[Footnote 8: Plato, Menon, p. 74 A. [Greek: ou) ga\r du/namai/ pô, ô)= Sô/krates, ô(s su\ zêtei=s, mi/an a)retê\n labei=n kata\ pa/ntôn.]] [Side-note: Analogous cases cited--definitions of figure and colour.] Sokrates proceeds to illustrate his meaning by the analogies of figure and colour. You call _round_ a figure, and _square_ a figure: you call _white_ and _black_ both colour, the one as much as the other, though they are unlike and even opposite.[9] Tell me, What is this same common figure and property in both, which makes you call both of them figure--both of them colour? Take this as a preliminary exercise, in order to help you in answering my enquiry about virtue.[10] Menon cannot answer, and Sokrates answers his own question. He gives a general definition, first of figure, next of colour. He first defines figure in a way which implies colour to be known. This is pointed out; and he then admits that in a good definition, suitable to genuine dialectical investigation, nothing should be implied as known, except what the respondent admits himself to know. Figure and colour are both defined suitably to this condition.[11] [Footnote 9: Plato, Menon, p. 74 D.] [Footnote 10: Plato, Menon, c. 7, pp. 74-75. [Greek: Peirô= ei)pei=n, i(/na kai\ ge/nêtai/ soi mele/tê pro\s tê\n peri\ tê=s a)retê=s a)po/krisin] (75 A). The purpose of practising the respondent is here distinctly announced.] [Footnote 11: Plato, Menon, p. 75 C-E.] [Side-note: Importance at that time of bringing into conscious view, logical subordination and distinctions--Neither logic nor grammar had then been cast into system.] All this preliminary matter seems to be intended for the purpose of getting the question clearly conceived as a general question--of exhibiting and eliminating the narrow and partial conceptions which unconsciously substitute themselves in the mind, in place of that which ought to be conceived as a generic whole--and of clearing up what is required in a good definition. A generic whole, including various specific portions distinguishable from each other, was at that time little understood by any one. There existed no grammar, nor any rules of logic founded on analysis of the intellectual processes. To predicate of the genus what was true only of the species--to predicate as distinctively characterizing the species, what is true of the whole genus in which it is contained--to lose the integrity of the genus in its separate parcels or fragments[12]--these were errors which men had never yet been expressly taught to avoid. To assign the one common meaning, constituent of or connoted by a generic term, had never yet been put before them as a problem. Such preliminary clearing of the ground is instructive even now, when formal and systematic logic has become more or less familiar: but in the time of Plato, it must have been indispensably required, to arrive at a full conception of any general question.[13]