He now, therefore, went to meet the sophists on their own ground and with their own methods, and he did this so well as to be considered by many, Aristophanes among them, as the best possible representative of the class. What is true is, that he was the first Athenian who undertook to do what the sophists had for some time considered their special function,--to impart a "higher education" to the youth and men of Athens. He went about the streets, shops, walks, schools, and gymnasia of the city, drawing all sorts of persons into conversation, and trying to elicit truth for himself and them (for he pretended to know nothing). He was never so pleased as when he met a real sophist, who professed to have knowledge, and never so much in his element as when, in the presence of a knot of young men, he could, by his ironical, subtle questions, force said sophist to admit that he too knew nothing. The fact was, Socrates, studying Heraclitus, had become convinced that the reason why men fell into error was because they did not know themselves, or their own thoughts, because what they called thoughts were mere opinions, mere fragments of thoughts. He concluded that, if men were ever to be redeemed from error, intellectual and moral, they must be made to think whole thoughts. Accordingly, he took the ordinary opinions of men and, by a series of well-directed questions, tried to bring out their implications, that is, the wholes of which they were parts. Such is the Socratic or dialectic (= conversational) method. It does not pretend to impart any new knowledge, but merely, as Socrates said, to deliver the mind of the thoughts with which it is pregnant. And Socrates not only held that saving truth consisted of whole thoughts; he held also that all such thoughts were universally and necessarily true; that, while there might be many opinions about a thing, there could be but one truth, the same for all men, and therefore independent of any man. This was the exact opposite of what Protagoras the sophist had taught, the opposite of the gospel of individualism (see p. 93). Man is so far from being the measure of all things, that there is in all things a measure to which he must conform, if he is not to sink into error. This measure, this system of whole truths, implying an eternal mind to which it is present, and by which it is manifested in the world, is just what man arrives at, if he will but think out his thoughts in their completeness. In doing so, he at once learns the laws by which the universe is governed and finds a guide and sanction for his own conduct--a sanction no longer external and imposed by the State, but internal and imposed by the mind. A system like this involved a complete reversal of the old view of the relation between man and the State, and at the same time took the feet from under individualism. "It is true," said Socrates in effect, "that the individual, and not the State, is the source of all