(1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, we are
made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old difficulty
of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the arts and the
virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words, such as nature,
custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up. The Sophists are
still floundering about the distinction of the real and seeming. Figures
of speech are made the basis of arguments. The possibility of conceiving a
universal art or science, which admits of application to a particular
subject-matter, is a difficulty which remains unsolved, and has not
altogether ceased to haunt the world at the present day (compare
Charmides). The defect of clearness is also apparent in Socrates himself,
unless we suppose him to be practising on the simplicity of his opponent,
or rather perhaps trying an experiment in dialectics. Nothing can be more
fallacious than the contradiction which he pretends to have discovered in
the answers of Gorgias (see above). The advantages which he gains over
Polus are also due to a false antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an
erroneous assertion that an agent and a patient may be described by similar
predicates;--a mistake which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in
the Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a 'robust sophistry' are likewise
discernible in his argument with Callicles.

(2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the
argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts
himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may
sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists, or
pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the ambiguous terms
good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as useless to examine his
arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to criticise this ideal
from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say that the ideal is