Common Sense is the region of Opinion, in which there is diversity of authorities and contradiction of arguments without any settled truth; all affirmations being particular and relative, true at one time and place, false at another. Science, on the contrary, deals with imperishable Forms and universal truths, which Plato regards, in their subjective aspect, as the innate, though buried, furniture of the soul, inherited from an external pre-existence, and revived in it out of the misleading data of sense by a process first of the cross-examining _Elenchus_, next of scientific Demonstration. Plato depreciates altogether the untaught, unexamined, stock of acquirements which passes under the name of Common Sense, as a mere worthless semblance of knowledge without reality; as requiring to be broken up by the scrutinizing _Elenchus_, in order to impress a painful but healthy consciousness of ignorance, and to prepare the mind for that process of teaching whereby alone Science or Cognition can be imparted.[2] He admits that Opinion may be right as well as wrong. Yet even when right, it is essentially different from Science, and is essentially transitory; a safe guide to action while it lasts, but not to be trusted for stability or permanence.[3] By Plato, Rhetoric is treated as belonging to the province of Opinion, Dialectic to that of Science. The rhetor addresses multitudes in continuous speech, appeals to received common places, and persuades: the dialectician, conversing only with one or a few, receives and imparts the stimulus of short question and answer; thus awakening the dormant capacities of the soul to the reminiscence of those universal Forms or Ideas which are the only true Knowable. [Footnote 2: Plato, Sophistes, pp. 228-229; Symposion, pp. 203-204; Theætetus, pp. 148, 149, 150. Compare also 'Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates,' Vol. I. chs. vi.-vii. pp. 245-288; II. ch. xxvi. p. 376, seq.] [Footnote 3: Plato, Republic, v. pp. 477-478; Menon, pp. 97-98.]