The dialectic age had not yet arrived. When it did arrive, with Sokrates as its principal champion, the topics of philosophy were altered, and its process revolutionised. We have often heard repeated the Ciceronian dictum--that Sokrates brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth: from the distant, abstruse, and complicated phenomena of the Kosmos--in respect to which he adhered to the vulgar point of view, and even disapproved any enquiries tending to rationalise it--to the familiar business of man, and the common generalities of ethics and politics. But what has been less observed about Sokrates, though not less true, is, that along with this change of topics he introduced a complete revolution in method. He placed the negative in the front of his procedure; giving to it a point, an emphasis, a substantive value, which no one had done before. His peculiar gift was that of cross-examination, or the application of his Elenchus to discriminate pretended from real knowledge. He found men full of confident beliefs on these ethical and political topics--affirming with words which they had never troubled themselves to define--and persuaded that they required no farther teaching: yet at the same time unable to give clear or consistent answers to his questions, and shown by this convincing test to be destitute of real knowledge. Declaring this false persuasion of knowledge, or confident unreasoned belief, to be universal, he undertook, as the mission of his life, to expose it: and he proclaimed that until the mind was disabused thereof and made painfully conscious of ignorance, no affirmative reasoned truth could be presented with any chance of success.