Now the Greater and Lesser Hippias are peculiar specimens of these Dialogues of Search, and each serves the purpose above indicated. The Greater Hippias enumerates a string of tentatives, each one of which ends in acknowledged failure: the Lesser Hippias enunciates a thesis, which Sokrates proceeds to demonstrate, by plausible arguments such as Hippias is forced to admit. But though Hippias admits each successive step, he still mistrusts the conclusion, and suspects that he has been misled--a feeling which Plato[70] describes elsewhere as being frequent among the respondents of Sokrates. Nay, Sokrates himself shares in the mistrust--presents himself as an unwilling propounder of arguments which force themselves upon him,[71] and complains of his own mental embarrassment. Now you may call this sophistry, if you please; and you may silence its propounders by calling them hard names. But such ethical prudery--hiding all the uncomfortable logical puzzles which start up when you begin to analyse an established sentiment, and treating them as non-existent because you refuse to look at them--is not the way, to attain what Plato calls knowledge. If there be any argument, the process of which seems indisputable, while yet its conclusion contradicts, or seems to contradict, what is known, upon other evidence--the full and patient analysis of that argument is indispensable, before you can become master of the truth and able to defend it. Until you have gone through such analysis, your mind must remain in that state of confusion which is indicated by Sokrates at the end of the Lesser Hippias. As it is a part of the process of Search, to travel in the path of the Greater Hippias--that is, to go through a string of erroneous solutions, each of which can be proved, by reasons shown, to _be_ erroneous: so it is an equally important part of the same process, to travel in the path of the Lesser Hippias--that is, to acquaint ourselves with all those arguments, bearing on the case, in which two contrary conclusions appear to be both of them plausibly demonstrated, and in which therefore we cannot as yet determine which of them is erroneous--or whether both are not erroneous. The Greater Hippias exhibits errors,--the Lesser Hippias puts before us confusion. With both these enemies the Searcher for truth must contend: and Bacon tells us, that confusion is the worst enemy of the two--"Citius emergit veritas ex errore, quam ex confusione". Plato, in the Lesser Hippias, having in hand a genuine Sokratic thesis, does not disdain to invest Sokrates with the task (sophistical, as some call it, yet not the less useful and instructive) of setting forth at large this case of confusion, and avowing his inability to clear it up. It is enough for Sokrates that he brings home the painful sense of confusion to the feelings of his hearer as well as to his own. In that painful sentiment lies the stimulus provocative of farther