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Socratic   /səkrˈætɪk/   Listen
Socratic

adjective
1.
Of or relating to Socrates or to his method of teaching.



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"Socratic" Quotes from Famous Books



... was therefore love for the universal, and not love for an individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception of love. Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own being. It had an alien purpose: the knowledge of things divine, by a later period Christianised and understood ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... work called Near Home; or, Europe Described, published by Hatchards in the fifties (though my friend, Mr. Arthur Humphreys, denies all knowledge of it), I can recall many stereos of dialectic cast in a Socratic mould:— ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... or the land where the Spartan exile came to dwell, or the Sirens' home, let him devote his early years to poesy, and let his spirit drink in with happy omen a draught from the Maeonian fount. Thereafter, when his soul is full of the lore of the Socratic school, let him give himself free rein and brandish the weapons of great Demosthenes. Next let the band of Roman authors throng him round, and, but newly freed from the music of Greece, suffuse his soul ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... on, while the soul of Ctesippus, released by sleep from its mortal envelop, flew after them, greedily absorbing the tones of the clear Socratic speech. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold, unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his subjects he had the very strongest sympathy—with Spinoza (as already with Heine) as a ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... self-assertion without which a Scot ceases to be a Scot, he had fastened upon those winter months with Julian Wemyss to fill in the lacunes of Dominie McAll's instruction. A good good deal of classics, daily readings in the French and German tongues, conversation after the Socratic method—these were the pillars of Stair's temple of learning at the Bothy. And because the root of the matter had always been in him—which is the determination to excel—he progressed with a rapidity that ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... grope for the lamp on his desk, and as its light struck up into his face Bernald's sense of the rareness of his opportunity increased. He couldn't have said why, for the face, with its ridged brows, its shabby greyish beard and blunt Socratic nose, made no direct appeal to the eye. It seemed rather like a stage on which remarkable things might be enacted, like some shaggy moorland landscape dependent for form and expression on the clouds rolling over it, and the bursts of light between; and one of these flashed out in the smile ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... laugh to remember, "a rich Homeric laugh, round and full, musical and jocund." "At a droll suggestion of Mr. Huxley's, or a humorous doubt insinuated in the musical tones of the President of the Royal Society (Sir Joseph Hooker), the eyes twinkle under the massive overhanging brows, the Socratic head, as Professor Tyndall loves to call it, is thrown back, and over the long white beard rolls out such a laugh as we ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... question and answer, while Plato developed it metaphysically in connexion with his doctrine of "Ideas" as the art of analysing ideas in themselves and in relation to the ultimate idea of the Good (Repub. vii.). The special function of the so-called "Socratic dialectic" was to show the inadequacy of popular beliefs. Aristotle himself used "dialectic," as opposed to "science," for that department of mental activity which examines the presuppositions lying at the back of all the particular ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... This Socratic reply made me see how misplaced my remark had been, and I felt some confusion. Finding a book to my hand I opened it ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... some measure be preserved in the following survey; but regard for the continuity of the tradition of the doctrine will entail certain deviations. It will, that is to say, be natural to divide the material into four groups: the pre-Socratic philosophy; the Sophists; Socrates and the Socratics; Hellenistic philosophy. Each of these groups has a philosophical character of its own, and it will be seen that this character also makes itself felt in the relation to the gods of the popular ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann

... a country doctor's duties to learn that view of things, may I ask, sir?" said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic {Greek word: irony} with such well-assumed simplicity ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... been pleasant to Horace to find even one among his friends illustrating in his life this modest Socratic creed; for he is so constantly enforcing it, in every variety of phrase and metaphor, that while we must conclude that he regarded it as the one doctrine most needful for his time, we must equally conclude that he found ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... The world will see its ears in a glass no longer. So we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of asses come but once a year, when all the days are foaled of one mother? O world! world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's sign ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... an incident or two which he narrated as having impressed themselves permanently on the memory of his youth. He once asked his father what he thought was the oldest of all things. The father replied, after the Socratic method, by putting another question: 'And what do you yourself suppose is the oldest of all things?' The boy was not successful in his answers, thereon the old astronomer took up a small stone from the garden walk: 'There, my child, there is the oldest of all the things ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... to suggest that the latter are in any way indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For, while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very poor except in ideas; a ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... the art of education. At first I talked glibly enough of what I intended to do, and he listened sympathetically and helpfully, with a little quizzical smile in his eyes as I outlined my ambitious plans. And when I had run the gamut of my dreams, he took his turn, and, in true Socratic fashion, yet without making me feel in the least that I was only a dreamer after all, he refashioned my theories. One by one the little card houses that I had built up were deftly, smoothly, gently, but completely demolished. I did ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... that Mrs. Atterbury had spent many of her recent summers there. Their devotion to the Confederacy must be shown by deeds. It was true they had given twenty thousand dollars to the cause, but what was that to threefold millionaires? General Lee, their kinsman, had shaken his Socratic head solemnly when Rosa, at the War Department, told him, as an excellent joke, the strange chance that had brought Vincent's college chum and his family under the kind ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... Sciapodes were a people who dwelt on the borders of the Atlantic. Their feet were larger than the rest of their bodies, and to shield themselves from the sun's rays they held up one of their feet as an umbrella.—By giving the Socratic philosophers the name of Sciapodes here Aristophanes wishes to convey that they are walking in the dark and busying themselves with ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes

