He pleads to be excused if in making his defence he speaks after his accustomed manner: not merely in home-spun phrase, that is to say, very different from what is usually heard at least in those sophisticated law-courts of Athens, nor merely with certain lapsing into his familiar habit of dialogue, but with a tacit assumption, throughout his arguments, of that logical realism which suggested the first outline of Plato's doctrine of the "ideas." Everywhere, with what is like a physical passion for what is, what is true--as one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and meant us to know--he is driving earnestly, yet with method, at those universal conceptions or definitions which serve to establish [79] firmly the distinction, attained by so much intellectual labour, between what is absolute and abiding, of veritable import therefore to our reason, to the divine reason really resident in each one of us, resident in, yet separable from, these our houses of clay--between that, and what is only phenomenal and transitory, as being essentially implicate with them. He achieved this end, as we learn from Aristotle, this power, literally, of "a criticism of life," by induction (epagôgê)+ by that careful process of enquiry into the facts of the matter concerned, one by one (facts most often of conscience, of moral action as conditioned by motive, and result, and the varying degrees of inward light upon it) for which the fitting method is informal though not unmethodical question and answer, face to face with average mankind, as in those famous Socratic conversations, which again are the first rough natural growth of Plato's so artistic written Dialogues. The exclusive preoccupation of Socrates with practical matter therein, his anxious fixing of the sense of such familiar terms as just and good, for instance, was part of that humble bearing of himself by which he was to authenticate a claim to superior wisdom, forced upon him by nothing less than divine authority, while there was something also in it of a natural reaction against the intellectual ambition of his youth. He had gone to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the [80] Phaedo, in his last discourse, to a physical philosopher, then of great repute, but to his own great disappointment.--