[Footnote 43: See my account of the Platonic dialogue Hippias Major, vol. ii. chap. xiii. Aristot. Metaphys. A. minor, p. 995, a. 9. [Greek: tou\s de\ lupei= to\ a)kribe\s, ê)\ dia\ to\ mê\ du/nasthai sunei/rein, ê)\ dia\ tê\n mikrologi/an; e)/chei ga/r ti to\ a)kribe\s toiou=ton, ô(/ste katha/per e)pi\ tô=n sumbolai/ôn, kai\ e)pi\ tô=n lo/gôn a)neleu/theron ei)=nai tisi dokei=]. Cicero (Paradoxa, c. 2) talks of the "minutæ interrogatiunculæ" of the Stoics as tedious and tiresome.] [Side-note: Logical position of the Megaric philosophers erroneously described by historians of philosophy. Necessity of a complete collection of difficulties.] Now the historians of philosophy seldom take this view of philosophy as a whole--as a field to which the free antithesis of affirmative and negative is indispensable. They consider true philosophy as represented by Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle, one or other of them: while the contemporaries of these eminent men are discredited under the name of Sophists, Eristics, or sham-philosophers, sowing tares among the legitimate crop of wheat--or as devils whom the miraculous virtue of Sokrates and Plato is employed in expelling from the Athenian mind. Even the companions of Sokrates, and the Megarics among them, whom we know only upon the imperfect testimony of opponents, have fallen under this unmerited sentence:[44] as if they were destructive agents breaking down an edifice of well-constituted philosophy--no such edifice in fact having ever existed in Greece, though there were several dissenting lecture rooms and conflicting veins of speculation promoted by eminent individuals. [Footnote 44: The same charge is put by Cicero into the mouth of Lucullus against the Academics: "Similiter vos (Academici) quum perturbare, ut illi" (the Gracchi and others) "rempublicam, sic vos philosophiam, benè jam constitutam velitis. . . . Tum exortus est, ut in optimâ republicâ Tib. Gracchus, qui otium perturbaret, sic Arcesilas, qui constitutam philosophiam everteret" (Acad. Prior, ii. 5, 14-15). Even in the liberal and comprehensive history of the Greek philosophy by Zeller (vol. ii. p. 187, ed. 2nd), respecting Eukleides' and the Megarians;--"Dagegen bot der _Streit gegen die geltenden Meinungen_ dem Scharfsinn, der Rechthaberei, und dem wissenschaftlichen Ehrgeiz, ein unerschöpfliches Feld dar, welches denn auch die Megarischen Philosophen rüstig ausbeuteten." If by "die geltenden Meinungen" Zeller means the common sense of the day that is, the opinions and beliefs current among the [Greek: i)diô=tai], the working, enjoying, non-theorising public--it is very true that the Megaric philosophers contended against them: but Sokrates and Plato contended against them quite as much: we see this in the Platonic Apology, Gorgias, Republic, Timæus, Parmenidês, &c.