the next generation. Socrates. Among the pioneers of the sophistic age Socrates stands apart. He has no other instrument than the dialectic of his compeers, and he is as far off as the rest from a criticism of the instrument, but he uses it differently and with a difference of aim. He construes the give and take of the debate-game with extreme rigour. The rhetorical element must be exorcised. The set harangue of teacher to pupil, in which steps in argument are slurred and the semblance of co-inquiry is rendered nugatory, must be eliminated. The interlocutors must in truth render an account under the stimulus of organized heckling from their equals or superiors in debating ability. And the aim is heuristic, though often enough the search ends in no overt positive conclusion. Something can be found and something is found. Common names are fitted for use by the would-be users being first delivered from abortive conceptions, and thereupon enabled to bring to the birth living and organic notions. Aristotle would assign to Socrates the elaboration of two logical functions:--general definition and inductive method.[6] Rightly, if we add that he gives no theory of either, and that his practical use of the latter depends for its value on selection.[7] It is rather in virtue of his general faith in the possibility of construction, which he still does not undertake, and because of his consequent insistence on the elucidation of general concepts, which in common with some of his contemporaries, he may have thought of as endued with a certain objectivity, that he induces the controversies of what are called the Socratic schools as to the nature of predication. These result in the formulation of a new dialectic or logic by Plato. Manifestly Socrates' use of certain forms of argumentation, like their abuse by the sophists, tended to evoke their logical analysis. The use and abuse, confronted one with the other, could not but evoke it. Antisthenes.