"Socratical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here—we are equal!" At present, on the contrary, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... way 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 and ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... ears in 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... 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 antagonists ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... have been pleasant to Horace to find even one among his friends illustrating in his life this modest Socratic creed; for he is so constantly enforcing it, in every variety of phrase and metaphor, that while we must conclude that he regarded it as the one doctrine most needful for his time, we must equally conclude that he found it utterly disregarded. All round ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... [Greek: philai]? Had he meant the virtues or moral qualities, he would have spoken plainer, as was his wont; but here, where the subject is the personal beauty, the charms of Theodote, it is more in the Socratic vein that he refers to other personal charms, which engage his thoughts night and day, and keep him at home. Now, it appears too, that Socrates was taken to see her, on account of the fame of her beauty, and goes to her when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... appears to have been, in the early part of his life, engaged in mercantile pursuits. He received a very liberal education from his father, whom, we are told, perceived in his son a strong inclination for philosophical studies, and who purchased for Zeno the writings of the Socratic philosophers; which were studied with avidity, and which undoubtedly exercised a considerable influence over his future thinkings. When about thirty years of age, he made a trading voyage from Cittius to Athens, with a very valuable cargo of Phoenician purple, but was unfortunately shipwrecked ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... to say; the answers which he makes are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy of the arts. From his brother Lysias (contra Eratosth.) ...
— The Republic • Plato
... first great period of his literary 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
... Socratic every dining-room was Attic (Which suggests an architecture of a topsy-turvy kind), There they'd satisfy their thirst on a recherche cold {Greek word} Which is what they called their lunch—and so may you if you're inclined. As they gradually got on, they'd ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... 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 of proper books ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... 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 intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition—that what ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... overthrow my most Socratic father in argument. And outwit my sister Louisa in diplomacy—vide our poor, dear Dickie Calmady's broken engagement, and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... might quote many fake impressions conveyed, but I shall confine myself to one of his observations upon a religious subject, where at least decency might have made him respect truth. At page 126 I find the following sentence:—"They 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 to live.'" Now, I will not ask whether the author of this passage ever saw our Book of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Symposium, there is great improbability in supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the other. The conclusion seems to be, that the Dialogue was written at some comparatively late but unknown period of Plato's life, after he had deserted the purely Socratic point of view, but before he had entered on the more abstract speculations of the Sophist or the Philebus. Taking into account the divisions of the soul, the doctrine of transmigration, the contemplative nature of the philosophic life, and the character of the style, we shall ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... 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 as to spare him the annoyance ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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
... 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 that our hope ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... 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 not inconsistent ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... 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, both by the unlooked-for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... so happy meeting, there talked one "Philisitine;" who even now, to the general weariness, was dominantly pouring forth Philistinism (Philistriositaten.); little witting what hero was here entering to demolish him! We omit the series of Socratic, or rather Diogenic utterances, not unhappy in their way, whereby the monster, "persuaded into silence," seems soon after to have withdrawn for the night. "Of which dialectic marauder," writes our hero, "the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... 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 love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to us. There can be ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... he were conscious of being watched, the little man turned sharply, exhibiting his wrinkled forehead, broad at the brows, narrow and high in the middle, showing, too, a Socratic nose half buried in the midst of the gray hair which grew as high as the prominent cheek bones, and suggesting the idea of a polished ivory ball lying in a nest of grayish wool. Indeed all that was visible of the face above the beard might have been carved out of old ivory, so ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... realm. We "direct" the attention; we speak of "apprehension," of "conception," of "intuition." Our knowledge is "clear" or "obscure"; an oration is "brilliant"; an emotion is "sweet" or "bitter." What wonder that, as we read over the fragments that have come down to us from the Pre-Socratic philosophers, we should be struck by the fact that they sometimes leave out altogether and sometimes touch lightly upon a number of those things that we regard to-day as peculiarly within the province of the philosopher. They busied themselves ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... 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 ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 wit, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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
... wisdom of young Oxford at some length, replying vividly to here and there a Socratic interpolation on my part. After a while I began to grow irritated. His talk, like his verse, seemed to deal with unrealities. It was a negation of everything, save the intellectual. If he and his friends had been in power, there would never have been a war; there never would have been a ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... braved, Retreated, and a people saved, That laurel was not all his own; The plant by Socrates was sown; To Aristotle's greater name The Macedonian[10] owed his fame. 100 The Athenian bird, with pride replete, Their talents equalled in conceit; And, copying the Socratic rule, Set up for master of a school. Dogmatic jargon learnt by heart, Trite sentences, hard terms of art, To vulgar ears seemed so profound, They fancied learning in the sound. The school had fame: the crowded place With pupils swarmed of ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... same generous bestowal, another—inferior, indeed, in 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 Eternal Throne—and who, for his laborious exertions, of nearly thirty years' duration, has been rewarded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... after 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
