Compare Cicero, Tusc. Disp. ii. sect. 2-3-5-9. Quintilian, xii. 2-25.
In the modern world the search for truth is put out of sight. Every writer or talker professes to have already found it, and to proclaim it to others.
This process — the search for truth as an unknown — is in the modern world put out of sight. All discussion is conducted by persons who profess to have found it or learnt it, and to be in condition to proclaim it to others. Even the philosophical works of Cicero are usually pleadings by two antagonists, each of whom professes to know the truth, though Cicero does not decide between them: and in this respect they differ from the groping and fumbling of the Platonic dialogues. Of course the search for truth must go on in modern times, as it did in ancient: but it goes on silently and without notice. The most satisfactory theories have been preceded by many infructuous guesses and tentatives. The theorist may try many different hypotheses (we are told that Kepler tried nineteen) which he is forced successively to reject; and he may perhaps end without finding any better. But all these tentatives, verifying tests, doubts, and rejections, are confined to his own bosom or his own study. He looks back upon them without interest, sometimes even with disgust; least of all does he seek to describe them in detail as objects of interest to others. They are probably known to none but himself: for it does not occur to him to follow the Platonic scheme of taking another mind into partnership, and entering upon that distribution of active intellectual work which we read in the Theætêtus. There are cases in which two chemists have carried on joint researches, under many failures and disappointments, perhaps at last without success. If a record were preserved of their parley during the investigation, the grounds for testing and rejecting one conjecture, and for selecting what should be tried after it — this would be in many points a parallel to the Platonic process.
The search for truth by various interlocutors was a recognised process in the Sokratic age. Acute negative Dialectic of Sokrates.
But at Athens in the fourth century, B.C., the search for truth by two or more minds in partnership was not so rare a phenomenon. The active intellects of Athens were distributed between Rhetoric, which addressed itself to multitudes, accepted all established sentiments, and handled for the most part particular issues — and Dialectic, in which a select few debated among themselves general questions.[54] Of this Dialectic, the real Sokrates was the greatest master that Athens ever saw: he could deal as he chose (says Xenophon[55]) with all disputants: he turned them round his finger. In this process, one person set up a thesis, and the other cross-examined him upon it: the most irresistible of all cross-examiners was the real Sokrates. The nine books of Aristotle’s Topica (including the book De Sophisticis Elenchis) are composed with the object of furnishing suggestions, and indicating rules, both to the cross-examiner and to the respondent, in such Dialectic debates. Plato does not lay down any rules: but he has given us, in his dialogues of search, specimens of dialectic procedure shaped in his own fashion. Several of his contemporaries, companions of Sokrates, like him, did the same each in his own way: but their compositions have not survived.[56]
[54] The habit of supposing a general question to be undecided, and of having it argued by competent advocates before auditors who have not made up their minds — is now so disused (everywhere except in a court of law), that one reads with surprise Galen’s declaration that the different competing medical theories were so discussed in his day. His master Pelops maintained a disputation of two days with a rival; — ἡνίκα Πέλοψ μετὰ Φιλίππου τοῦ ἐμπειρικοῦ διελέχθη δυοῖν ἡμερῶν· τοῦ μὲν Πέλοπος, ὡς μὴ δυναμένης τῆς ἰατρικῆς δι’ ἐμπειρίας μόνης συστῆναι, τοῦ Φιλίππου δὲ ἐπιδεικνύντος δύνασθαι. (Galen, De Propriis Libris, c. 2, p. 16, Kühn.)
Galen notes (ib. 2, p. 21) the habit of literary men at Rome to assemble in the temple of Pax, for the purpose of discussing logical questions, prior to the conflagration which destroyed that temple.
[55] Xenophon, Memorab. i. 2.
[56] The dialogues composed by Aristotle himself were in great measure dialogues of search, exercises of argumentation pro and con (Cicero, De Finib. v. 4). “Aristoteles, ut solet, quærendi gratiâ, quædam subtilitatis suæ argumenta excogitavit in Gryllo,” &c. (Quintilian, Inst. Orat. ii. 17.)