SOCRATES - And Chinese may keep Americans out of China.

PHAEDO - That is another story. One must never let his logic get the
better of him.

And so we might play with these great subjects forever, with reasoning
as leaky as a sieve, but good enough to catch the careless or the
untrained.

One of the most interesting lectures which I ever listened to was one
before the Economic League of San Francisco on the "Dialectics of
Socialism." The lecturer was a very acute man, who would not for one
moment be deceived by the sophistry of my Socrates and Phaedo, but, who,
himself, made willing captives of his hearers by similar methods. I was
unable to hear all his address, but when I reluctantly left, it appeared
to me that he was expecting to prove that Socialism must be sound
philosophy because it was contradictory to all human observation,
experience, judgment and the dictates of sound common sense - and his
large audience was plainly enough with him.

The dialectics of the schoolmen or their equivalent are useless in
Social discussion. Social phenomena do not lend themselves to the
rigorous formulas of mathematics and logic, for the human intellect is
unable to discern and grasp all the factors of these problems. My
travesty of Plato was intended to illustrate the difficulty of close
reasoning on such topics.

Neither, on the other hand, are we to blindly follow the impulses of
emotion which lead us to jump at a conclusion, support it with what