bridge the gulf between them. Many perplexities are avoided by keeping
them apart. There might certainly be a new science of logic; it would not
however be built up out of the fragments of the old, but would be distinct
from them--relative to the state of knowledge which exists at the present
time, and based chiefly on the methods of Modern Inductive philosophy.
Such a science might have two legitimate fields: first, the refutation and
explanation of false philosophies still hovering in the air as they appear
from the point of view of later experience or are comprehended in the
history of the human mind, as in a larger horizon: secondly, it might
furnish new forms of thought more adequate to the expression of all the
diversities and oppositions of knowledge which have grown up in these
latter days; it might also suggest new methods of enquiry derived from the
comparison of the sciences. Few will deny that the introduction of the
words 'subject' and 'object' and the Hegelian reconciliation of opposites
have been 'most gracious aids' to psychology, or that the methods of Bacon
and Mill have shed a light far and wide on the realms of knowledge. These
two great studies, the one destructive and corrective of error, the other
conservative and constructive of truth, might be a first and second part of
logic. Ancient logic would be the propaedeutic or gate of approach to
logical science,--nothing more. But to pursue such speculations further,
though not irrelevant, might lead us too far away from the argument of the
dialogue.

The Euthydemus is, of all the Dialogues of Plato, that in which he
approaches most nearly to the comic poet. The mirth is broader, the irony
more sustained, the contrast between Socrates and the two Sophists,
although veiled, penetrates deeper than in any other of his writings. Even
Thrasymachus, in the Republic, is at last pacified, and becomes a friendly
and interested auditor of the great discourse. But in the Euthydemus the
mask is never dropped; the accustomed irony of Socrates continues to the