to the Sophists' impudently avowed theory and practice of the superficial, as such. Well! we all always need to be set on our guard against theories which flatter the natural indolence of our minds. "We proposed then just now," says Socrates in the Phaedrus, "to consider the theory of the way in which one would or would not write or speak well."--"Certainly!"--"Well then, must there not be in those who are to speak meritoriously, an understanding well acquainted with the truth of the things they are to speak about?"--"Nay!" answers Phaedrus, in that age of sophistry, "It is in this way I have heard about it:-- that it is not necessary for one who would be a master of rhetoric to learn what really is just, for instance; but rather what seems just to the multitude who are to give judgment: nor again what is good or beautiful; but only what seems so to them. For persuasion comes of the latter; by no means of a hold upon the truth of things." Whether or not the Sophists were quite fairly chargeable with that sort of "inward lie," just this, at all events, was in the judgment of Plato the essence of sophistic vice. With them [118] art began too precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people's productions, in congruity with a general method which everywhere ruthlessly severed branch and flower from its natural root--art from one's own vivid sensation or belief. The Lacedaemonian (ho Lakôn)+ Plato's favourite scholar always, as having that infinite patience which is the note of a sincere, a really impassioned lover of anything, says, in his convinced Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech (tou legein etumos technê)+ unless one be in contact with truth, there neither is nor can be. We are reminded of that difference between genuine memory, and mere haphazard recollection, noted by Plato in the story he tells so well of the invention of writing in ancient Egypt.-- It might be doubted, he thinks, whether genuine memory was encouraged by that invention. The note on the margin by the inattentive reader to "remind himself," is, as we know, often his final good-bye to what it should remind him of. Now this is true of all art: Logôn ara technên, ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs, doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai.+ --It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words (texnê atexnos)+ that he will have who does not know the truth of things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it. "Conception," observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and artist of our own generation: [119] "Conception, fundamental brainwork,- -that is what makes the difference, in all art."