[Footnote 71: See the five discourses of the rhetor Aristeides--[Greek: I(erô=n Lo/goi], Oratt. xxiii.-xxvii.--containing curious details about his habits and condition, and illustrating his belief; especially Or. xxiii. p. 462 seqq. The perfect faith which he reposed in his dreams, and the confidence with which he speaks of the benefits derived from acting upon them, are remarkable.] [Side-note: Plato's argument is untenable--That if the Protagorean formula be admitted, dialectic discussion would be annulled--The reverse is true--Dialectic recognises the autonomy of the Individual mind.] But the most unfounded among all Plato's objections to the Protagorean formula, is that in which Sokrates is made to allege, that if it be accepted, the work of dialectical discussion is at an end: that the Sokratic Elenchus, the reciprocal scrutiny of opinions between two dialogists, becomes nugatory--since every man's opinions are _right_.[72] Instead of _right_, we must add the requisite qualification, here as elsewhere, by reading, _right to the man himself_. Now, dealing with Plato's affirmation thus corrected, we must pronounce not only that it is not true, but that the direct reverse of it is true. Dialectical discussion and the Sokratic procedure, far from implying the negation of the Protagorean formula, involve the unqualified recognition of it. Without such recognition the procedure cannot even begin, much less advance onward to any result. Dialectic operates altogether by question and answer: the questioner takes all his premisses from the answers of the respondent, and cannot proceed in any direction except that in which the respondent leads him. Appeal is always directly made to the affirmative or negative of the individual mind, which is thus installed as measure of truth or falsehood _for itself_. The peculiar and characteristic excellence of the Sokratic Elenchus consists in thus stimulating the interior mental activity of the individual hearer, in eliciting from him all the positive elements of the debate, and in making him feel a shock when one of his answers contradicts the others. Sokrates not only does not profess to make himself a measure for the respondent, but expressly disclaims doing so: he protests against being considered as a teacher, and avows his own entire ignorance. He undertakes only the obstetric process of evolving from the respondent mind what already exists in it without the means of escape--and of applying interrogatory tests to the answer when produced: if there be nothing in the respondent's mind, his art is inapplicable. He repudiates all appeal to authority, except that of the respondent himself.[73] Accordingly there is neither sense nor fitness in the Sokratic cross-examination, unless you assume that each person, to whom it is addressed, is a measure of truth and falsehood to himself. Implicitly indeed, this is assumed in rhetoric as well as in dialectic: wherever the speaker aims at