"Socrates," says Grote, "disclaimed all pretensions to wisdom. He
announced himself as a philosopher, that is, as ignorant, yet as
painfully conscious of his ignorance and anxiously searching for
wisdom as a correction to it, while most men were equally ignorant,
but unconscious of their ignorance, believed themselves to be already
wise, and delivered confident opinions without ever having analyzed the
matters on which they spoke. The conversation of Socrates was intended,
not to teach wisdom, but to raise men out of this false persuasion of
wisdom, which he believed to be the natural state of the human mind,
into that mental condition which he called philosophy.
"His 'Elenchus' made them conscious of their ignorance, and anxious to
escape from it, and prepared for mental efforts in search of knowledge;
in which search Socrates assisted them, but without declaring, and
even professing inability to declare, where the truth lay in which
this search was to end. He considered this change itself a great and
serious improvement, converting what was evil, radical, ingrained,
into evil superficial and moveable, which was a preliminary condition
to any positive acquirement. The first thing to be done was to create
searchers after truth, men who look at the subject for themselves, with
earnest attention, and make up their own individual convictions. Even
if nothing ulterior were achieved, that alone would be a great deal.
"Such was the scope of the Socratic Conversation, and such the
conception of philosophy (the peculiarity which Plato borrowed from
Socrates), which is briefly noted in the passage of the Lysis and
developed in the Platonic dialogues, especially in the Symposeum."
Observe how confidently the great master of Dialectic went into the
discussion, dealing directly all the while with the Personality of his
auditors, and driving straight through the seeming windings of the
discourse at the seats of thought and of sensibility, by his searching
humor, his delightful irony, thus making the mind the mind's guest and
querist in his suggestive colloquy. Affecting perhaps to know less than
any, he yet showed those with whom he conversed how little they knew,
while professing to know so much, convicting them of being ignorant of
their own ignorance, real wisdom beginning in humility and openness to
instruction. If he puzzled and perplexed, it was but to reduce their
egotism and ignorance, and prepare them for receiving the truths he had
to lay open in themselves. Plato, Aristotle, the German Methodists, but
define and deliver the steps of his method.