Euthydemus | Page 7

oration from Socrates:--
First, he praises the indifference of Dionysodorus and Euthydemus to
public opinion; for most persons would rather be refuted by such
arguments than use them in the refutation of others. Secondly, he
remarks upon their impartiality; for they stop their own mouths, as well
as those of other people. Thirdly, he notes their liberality, which makes

them give away their secret to all the world: they should be more
reserved, and let no one be present at this exhibition who does not pay
them a handsome fee; or better still they might practise on one another
only. He concludes with a respectful request that they will receive him
and Cleinias among their disciples.
Crito tells Socrates that he has heard one of the audience criticise
severely this wisdom,--not sparing Socrates himself for countenancing
such an exhibition. Socrates asks what manner of man was this
censorious critic. 'Not an orator, but a great composer of speeches.'
Socrates understands that he is an amphibious animal, half philosopher,
half politician; one of a class who have the highest opinion of
themselves and a spite against philosophers, whom they imagine to be
their rivals. They are a class who are very likely to get mauled by
Euthydemus and his friends, and have a great notion of their own
wisdom; for they imagine themselves to have all the advantages and
none of the drawbacks both of politics and of philosophy. They do not
understand the principles of combination, and hence are ignorant that
the union of two good things which have different ends produces a
compound inferior to either of them taken separately.
Crito is anxious about the education of his children, one of whom is
growing up. The description of Dionysodorus and Euthydemus
suggests to him the reflection that the professors of education are
strange beings. Socrates consoles him with the remark that the good in
all professions are few, and recommends that 'he and his house' should
continue to serve philosophy, and not mind about its professors.
...
There is a stage in the history of philosophy in which the old is dying
out, and the new has not yet come into full life. Great philosophies like
the Eleatic or Heraclitean, which have enlarged the boundaries of the
human mind, begin to pass away in words. They subsist only as forms
which have rooted themselves in language--as troublesome elements of
thought which cannot be either used or explained away. The same
absoluteness which was once attributed to abstractions is now attached
to the words which are the signs of them. The philosophy which in the
first and second generation was a great and inspiring effort of reflection,
in the third becomes sophistical, verbal, eristic.
It is this stage of philosophy which Plato satirises in the Euthydemus.

The fallacies which are noted by him appear trifling to us now, but they
were not trifling in the age before logic, in the decline of the earlier
Greek philosophies, at a time when language was first beginning to
perplex human thought. Besides he is caricaturing them; they probably
received more subtle forms at the hands of those who seriously
maintained them. They are patent to us in Plato, and we are inclined to
wonder how any one could ever have been deceived by them; but we
must remember also that there was a time when the human mind was
only with great difficulty disentangled from such fallacies.
To appreciate fully the drift of the Euthydemus, we should imagine a
mental state in which not individuals only, but whole schools during
more than one generation, were animated by the desire to exclude the
conception of rest, and therefore the very word 'this' (Theaet.) from
language; in which the ideas of space, time, matter, motion, were
proved to be contradictory and imaginary; in which the nature of
qualitative change was a puzzle, and even differences of degree, when
applied to abstract notions, were not understood; in which there was no
analysis of grammar, and mere puns or plays of words received serious
attention; in which contradiction itself was denied, and, on the one
hand, every predicate was affirmed to be true of every subject, and on
the other, it was held that no predicate was true of any subject, and that
nothing was, or was known, or could be spoken. Let us imagine
disputes carried on with religious earnestness and more than scholastic
subtlety, in which the catchwords of philosophy are completely
detached from their context. (Compare Theaet.) To such disputes the
humour, whether of Plato in the ancient, or of Pope and Swift in the
modern world, is the natural enemy. Nor must we forget that in modern
times also there is no fallacy so gross, no trick of language so
transparent, no abstraction so barren