"And," again, "is not the road to Athens made for conversation?" Yes! It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that promoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate parturition, of the mind. A method such as this, a process (processus) a movement of thought, which is the very converse of mathematical or demonstrative reasoning, and incapable therefore of conventional or scholastic form, of "exactness," in fact; which proceeded to truth, not by the analysis and application of an axiom, but by a gradual suppression of error, of error in the form of partial or exaggerated truths on the subject- matter proposed, found its proper [180] literary vehicle in a dialogue, the more flexible the better. It was like a journey indeed, that essay towards Justice, for example, or the true Polity; a journey, not along the simple road to Athens, but to a mountain's top. The proportions, the outline, the relation of the thing to its neighbours,--how do the inexperienced in such journeys mistake them, as they climb! What repeated misconceptions, embodying, one by one, some mere particularity of view, the perspective of this or that point of view, forthwith abandoned, some apprehension of mountain form and structure, just a little short, or, it may be, immeasurably short, of what Plato would call the "synoptic" view of the mountain as a whole. From this or that point, some insignificant peak presented itself as the mountain's veritable crest: inexperience would have sworn to the truth of a wholly illusive perspective, as the next turn in the journey assured one. It is only upon the final step, with free view at last on every side, uniting together and justifying all those various, successive, partial apprehensions of the difficult way--only on the summit, comes the intuitive comprehension of what the true form of the mountain really is; with a mental, or rather an imaginative hold upon which, for the future, we can find our way securely about it; observing perhaps that, next to that final intuition, the first view, the first impression, had been truest about it.