... 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 of his time requires ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... 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, Observe; ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... 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
... despatched to the best restaurant in the neighbourhood, and the three adventurers made a less Socratic dinner than ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... thought of the condition of the lower classes, and I told her I was persuaded, from various things I had noticed, that a lot of them were frightfully hard up. And with that she started off to show whose fault it was, by the Socratic method." ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... 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 popular belief, even though we here meet with phenomena ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... teachers and citizens who shall be 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 a ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... 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 argumentation, ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... 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 to ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... head, that beyond the blue 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, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... eccentricities of behaviour gave a ready handle to caricature. Neither the author nor his audience took the trouble, or were likely to take the trouble, to discriminate nicely; there was, of course, a general resemblance between the Socratic 'elenchos' and the methods of the new practitioners of dialectic; and this was enough for stage purposes. However unjustly, Socrates is taken as typical of the newfangled sophistical teachers, just as in 'The Acharnians' Lamachus, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... inquiry, 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 Diogenes. question, query, problem, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... at Athens about B.C. 430, and died probably in 355. He was an Athenian gentleman who in his early-manhood was an intimate member of the Socratic circle. In 401 he joined the expedition of Cyrus, recorded in the "Anabasis," and did not again take up his residence in Athens. The "Anabasis" must be introduced by an historical note. In the year 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian war was brought to a close by a peace ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... to hear that I know a little Greek," she said, "just enough to struggle through the Socratic dialogues with ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... 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 to maintain his footing, or indeed his life, between the ignorant ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... his feats of strength and shrewdness some of the highest flights of taste. As we look back across the changes of his life,—see him passing over the high places and the low, and across the long stretches of the prairie; spending years in the Socratic arguments of the tavern, and anon holding the rudder of state in grim silence; choosing jests which have the freshness of earth, and principles of eternal right; judging potentates and laborers in the clear light of nature, and at ease with both; alone ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... 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 you an account of them, but represent them to you as they were carried ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... it is not incumbent upon me to stand here in order that my character inspire you with further Socratic comment. ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... find themselves confronted with men, not personally involved, who control enough facts and have the dialectical skill to sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and elaboration. It is the Socratic dialogue, with all of Socrates's energy for breaking through words to meanings, and something more than that, because the dialectic in modern life must be done by men who have explored the environment as well ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... 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 upon detaching oneself from what one considers rather ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 14) who speaks of "Socratici paedicones." It is the modern fashion to doubt the pederasty of the master of Hellenic Sophrosyne, the "Christian before Christianity;" but such a world-wide term as Socratic love can hardly be explained by the lucus-a-non-lucendo theory. We are overapt to apply our nineteenth century prejudices and prepossessions to the morality of the ancient Greeks who would have specimen'd such squeamishness ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... busy man, and bitter indeed was the thought that the well-meaning persons who maintain our university system had actually been keeping me all those years from the divine wells of grace and beauty. But for them, how many more years of enjoyment might I have drawn from the Socratic Dialogues, from the Apology, and from the Republic! Think of it! It was not till four years ago that I read Thucydides and had my soul shaken by the supreme wickedness, the intellectual devilry of the Melian controversy. How I thrilled at the awful picture ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 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 ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... prose or in verse, and if in verse, either in some one or in a plurality of metres. This form of imitation is to this day without a name. We have no common name for a mime of Sophron or Xenarchus and a Socratic Conversation; and we should still be without one even if the imitation in the two instances were in trimeters or elegiacs or some other kind of verse—though it is the way with people to tack on 'poet' to the name of a metre, and talk of elegiac-poets and epic-poets, thinking that they call ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... expression allow a man to teach what he will without pedantry, and to venture what he will 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 of superiority, and taste its revelation. "What balance of faculties ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for love of the 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)
