His method yet survives, as far as such method can survive, in some of the dialogues of Plato. It is a process of eternal value and of universal application. That purification of the intellect, which Bacon signalised as indispensable for rational or scientific progress, the Socratic _elenchus_ affords the only known instrument for at least partially accomplishing. However little that instrument may have been applied since the death of its inventor, the necessity and use of it neither have disappeared, nor ever can disappear. There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Socrates made war: there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association--resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together _disparates_ or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases, and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account: there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education, to break up, disentangle, analyse, and reconstruct, these ancient mental compounds--and who has not been driven to it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial elenchus no longer stands in the market-place to lend him help and stimulus. To hear of any man, especially of so illustrious a man, being condemned to death on such accusations as that of heresy and alleged corruption of youth, inspires at the present day a sentiment of indignant reprobation, the force of which I have no desire to enfeeble. The fact stands eternally recorded as one among the thousand misdeeds of intolerance, religious and political. But the sentiment now prevalent is founded upon a conviction that such matters as heresy and heretical teaching of youth are not proper for judicial cognisance. Even in the modern world, such a conviction is of recent date; and in the fifth century B.C. it was unknown. Socrates himself would not have agreed in it; and all Grecian governments, oligarchical and democratical alike, recognised the opposite. The testimony furnished by Plato is on this point decisive. When we examine the two positive communities which he constructs, in the treatises _De Republica_ and _De Legibus_, we find that there is nothing about which he is more anxious, than to establish an unresisted orthodoxy of doctrine, opinion, and education. A dissenting and free-spoken teacher, such as Socrates was at Athens, would not have been allowed to pursue his vocation for a week, in the Platonic republic. Plato would not indeed condemn him to death; but he would put him to silence, and in case of need, send him away. This, in fact, is the consistent deduction, if you assume that the state is to determine what is orthodoxy, and orthodox teaching--and to repress what contradicts its own views. Now all the