and observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains might know them. Nay, Socrates went a step further--and this forward step is the fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things, but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well, unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Socrates felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety, patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it--yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Socrates found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was, that universal “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” against which he declares such emphatic war; and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards--“_Opinio copiæ inter causas inopiæ est_.” If then the philosophers of the New Academy considered Socrates either as a sceptic, or as a partisan of systematic negation, they misinterpreted his character, and mistook the first stage of his process--that which Plato, Bacon, and Herschel call the purification of the intellect--for the ultimate goal. The elenchus, as Socrates used it, was animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment. Though negative in his means, Socrates is strictly positive in his ends; his attack is undertaken only with distinct view to a positive result; in order to shame them out of the illusion of knowledge, and to spur them on and arm them for the acquisition of real, assured, comprehensive, self-explanatory, knowledge--as the condition and guarantee of virtuous practice. Socrates was indeed the reverse of a sceptic; no man ever looked upon life with a more positive and practical eye; no man ever pursued his mark with a clearer perception of the road which he was travelling; no man ever combined, in like manner, the absorbing enthusiasm of a missionary, with the acuteness, the originality, the inventive resource, and the generalising comprehension, of a philosopher.