... with us last Saturday, I have asked myself three or four Socratic questions the answers to which make me, personally, quite sure on which side the moral ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... 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 in ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... dialogue. The catechetical is connected with the first kind of oral instruction above designated because it makes demand upon the memory of the learner only for the answer to one question at a time, and is hence very often and very absurdly called the Socratic method. In teaching by means of the dialogue, we try, by means of a reciprocal interchange of thought, to solve in common some problem, proceeding according to the necessary forms of reason. But in ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... 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 to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 looked up with ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... believer 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 with extreme rapidity. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... not 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 conclude me ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, in an odd ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... are not recommended as essential, but merely as suggestive and perhaps useful to teachers who prefer the Socratic method. They might also serve to call the attention of students to some point which they ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... do you like it?" continued the Doctor. "(We are now pursuing the Socratic method.) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 at ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Scot, he 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 astounded ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... 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
... cross-examination. Employ the Socratic method always. Ask only those questions the logical conclusion of which is irresistible, and stop there. Don't press the conclusion on the witness. It is your province to show that ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Socratic theory is well remarked by Grote to be, that while he resolved all virtue into knowledge or wisdom, and all vice into ignorance or folly, he omitted to notice what is not less essential to virtue, the proper condition of the passions, desires, &c., and limited his views too ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Robert was at least 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 his cause and his influence ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... it is 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
... 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
... (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 without ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... he admits the remarkable moderation displayed by the restored Demos. His repugnance was aggravated to the highest pitch of grief and indignation by the trial and condemnation of Socrates (399 B.C.) four years after the renewal of the democracy. At that moment doubtless the Socratic men or companions were unpopular in a body. Plato, after having yielded his best sympathy and aid at the trial of Socrates, retired along with several others of them to Megara. He made up his mind that for a man of his views and opinions it was not only unprofitable, but also unsafe, to embark in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by thrusting into my 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, the statue, and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... See my paper on 'The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul'. Proceedings of the British Academy, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... understood 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 ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... occurred during his voyage to Egypt. The 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 ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... 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, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... country doctor's duties to learn that view of things, may I ask, sir?" said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic {Greek word: irony} with such well-assumed simplicity that Fitzpiers ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... nothing, upon the whole, can be finer than the address with which this is done; the changes of scene and the turns of the dialogue are managed with admirable felicity; there is an exquisite fitness and Socratic point in all the evolutions of the argument, which we feel even now when we see so clearly behind the scenes, and know that Molinist and New Thomist must have had a good deal more to say for themselves. We have only to imagine the atmosphere of ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... 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
... Thou makest feeling conqueror. Ah! through thee Fuller, more tremulous, heaves each blooming breast; With lips spell-freed by thee Young love unfaltering pleads. Fair gleams the wine, when to the social change Of thought, or heart-felt pleasure, it invites, And the 'Socratic' cup With dewy roses bound, Sheds through the bosom bliss, and wakes resolves, Such as the drunkard knows not—proud resolves Emboldening to despair Whate'er the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... social criticism. The effect upon common opinion of criticism cast in such a mould, presenting familiar habits, institutions, and observances, in a striking and unusual light, was to give a kind of Socratic stimulus to people's ideas about education, civilisation, conduct, and the other topics springing from a comparison between the manners of one community and another. That one of the two, whether Peru, or China, or Persia, was a community drawn mainly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... Supreme Court, an 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 inches too short, exposing a long, large, unshapely ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... applied it at once to particulars, and by questions the purport of which was not comprehended. It was not by positive teaching, but by exciting scientific impulse in the minds of others, or stirring up the analytical faculties, which constitute his originality. "The Socratic dialectics, clearing away," says Grote, [Footnote: Grote, part ii. ch. 68; Maurice, Ancient Philosophy, p. 119.] "from the mind its mist of fancied knowledge, and, laying bare the real ignorance, produced an immediate effect like the touch of the torpedo; the newly created consciousness ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... 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, by asking another, "Thirty-six?" Then he goes ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... arguing; he was naturally disputatious. With his keen intellect, he was pretty sure to come off as victor, at least in his own judgment, in discussions with his associates. But the Socratic method of argumentation, so different from that in which he had been accustomed to indulge, at once secured his approval and admiration. Socrates was never guilty of the discourtesy of assailing an opponent with flat contradiction or positive assertion. With ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been a little reserved, resorted presently to the Socratic method to restrain the young man with the orange tie, and bent his forehead over him, and brought out at last very clearly from him that the body was only illusion and everything nothing but just spirit and molecules of thought. It became a sort of duel at ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... a most valuable patroness,' broke in Don Filippo del Monte, a man of about forty, almost bald, a keen sharpener of epigrams, whose face seemed a sort of Socratic mask; the right eye was forever on the move, and flashed with a thousand changing expressions, while the left remained stationary and glazed behind the single eye-glass, as if he used the one for expressing himself and the other for seeing. 'At the May bazaar, you ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... 