... the chase, make it prudent to present it in as startling a shape as possible; in order that, the attention being thoroughly roused, the final assent may not be languid or easily forgotten. Suffer me, therefore, Phaedrus, in a Socratic way, to extort an assent from your own arguments—allow me to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... Tommy's threat has often been couched in modern language by grandsons of the boys from whom the Socratic Mr. Day wrote to expose the evils of too luxurious an education. His method of compilation of facts to be taught may best be given in the words of his Preface: "All who have been conversant in the education of very young children, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... inquiry, searching inquiry, exhaustive inquiry; narrow search, strict search; study &c. (consideration) 451. scire facias[Lat], ad referendum; trial. questioning &c. v.; interrogation, interrogatory; interpellation; challenge, examination, cross-examination, catechism; feeler, Socratic method, zetetic philosophy[obs3]; leading question; discussion &c. (reasoning) 476. reconnoitering, reconnaissance; prying &c. v.; espionage, espionnage[Fr]; domiciliary visit, peep behind the curtain; lantern of Diogenes. question, query, problem, desideratum, point to be solved, porism[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... sore-hearted unbelief of the man no nearer than the clangour of negro kettles affects the eclipse of the sun. Falconer stood watching his opportunity. Nor was the eager disputant long in affording him one. Socratic fashion, Falconer asked him a question, and was answered; followed it with another, which, after a little hesitation, was likewise answered; then asked a third, the ready answer to which involved ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... was beginning when her mother, familiar with the Socratic nature of her daughter's conversation and its exhaustive effect upon the interlocutor, interposed a remark which guided the current of talk out of heavenly channels and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... jokers. Have you ever watched an elderly male or female—an elderly "party," so to speak, who begins to find out that some young wag of the company is "chaffing" him? Have you ever tried the sarcastic or Socratic method with a child? Little simple he or she, in the innocence of the simple heart, plays some silly freak, or makes some absurd remark, which you turn to ridicule. The little creature dimly perceives that you are making fun of him, writhes, blushes, grows uneasy, bursts into tears,—upon my word ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... what I got: but my rule always was—Fight fair; fall soft; know when you've got enough; and don't cry out when you've got it: but just go home; train again; and say—better luck next fight." And so old Mark's sermon ended (as most of them did) in somewhat Socratic allegory, savouring rather of the market than of the study; but Elsley understood him, and looked up with ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... The Socratic method can be employed to great advantage in handling difficult inferences. The children discuss in class the principle under which an inference comes, and the teacher guides the discussion, when necessary, by skillfully placed questions designed to ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne

... shadowy Marlow, a "cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic manner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh. In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourth before we get a glimpse of Falk. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... important uses of this method is found in inductive teaching. The famous "Socratic method" was simply the question-and-answer method applied by Socrates to teaching new truths. This noted teacher would, by a series of skillful questions calculated to call forth what the pupil already ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts

