This dialectic method, this continuous discourse with one's self, being, for those who prosecute it with thoroughness, co-extensive with life itself--a part of the continuous company we keep with ourselves through life--will have its inequalities; its infelicities; above all, its final insecurity. "We argue rashly and adventurously," writes Plato, most truly, in the Timaeus--aye, we, the Platonists, as such, sometimes--"by reason that, like ourselves, our discourses (our Platonic discourses, as such) have much participation in the temerity of chance." Of course, as in any other occasional conversation, with its dependence on the hour and the scene, the persons we are with, the humours of the moment, there will always be much of accident in this essentially informal, this un-methodical, [186] method; and, therefore, opportunities for misuse, sometimes consciously. The candid reader notes instances of such, even in The Republic, not always on the part of Thrasymachus:--in this "new game of chess," played, as Plato puts it, not with counters, but with words, and not necessarily for the prize of truth, but, it may be, for the mere enjoyment of move and counter-move, of check-mating. Since Zeno's paradoxes, in fact, the very air of Athens was become sophisticated, infected with questionings, often vain enough; and the Platonic method had been, in its measure, determined by (the unfriendly might say, was in truth only a deposit from) that infected air. "Socrates," as he admits, "is easily refuted. Say rather, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth." That is reassuring, certainly! For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en caricature, in the Euthydemus, "Such is his skill in the war of words, that he can refute any proposition whatever, whether true or false"; that, in short, there is a dangerous facility abroad for proving all things whatever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable allotment of truth, has but the general allotment. The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin even then, that, as Lessing suggests, the search for truth is a better thing for us than its possession.