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 ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sure he used the method afterwards adopted by Socrates, and now known as the Socratic method, of appealing to the unquestioned belief of the Brahmans themselves as the foundation of his argument in support of that fundamental truth of all religions, that the pure in heart alone can see ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... feeling, but such a principle is really nothing else than an obscurely conceived metaphysic which inheres in every man's reasoning faculty; as the teacher will easily find who tries to catechize his pupils in the Socratic method about the imperative of duty and its application to the moral judgement of his actions. The mode of stating it need not be always metaphysical, and the language need not necessarily be scholastic, unless the pupil is to be trained to ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... and which to this day so exasperates some of her biographers, was largely economical and ironical. Her narrow cell is reported to have often resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters. In support of all that, I have marked a score of Socratic passages in Woodhead, and Dalton, and Lewis, and Father Coleridge, and Mrs. Cunninghame Graham. They are very delicious passages and very tempting. But were they once begun there would be no end to them. You will believe Froude, ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... 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
... evening. After some talk on the adventures of the preceding day: "I carried you yesterday," said he to Harley, "to visit the mad; let me introduce you to-night, at supper, to one of the wise: but you must not look for anything of the Socratic pleasantry about him; on the contrary, I warn you to expect the spirit of a Diogenes. That you may be a little prepared for his extraordinary manner, I will let you into ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... the jungle of Kantian theory, with Koerner's critical assistance, and then to return and convert the trail into an agreeable road for the general reader. In the end he chose a different form than that of the Socratic dialogue for the literary presentation of his doctrine, but what he wrote subsequently was based partly at least upon conclusions that he had reached through his correspondence with Koerner; wherefore it will be well to ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... 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, the understanding which has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... is related of 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 ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... panoplied Minerva allure him with its 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, let his pen run its course withdrawn ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... 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 spiritual reward, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked, and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... left hand. By the body of a fox new slain, quoth Pantagruel, what is that? This maketh nothing for your advantage; for he betokeneth thereby that your marriage will be inauspicious and unfortunate. This sneezing, according to the doctrine of Terpsion, is the Socratic demon. If done towards the right side, it imports and portendeth that boldly and with all assurance one may go whither he will and do what he listeth, according to what deliberation he shall be pleased to have thereupon taken; his entries in the beginning, progress in his proceedings, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... anything 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 ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus the philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as Gellius tells in the book we have mentioned. For the Athenians, hating the people of Megara, decreed that if any of the Megarensians entered Athens, he should ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... ( c. 540-480 BC) pre-Socratic philosopher, who believed in a cosmic justice where sinners would be punished and haunted by the Erinyes, (the furies) the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... every dictate of inclination urged. Here was an opportunity to put to the test a most important theory of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge is to be elicited from within and is to be sought for in ideas and not in particulars of sense. What a chance! A growing youth in seclusion. Such a magnificent seclusion! Where I could try ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... rival's 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 death-bed. They will be the closing ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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
... 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 of man, and is discontented with the Socratic ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... establishments. It came to me, indeed, with a sudden deep sense of understanding, that I should probably find there, as everywhere else, just men and women. And with that I fell into a sort of Socratic ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... experience of 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 safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is a good thing to ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... detail, should form subjects of school instruction, the rules determining the selection of each and the methods of their construction not being preached in lectures, ex Cathedra, but evolved by a patient questioning of nature, by experiment and the Socratic method of inquiry. Exercise of the limbs under the direction of a skilled instructor, so that all the muscles of the body may be duly trained, and a healthy body built up to support a healthy mind. The ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... suspected that in including them Mr Arnold, unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his subjects he had the very strongest sympathy—with Spinoza (as already ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic. Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the world, in which ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Murray. Hammond, a Coventry manufacturer, had scarcely missed an evening at the "Chapter" for forty-five years. His strictures on the events of the day were thought severe but able, and as a friend of liberty he had argued all through the times of Wilkes and the French and American wars. His Socratic arguments were very amusing. Mr. Murray, the great referee of the Wittinagemot, was a Scotch minister, who generally sat at the "Chapter" reading papers from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. He was known to have read straight through every morning and evening ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... such definitions, by whomsoever given, were based on the Socratic theory, and should be explained according to what we have said about art ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... symptoms of labour, carrying the child round the 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 delights to ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... probably developed still more in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings. In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches of physical science—which, suitably treated, afford even now so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand, and in antiquity with its more defective insight into ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... things, but who could hear Rubinstein's touch without being benefited? I believe that in teaching touch the teacher should first give his model of the touch required and then proceed from this positive ideal, by means of the so-called Socratic method of inducing the pupil to produce a similar result through repeated questions. In this way the pupil will not be obliged to resign his individuality, as would be the case if he followed strict ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... but virtue 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 race ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the observer said, with a Socratic subtlety that betrayed itself in his gleaming eye, in the joyous hope of seeing his victim fall into the pit that his own admissions had digged for him, "and don't you think that it would also bring to you the unpleasant consciousness of having ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... irreverent 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
