Such a string of objections never answered, and of difficulties without solution, may appear to many persons nugatory as well as tiresome. To Plato they did not appear so. At the time when most of his dialogues were composed, he considered that the Search after truth was at once the noblest occupation, and the highest pleasure, of life. Whoever has no sympathy with such a pursuit--whoever cares only for results, and finds the chase in itself fatiguing rather than attractive--is likely to take little interest in the Platonic dialogues. To repeat what I said in Chapter VIII.**--Those who expect from Plato a coherent system in which affirmative dogmas are first to be laid down, with the evidence in their favour--next, the difficulties and objections against them enumerated--lastly, these difficulties solved--will be disappointed. Plato is, occasionally, abundant in his affirmations: he has also great negative fertility in starting objections: but the affirmative current does not come into conflict with the negative. His belief is enforced by rhetorical fervour, poetical illustration, and a vivid emotional fancy. These elements stand to him in the place of positive proof; and when his mind is full of them, the unsolved objections, which he himself had stated elsewhere, vanish out of sight. Towards the close of his life (as we shall see in the Treatise De Legibus), the love of dialectic, and the taste for enunciating difficulties even when he could not clear them up, died out within him. He becomes ultra-dogmatical, losing even the poetical richness and fervour which had once marked his affirmations, and substituting in their place a strict and compulsory orthodoxy. [Side-note: Contrast between the philosopher and the practical statesman--between Knowledge and Opinion.]