"See him now!" he cries triumphantly, "How he remembers; in the logical order; as he ought to remember!" The reader, in truth, following closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is [64] once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them: that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the mistakes also which he ought to make--the right sort of mistakes, such as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors. Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai autai.+--"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical problems, with any and every problem whatever. "If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine:-- If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe- matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just and good, and about all things whatever, upon [65] which, in all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal--hois episphragizometha touto + --That, which really is. Phaedo, 75. But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno--from the prison-cell to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment upon the young boy with the square:-- Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên;+ "Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning, will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense (epistêmê)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"--Yes! and that recovery is an act of reminiscence.