e earliest Dialogues of
Plato, and in the Apology. He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the
old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well
as to argue seriously. But in the sixth book his enmity towards the
Sophists abates; he acknowledges that they are the representatives
rather than the corrupters of the world. He also becomes more dogmatic
and constructive, passing beyond the range either of the political or
the speculative ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato
himself seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who
had passed his whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and
not to be always repeating the notions of other men. There is no
evidence that either the idea of good or the conception of a perfect
State were comprehended in the Socratic teaching, though he certainly
dwelt on the nature of the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen.
Mem. i. 4; Phaedo 97); and a deep thinker like him in his thirty or
forty years of public teaching, could hardly have falled to touch on
the nature of family relations, for which there is also some positive
evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem. i. 2, 51 foll.) The Socratic method
is nominally retained; and every inference is either put into the mouth
of the respondent or represented as the common discovery of him and
Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, of which the
affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method of
inquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help of
interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points of view.

The nature of the process is truly characterized by Glaucon, when he
describes himself as a companion who is not good for much in an
investigation, but can see what he is shown, and may, perhaps, give the
answer to a question more fluently than another.

Neither can we be absolutely certain that, Socrates himself taught the
immortality of the soul, which is unknown to his disciple Glaucon in
the Republic; nor is there any reason to suppose that he used myths or
revelations of another world as a vehicle of instruction, or that he
would have banished poetry or have denounced the Greek mythology. His
favorite oath is retained, and a slight mention is made of the
daemonium, or internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as a
phenomenon peculiar to himself. A real element of Socratic teaching,
which is more prominent in the Republic