... 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 I certainly know.' ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... 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 into tears,—upon ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 hailed him as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... interlocutor by making him considerate of the meaning of his 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 ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... lurks. In order to detect the fallacy, the proposition thus silently assumed must be supplied; but the reasoner, most likely, has never really asked himself what he was assuming; his confuter, unless permitted to extort it from him by the Socratic mode of interrogation, must himself judge what the suppressed premise ought to be in order to support the conclusion. And hence, in the words of Archbishop Whately, "it must be often a matter of doubt, or, rather, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the Sciapodes were a people who dwelt on the borders of the Atlantic. Their feet were larger than the rest of their bodies, and to shield themselves from the sun's rays they held up one of their feet as an umbrella.—By giving the Socratic philosophers the name of Sciapodes here Aristophanes wishes to convey that they are walking in the dark and busying themselves with ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... side, gave sculptural strength 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 all of this. He sat in self-possession, in ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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 render it powerless for harm, by closing up the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... 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 [51] (460 B.C.). But while Aristotle ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... before all men. There are a number of authorities who say that Crates and Hipparchia consummated their marriage in the presence of many spectators. Lactantius (Inst. iii, 15) says that the practice was common, but this Zeller is inclined to doubt. (Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, translated from the Third German ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a settler like Crevecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a "panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians; ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... resources of the pupil. Yet even this word comes short of the exact truth. The teacher must put in, as well as draw out. No process of mere pumping will draw out from a child's mind knowledge which is not there. All the power of the Socratic method, could it be applied by Socrates himself, would be unavailing to draw from a child's mind, by mere questioning, a knowledge, for instance, of chemical affinity, of the solar system, of the temperature of the Gulf Stream, of ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... you have need of me before I pass by the Socratic method," he suggested, still with that pale smile set in granite "I shall depend on you to let me know at what precise hour you would like to order an epitaph written for me. Say the word at your convenience, and within five minutes your bulletin concerning the late governor ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... intended to do, and he listened sympathetically and helpfully, with a little quizzical smile in his eyes as I outlined my ambitious plans. And when I had run the gamut of my dreams, he took his turn, and, in true Socratic fashion, yet without making me feel in the least that I was only a dreamer after all, he refashioned my theories. One by one the little card houses that I had built up were deftly, smoothly, gently, but completely demolished. I did not know the ABC of schoolcraft—but he did ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... their powers of teaching, for that no man could get a 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, and ...
— Meno • Plato
... since his day thrown out and at a fault precisely at 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, Phdrus, in a Socratic way, to extort an assent from your own arguments—allow me to drive you ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 a simple ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... dulness, and a low order of intellect, cf. "boorish," "rustic," "loutish," ("pariah," conceivably). "Slavish," "servile," with us connote moral rather than intellectual deficiency, I suppose. Hence it is impossible to preserve the humour of the Socratic argument. See Newman, ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... thus reducing the whole of history and, 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 ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... which primarily regards others, and the quality in which self and others are equally regarded; (2) by the confusion of doing and suffering justice; (3) by the unwillingness to renounce the old Socratic paradox, ...
— Laws • Plato
... 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. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... She had felt herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty impulse in her to the noblest proportions! Under Wharton's Socratic method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish desires, worthy of her childhood—to cry, to go into a passion!—and when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young, dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have beaten ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expression." In "Youth" and "Heart of Darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the 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 before we get a glimpse of Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... 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 convenience ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... 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 the socratic form. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... temptation and pray that you may be delivered from evil," shouted the Doctor—(his was not the Socratic method)—"but remember this: that as sure as the sparks fly upward there will come a time when, however fast you run, you will be overtaken—cornered—no one to deliver you but yourself—the gods sitting round interested. It is a grim fight, for the Thing, you may be sure, has chosen its right ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was just a man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But his discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neither disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but on the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged to more orderly, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch |
