or walking; and so I have compiled the scholae, as the Greeks call them, of five days, in as many books. We proceeded in this manner: when he who had proposed the subject for discussion had said what he thought proper, I spoke against him; for this is, you know, the old and Socratic method of arguing against another's opinion; for Socrates thought that thus the truth would more easily be arrived at. But to give you a better notion of our disputations, I will not barely send ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... achievement. Plato, however, makes right knowledge of man and society depend upon knowledge of the essential features of nature. His chief treatise, entitled the Republic, is at once a treatise on morals, on social organization, and on the metaphysics and science of nature. Since he accepts the Socratic doctrine that right achievement in the former depends upon rational knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of knowledge. Since he accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge is the discovery of the good or end ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... lumber, so Poems of this kind make excellent beasts of burden and will bear notes though they may not bear reading. Besides, the comments in such cases are so little under the necessity of paying any servile deference to the text, that they may even adopt that Socratic, "quod supra ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... (said Harrington)—forgive a Socratic oath—I really do not see that Mr. Rogers differs much from Theodore Parker. If a man cannot hack a bit of stone or timber without the Spirit of God, Mr. Rogers will have hard work to convince me, that any one can make a rifled cannon ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... living by shoemaking who was not a good shoemaker; or (3) the remark conveyed, almost in a word, that the verbal sceptic is saved the labour of thought and enquiry (ouden dei to toiouto zeteseos). Characteristic also of the temper of the Socratic enquiry is, (4) the proposal to discuss the teachableness of virtue under an hypothesis, after the manner of the mathematicians; and (5) the repetition of the favourite doctrine which occurs so frequently in the earlier and more Socratic Dialogues, ...
— Meno • Plato
... then," returned the Easy Chair, assuming the Socratic manner, "that there are circumstances under which a gentleman will not smoke in the presence of a lady. But to answer your question directly, it is not possible to prescribe an exact code, although certain ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... consequently, the dominating human motives to but one elementary motive. Belfort Bax, the well-known English socialist writer, makes a very clever argument against the determinist position by comparing it with the attempts of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce nature to one element. His remarks are so pertinent that a brief abstract of his argument is here quoted in his own language. He says in "Outlooks from a ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... brother-in-law Dion was the next prominent member of his family, and possessed a fortune of one hundred talents—a man of great capacity, ambitious, luxurious, but fond of literature and philosophy. He was, however, so much influenced by Plato, whose Socratic talk and democratic principles enchained and fascinated him, that his character became essentially modified, and he learned to hate the despotism under which he grew up, and formed large schemes for political reform. He aspired to cleanse Syracuse of slavery, and clothe her in ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... that this is merely a personal opinion of the writer and might well have been prefaced by the Socratic "it seems to me." Too much criticism reminds us of wine-tasting—Mr. So-and-So likes port, Mr. So-and-So sherry. The object of fair-minded appreciation is to understand clearly just what each composer set out to do, i.e., what ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... speculations which can never lead to any result, or on the idle attempt to invent new ideas and opinions. But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. For, as the world has never been, and, no doubt, never will be without a system of metaphysics of one kind or another, it is the highest and weightiest concern of philosophy to ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... many hundred pages of his essay, the astoundingly original theory that art "is to establish brotherly union among men," which was better said by Aristotle, and probably first heard by him as a Socratic pearl of wisdom. It remained for Merejkowski to set right the Western world in its estimate of Tolstoy as man and artist. In his frank study, the facts in the case are laid bare by a skilled, impartial ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a glass no longer. So we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of asses come but once a year, when all the days are foaled of one mother? O world! world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... and opinions of the master with those of his scholars. To a later Platonist, the difference between Plato and his imitators was not so perceptible as to ourselves. The Memorabilia of Xenophon and the Dialogues of Plato are but a part of a considerable Socratic literature which has passed away. And we must consider how we should regard the question of the genuineness of a particular writing, if this lost literature had been preserved ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... that day of a man who got a living by spiritually intuiting oil. "Something told him," some Socratic demon or inner impulse, that there was "ile" here or there, deep under the earth. To pilot to this "ile" of beauty he was paid high fees. One of my new friends avowed his intention of at once employing ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... had a Socratic contempt for this sort of fault-finding. It was answer enough to say, "It pays. The people like it or they wouldn't buy it. It commands the best talent in the market and can afford to pay for it; even clergymen like to appear in its columns—they say it's a providential ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... wall,—sometimes silent, indeed, and already musing over the future, while he was busy with the past, but amply rewarded when, suspending his lecture, he would pour forth hoards of varied learning, rendered amusing by his quaint comments, and that Socratic satire which only fell short of wit because it never passed into malice. At some moments, indeed, the vein ran into eloquence; and with some fine heroic sentiment in his old books, his stooping form rose erect, his eye flashed, and you saw that he had not been originally formed and wholly ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the centre or inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached building in a different style, framed, not after the Socratic, but after some Pythagorean model. As in the Cratylus and Parmenides, we are uncertain whether Plato is expressing his own opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving the philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he is exerting ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... exhaustive inquiry; narrow search, strict search; study &c. (consideration) 451. scire facias[Lat], ad referendum; trial. questioning &c. v.; interrogation, interrogatory; interpellation; challenge, examination, cross-examination, catechism; feeler, Socratic method, zetetic philosophy[obs3]; leading question; discussion &c. (reasoning) 476. reconnoitering, reconnaissance; prying &c. v.; espionage, espionnage[Fr]; domiciliary visit, peep behind the curtain; lantern of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... would step to the window and look into the hut from which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was not Isidro, but the witless ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... His first speech as a general; a fine one; a spirit of athleticism breathes through it. Cf. Memorabilia for a similar rationalisation of virtuous self-restraint (e.g. Mem., Bk. I. c. 5, 6; Bk. III. c. 8). Paleyan somewhat, perhaps Socratic, not devoid of common sense. What is the end and aim of our training? Not only for an earthly aim, but for a high ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... in which his book and college training had placed him. His mind still had greater faith in things because Aristotle or Augustine said them, than because they are true.[124] If the end of education be to teach independence of mind, the Socratic temper, the love of pushing into unexplored areas—intellectual curiosity in a word—Oxford had done none of all this for him. In every field of thought and life he started from the principle of authority; it fitted in with his reverential ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... activity, though he may have edited, in early youth, his predecessor Thucydides, and composed the first two books of his historical continuation entitled "Hellenica." In his retreat at Skillus he composed a series of "Dialogues," in what is termed the Socratic vein; "Memorials" of his great master, a tract on household "Economy," another on a "Symposium," or feast, one called "Hiero," or on the Greek tyrant, and an account of the "Laconian Polity," which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... put up its fists to the Mayor, and the Mayor proposed a public hearing, with the Council in attendance. At this juncture the Reform League sent a questionnaire to each Councillor, and to each member of the Association. The phraseology was Socratic (it was the product of Mr. Mix's genius) and if any one answered Yes, he was snared: if he said No, he was ambushed, and if he said nothing he was cooked. It reminded the Mayor of the man who claimed that in a debate, he would answer every question of his adversary with ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... this point of the chase, make it prudent to present it in as startling a shape as possible; in order that, the attention being thoroughly roused, the final assent may not be languid or easily forgotten. Suffer me, therefore, Phaedrus, in a Socratic way, to extort an assent from your own arguments—allow me to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... mountains in New South Wales, was the real El Dorado. But as he possessed, according to the usual phrase, more wit than money, and no one will discount a check from the aforesaid wit on change, the zeal of Epictetus Moonshine, some time after the breaking up of the Socratic institution for benefitting the human race, so much got the better of self-love, that he committed several petty larcenies in hopes of being transported thither; but whether his courage or his luck failed him, certain it is that he never reached the proper ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... their business troubles to a friend whom we shall call Socratic. And Socratic helps them out for a consideration. His time is valuable and he bought his wisdom ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Emerson had surely overlooked this nobler meaning of the word when he wrote, "They [the English] put up no Socratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer, for the queen's mind; ask neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, 'grant her in health and wealth long ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... argumentative victory. A great contemporary of his, whom he never met, and whom, if he had met, he would probably have insulted—Benjamin Franklin, to wit—preferred winning the case to winning the argument. While still a boy, he tells us, he was fascinated by the Socratic method, and instead of expressing opinions asked leading questions. He ceased to use words like "certainly," "undoubtedly," or anything that gave the air of positiveness to an opinion, and said "I apprehend," or "I conceive," a thing ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... to his face. His great mouth with its fleshy underlip, supplemented the nose. Both were material for grotesque caricature. He looked like an educated gawk, a rural genius, a pied piper of motley followers. He was a sad clown, a Socratic wag, a countryman dressed up for a state occasion. But he was not a poor man defending the cause of the poor. There was nothing of the dreamer in his make-up, the eccentric idealist. His big nose and mouth and Henry Clay forehead denied ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... to suggest that the latter are in any way indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For, while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... leads to moral nihilism, the conviction of the pre-Socratic Sophists that, since every time and people has its own standards, there is no real objective right and wrong. Morality is seen to be not a fixed code sent readymade from heaven, but a set of habits and intuitions that have had ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. For instance, we might say, "Do you ever speak of being free from good health, or free from a good character, or free from prosperity?" I fancy not; and yet copiously talkative individuals employ terms quite as hazy and ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... hand. Choosing to cleave to the old creeds of his race, and passing, without a backward glance, into the paths of honour and of justice, it was thus with him now. Verily, virtue must be her own reward, as in the Socratic creed; for she will bring no other dower than peace of conscience in her gift to whosoever weds her. "I have loved justice, and fled from iniquity; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand upon his ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... an individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception of love. Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own being. It had an alien purpose: the knowledge of things divine, by a later period Christianised ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... write me, there were two Platos; I carry in me all the flowers of Socratic talk. But Panaetius concluded me to be spurious; yes, he who concluded that the soul was mortal, would ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... day to take down, as Stenographer, what purported to be a discussion upon some general political topics, and more especially on the forthcoming presidential election. One of the disputants entrenched himself in what, I believe, scholars call the Socratic method, that is, he pumped his supposed antagonist dry. Whether the world at large may think the dialogue as funny as I did myself, I can form no opinion. It is to solve this question that I ...
— The Honest American Voter's Little Catechism for 1880 • Blythe Harding
... Satyron[A] the Socratic, think of either Eutyches or Hymen, and when thou hast seen Euphrates, think of Eutychion or Silvanus, and when thou hast seen Alciphron think of Tropaeophorus, and when thou hast seen Xenophon, think of Crito[B] or Severus, and when thou hast looked on thyself, think of any other Caesar, and ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... different and calculable dynamic values. The gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses and feelings to appreciate the cross-lights that might be generated in the process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... might cite to me a biological principle which could NOT be used for such a purpose. Again he failed, and it became evident to all present that of biology, about which he talked so often, he knew absolutely nothing but the name! After this I frequently employed the same pseudo-Socratic method of discussion, and very often with a similar result. Not one in fifty, perhaps, ever attempted to reduce the current hazy conceptions to a concrete form. The enthusiasm was not the less intense, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... and answer, while Plato developed it metaphysically in connexion with his doctrine of "Ideas" as the art of analysing ideas in themselves and in relation to the ultimate idea of the Good (Repub. vii.). The special function of the so-called "Socratic dialectic" was to show the inadequacy of popular beliefs. Aristotle himself used "dialectic," as opposed to "science," for that department of mental activity which examines the presuppositions lying at the back of all the particular sciences. Each particular science has its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various |
