For the certainty, the absolute and eternal character, of such ideas involved, with much labour and scruple, repeated acts of qualification and correction; many readjustments to experience; expansion, by larger lights from it; those exclusions and inclusions, debitae naturae (to repeat Bacon's phrase) demanded, that is to say, by the veritable nature of the facts which those ideas are designed to represent. "Representation" was, in fact, twofold, and comprehended many successive steps under each of its divisions. The thought was to be adjusted, first, to the phenomena, to the facts, daintily, to the end that the said thought might just cover those facts, and no more. To the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus articulated, it was necessary to adjust the term; the term, or "definition," by which it might be conveyed into the mind of another. The dialogue--the freedom, the variety and elasticity, of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone afforded the room necessary for that long and complex process. If one, if Socrates, seemed to become [179] the teacher of another, it was but by thinking aloud for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must really prosecute for himself, however full such comradeship might be of happy occasions for the awakening of the latent knowledge, with which mind is by nature so richly stored. The Platonic Socrates, in fact, does not propose to teach anything: is but willing, "along with you," and if you concur, "to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks."*