[Side-note: Trial and Error, the natural process of the human mind. Plato stands alone in bringing to view and dramatising this part of the mental process. Sokrates accepts for himself the condition of conscious ignorance.] We shall follow Plato towards the close of his career (Treatise De Legibus), into an imperative and stationary orthodoxy of his own: but in the dialogues which I have already reviewed, as well as in several others which I shall presently notice, no mention is made of any given affirmative doctrine as indispensable to arrive at ultimately. Plato here concentrates his attention upon the indeterminate period of the mind: looking upon the mind not as an empty vessel, requiring to be filled by ready-made matter from without--nor as a blank sheet, awaiting a foreign hand to write characters upon it--but as an assemblage of latent capacities, which must be called into action by stimulus and example, but which can only attain improvement through multiplied trials and multiplied failures. Whereas in most cases these failures are forgotten, the peculiarity of Plato consists in his bringing them to view with full detail, explaining the reasons of each. He illustrates abundantly, and dramatises with the greatest vivacity, the intellectual process whereby opinions are broached, at first adopted, then mistrusted, unmade, and re-made--or perhaps not re-made at all, but exchanged for a state of conscious ignorance. The great hero and operator in this process is the Platonic Sokrates, who accepts for himself this condition of conscious ignorance, and even makes it a matter of comparative pride, that he stands nearly alone in such confession.[35] His colloquial influence, working powerfully and almost preternaturally,[36] not only serves both to spur and to direct the activity of hearers still youthful and undecided, but also exposes those who have already made up their minds and confidently believe themselves to know. Sokrates brings back these latter from the false persuasion of knowledge to the state of conscious ignorance, and to the prior indeterminate condition of mind, in which their opinions have again to be put together by the tentative and guessing process. This tentative process, prosecuted under the drill of Sokrates, is in itself full of charm and interest for Plato, whether it ends by finding a good solution or only by discarding a bad one. [Footnote 35: Plato, Apolog. Sokr. pp. 21-22-23.] [Footnote 36: Plato, Symposion, 213 E, 215-216; Menon, 80 A-B.] [Side-note: Familiar words--constantly used, with much earnest feeling, but never understood nor defined--ordinary phenomenon in human society.]