A portion of the dialogue to which I have not yet adverted, illustrates this anxiety for the preliminary training of the ratiocinative power, as an indispensable qualification for any special research. "We have plenty of leisure for investigation[136] (says Sokrates). We are not tied to time, nor compelled to march briefly and directly towards some positive result. Engaged as we are in investigating philosophical truth, we stand in pointed contrast with politicians and rhetors in the public assembly or dikastery. We are like freemen; they, like slaves. They have before them the Dikasts, as their masters, to whose temper and approbation they are constrained to adapt themselves. They are also in presence of antagonists, ready to entrap and confute them. The personal interests, sometimes even the life, of an individual are at stake; so that every thing must be sacrificed to the purpose of obtaining a verdict. Men brought up in these habits become sharp in observation and emphatic in expression; but merely with a view to win the assent and approbation of the master before them, as to the case in hand. No free aspirations or spontaneous enlargement can have place in their minds. They become careless of true and sound reasoning--slaves to the sentiment of those whom they address--and adepts in crooked artifice which they take for wisdom.[137] [Footnote 136: Plato, Theæt. p. 155. [Greek: ô(s pa/nu pollê\n scholê\n a)/gontes, pa/lin e)panaskepso/metha], &c.; also p. 172.] [Footnote 137: Plato, Theætêt. p. 172-173. I give only an abstract of this eloquent passage, not an exact translation. Steinhart (Einleitung zum Theætêt. p. 37) calls it "a sublime Hymn" (einen erhabenen Hymnus). It is a fine piece of poetry or rhetoric, and shows that Plato was by nature quite as rhetorical as the rhetors whom he depreciates--though he had also, besides, other lofty intellectual peculiarities of his own, beyond these rivals.] [Side-note: The Philosopher is master of his own debates.]