The process of dialectic, as represented in the Platonic Dialogues, may seem, therefore, inconsistent with itself, if you isolate this or that particular movement, in what is a very complex process, with many phases of development. It is certainly difficult, and that not merely on a first reading, to grasp the unity of the various statements Plato has made about it. Now it may seem to differ from ordinary reasoning by a certain plausibility only: it is logic, plus persuasion; helping, gently enticing, a child out of his natural errors; carefully explaining difficulties by the way, as one can best do, by question and answer with him; above all, never falling into the mistake of the obscurum per obscurius. At another time it may seem to aim at plausibility of another sort; at mutual complaisance, as Thrasymachus complains. It would be possible, of course, to present an insincere dialogue, in which certain of the disputants shall be mere men of straw. In the Philebus again, dialectic is only the name of the process (described there [183] as exactly, almost as technically, as Aristotle, or some modern master of applied logic, might describe it) of the resolution of a genus into its species. Or it lapses into "eristic"--into an argument for its own sake; or sinks into logomachy, a mere dispute about words. Or yet again, an immense, a boundless promise is made for it, as in the seventh book of The Republic. It is a life, a systematised, but comprehensive and far-reaching, intellectual life, in which the reason, nay, the whole nature of man, realises all it was designed to be, by the beatific "vision of all time and all existence."