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Updated: May 3, 2025
It is necessary to observe that Plato in the Parmenides calls all that part of his Dialectic, which proceeds through opposite arguments, an exercise and wandering. The dialogues of the other kind, the Dogmatical or Didactic, teach explicitly some point of doctrine; and this they do either by laying it down in the authoritative way, or by proving it in the ways of reason and argument.
Knowledge may be so truly enriched by it that knowledge, in an ideal sense, only begins when dialectic has given some articulation to being. Without dialectic an animal might follow instinct, he might have vivid emotions, expectations, and dreams, but he could hardly be said to know anything or to guide his life with conscious intent.
With him, the idea of God is that of a logical process of thought, "ever unfolding itself, but never unfolded," a dialectic movement rather than a Divine Being, which realizes itself, and reaches a state of self-consciousness in man.
These new discoveries were the attainments of Greece in the natural sciences and in logic: they extended the scope of dialectic and stimulated the rise of metaphysical theory: the latter, in combination with ecclesiastical dogma and Greek science, became such a system of thought as that expounded in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas.
Physics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with our acquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by the shock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions and assumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give us still greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things, remains merely virtual.
If they both explained themselves by bringing forward, besides the dialectic proof, also an historical and economic one for their contentions, the answer is that historic proof cannot be brought forward for Proudhon's synthetic conception of property or for Marx's method of production, since history only concerns itself with the past or the present; whereas such conditions as they imagine exist only in the future, and can only be derived from the past or present conditions by the dialectic method, and only can be assumed as hypotheses.
The Republic is an enlargement of the lessons of the Politikus without the dialectic discussion. The postulate of the One Wise man is repeated in KRATYLUS, on the unpromising subject of Language or the invention of Names. The PHILEBUS has a decidedly ethical character. It propounds for enquiry the Good, the Summum Bonum.
His dramatic experiments, like Queen Mary, are not, on the whole, successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the poet who has written, upon one hand, Guinevere and the Passing of Arthur, and upon the other the homely dialectic monologue of the Northern Farmer. Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning is dark meat.
I feel convinced that prudence is not so simple a matter as appears; in fact that it involves the whole ethical dialectic. I find you, let us say, eating an apple with evident relish; and I ask you why. If you are candid, and free from pedantry, you will doubtless reply that it is because you like to. In this particular connection I can conceive no profounder utterance.
Dialectic, logic, and morals lose their authority and become inept if they trespass upon the realm of physics and try to disclose existences; while physics is a mere idea in the realm of poetic meditation.
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