Just as whenever in Æsthetic any one sought the "father" of the science Plato was usually named, so whenever a like enquiry has been proposed for Logic that honourable title has been almost unanimously bestowed upon Aristotle. But even if we admit (as we must) in a somewhat empirical and expedient sense, the propriety of these searches for "discoverers" and "fathers," Aristotle could not in our eyes occupy that position. For if Logic is the science of the concept, such a science was evidently begun before him. Further, Aristotle himself claimed the distinction only of having reduced and treated the theory of reasoning[1] and recognized elsewhere that to Socrates belonged the merit of having directed attention to the examination and definition of the concept (τούς τ' ἐπακτικοὺς λόγους καὶ τὸ όρίζεσθαι), that is to say, to the very principle of logical Science,[2] the rigorous form of truth. [Sidenote: _Socrates, Plato, Aristotle._] In this affirmation of the consistency and absoluteness of knowledge and of truth (sustained in him by a vivid religious and moral consciousness) lies the significance of Socrates as opposed to the Sophists; as indeed in the same thing lies the importance of Hellenic Logic of the truly classical period. This Logic elaborated the idea of conceptual knowledge, of science or of philosophy, and transmitted it to the modern world with a terminology, which is in great part that which we ourselves employ. We too reject in almost the same words as the Greek philosophers the renascent sophism, the perennial Protagoreanism, and the sensationalism which denies truth, and (like the ancient Gorgias), by declaring it incommunicable by the individual, individualizes and reduces it to practical utility. In Plato, the affirmation and glorification of conceptual knowledge was accompanied by contempt for the knowledge of the individual, and in comparison with the immortal world of ideas, the world of sensations was for him so dark and obscure as to disappear in his eyes like phantoms before the sun. But Aristotle, although he held firmly that there is no science of the accidental and individual, and of sensation, which is bound to space and time, to the _where_ and the _when,_ and that the object of science is the universal, the essence, _which is being,_ was less exclusive than he; and as he saved the world of poetry from the condemnation of Plato, so, in all his philosophy and in all his work as physicist, politician and historian, he affirmed the world of experience and of history.[3] [Sidenote: _Enquiries concerning the nature of the concept in Greece. The question of transcendence and immanence._]