hich they are
enveloped.

(1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato,
we are made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old
difficulty of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the
arts and the virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words,
such as nature, custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up.
The Sophists are still floundering about the distinction of the real
and seeming. Figures of speech are made the basis of arguments. The
possibility of conceiving a universal art or science, which admits
of application to a particular subject-matter, is a difficulty which
remains unsolved, and has not altogether ceased to haunt the world at
the present day (compare Charmides). The defect of clearness is also
apparent in Socrates himself, unless we suppose him to be practising on
the simplicity of his opponent, or rather perhaps trying an experiment
in dialectics. Nothing can be more fallacious than the contradiction
which he pretends to have discovered in the answers of Gorgias (see
above). The advantages which he gains over Polus are also due to a false
antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an erroneous assertion that an
agent and a patient may be described by similar predicates;--a mistake
which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in the Nicomachean
Ethics. Traces of a 'robust sophistry' are likewise discernible in his
argument with Callicles.

(2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the
argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts
himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may
sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists,
or pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the ambiguous
terms good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as useless to
examine his arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to
criticise this ideal from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say
that the ideal is generally regarded as unattainable, and that mankind
will by no means agree in thinking that the criminal is happier when
punished than when unpunished, any more than they would agree to the
stoical paradox that a man may be happy on the rack, Plato has already
admitted that the world is against him. Neither does he mean to say
that Archelaus is tormented by the stings of conscience; or that the
sensations of the impaled criminal are more