What Plato has sometimes called the act of reminiscence, what he has sometimes called the instinct of Love, is also known to him as the process of Dialectic. For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with the inertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the real, and to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by percepts, has to brace up its energies, and to advance not by mere pressing onward, but by tacking and zigzagging through contrary difficulties finally realise itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for union has to measure its force with the instinct of independence, where selfishness and self-surrender seek a reconciliation, and where in the close, if the close be love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods are absorbed. Even so in the course of Dialectic. It is the art which divides and conjoins, which unifies and distinguishes: the art of asking and answering. To Plato it appears in the main as an action of the intelligent subject: but an action which, as he hints, is almost a natural instinct, which through discipline has become an art. In the hands of its typical artist, it proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if unconscious of its principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes, no overt conception of the result: he has no knowledge of the positive conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos--the logic of reality--which sustains the movement. Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying the argument to a preconceived end, one is swept on by the current of real logic--the reason in things. The dogma we have set up and seemed to see before us, will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond itself, and suggest aspects calling for recognition and acceptance. If only we refrain from arresting the movement of criticism,--a course to which prudence, ease, custom, and every form of the _ignava ratio_ counsel us,--truth will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because other aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with us, that speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It is we who insist on closing up the door, not the truth that is reluctant to show itself.