... at this point of the chase, make it prudent to present it in as startling a shape as possible; in order that, the attention being thoroughly roused, the final assent may not be languid or easily forgotten. Suffer me, therefore, Phdrus, in a Socratic way, to extort an assent from your own arguments—allow me to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... in the soul we need, The old Socratic justice in the heart, The golden rule become the people's creed When years of training have performed their part For thus alone in home and church and mart Can evil perish ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... were none of the brightest, had got himself, without perceiving it, completely into a premunire, by the Socratic mode of reasoning adopted by his more skilful antagonist, who at parting once more ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... a Socratic oath—I really do not see that Mr. Rogers differs much from Theodore Parker. If a man cannot hack a bit of stone or timber without the Spirit of God, Mr. Rogers will have hard work to convince me, that any one can make a rifled cannon without the ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... the Socratic circle turned in a different direction. Xenophon, an exile from his country, a brilliant soldier and adventurer as well as a man of letters, is perhaps the first Greek on record who openly lost interest in the city. He thought less about cities and constitutions ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... Heraclitus ( c. 540-480 BC) pre-Socratic philosopher, who believed in a cosmic justice where sinners would be punished and haunted by the Erinyes, (the furies) ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... something, too, in its order, by which it resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master. I will illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each. In Aristophanes's "Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic Phrontisterium, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the moon only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm about his ears with lunar exactness, (literally so, since the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Protagoras, and the Republic. There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, the understanding which has made up all its bundles of associations ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... he makes are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy of the arts. From his brother Lysias (contra ...
— The Republic • Plato

... His first speech as a general; a fine one; a spirit of athleticism breathes through it. Cf. Memorabilia for a similar rationalisation of virtuous self-restraint (e.g. Mem., Bk. I. c. 5, 6; Bk. III. c. 8). Paleyan somewhat, perhaps Socratic, not devoid of common sense. What is the end and aim of our training? Not only for an earthly aim, but for a high spiritual ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... to—he (bless his heart) now and then apologizing for his copiousness, little dreaming that we are all better men for hearing him; that his great gray head and clear kindly eye ("His mild and magnificent eye": whose is that phrase?) are to us a symbol of Socratic virtue and power; that there is not one of us who, after an hour or so with him, does not depart with private resolutions of honour and fidelity to wisdom. How he irrigates his subject, whatever ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... adapted this simple device to our occasion by thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... adventures of the preceding day: "I carried you yesterday," said he to Harley, "to visit the mad; let me introduce you to-night, at supper, to one of the wise: but you must not look for anything of the Socratic pleasantry about him; on the contrary, I warn you to expect the spirit of a Diogenes. That you may be a little prepared for his extraordinary manner, I will let you into ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... heard concerning a life after death, as having reference to opinions and hypotheses which he had collected from the ancients and moderns. When the three strangers had done speaking, the sophi were all in amazement; and those who were of the Socratic school, said, that from the news they had heard from the earth, it was quite evident, that the interiors of human minds had been successively closed; and that in the world at this time a belief in what is false shines as truth, and an infatuated ingenuity ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... mind, occurred during his voyage to Egypt. The savants on board his ship, "L'Orient," were discussing one of those questions which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... end was regarded no higher than a convenient machine, which could turn out poems and maxims at bidding. Thus, knowledge was conceived as identical with its practical application in life; and this Socratic doctrine found its greatest exponent in the Chinese philosopher, Wan Yang Ming, who never wearies of repeating, "To know and to act are one and ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... as essential, but merely as suggestive and perhaps useful to teachers who prefer the Socratic method. They might also serve to call the attention of students to some point which they ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... approached soon passed, as none of them noticed the flowers she wore over a very happy heart. Demi meantime was escorting certain venerable personages about the college, and helping his grandfather entertain them with discussion of the Socratic method of instruction, Pythagoras, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and the rest, whom he devoutly wished at the bottom of the Red Sea, and no wonder, for his head and his heart were full of love and roses, hopes and fears. He piloted the 'potent, grave, and reverend seigniors' safely down to Plumfield ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... of the philosophy of Socrates in the Memorabilia of Xenophon than in Plato: that is, there is less of what does not belong to Socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by, Plato, are more Socratic.[1] ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... I infer, that you have need of me before I pass by the Socratic method," he suggested, still with that pale smile set in granite "I shall depend on you to let me know at what precise hour you would like to order an epitaph written for me. Say the word at your convenience, and within five minutes your bulletin concerning ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... silence and known opposition to the Epicurean tenets, have thought that Jerome referred to Q. Cicero the orator's brother, but for this there is no authority. The poem is entitled De Rerum Natura, an equivalent for the Greek peri physeos, the usual title of the pre-Socratic philosophers' works. The form, viz. a poem in heroic hexameters, containing a carefully reasoned exposition, in which regard was had above all to the claims of the subject-matter, was borrowed from ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... countess, in one hand A sky-blue string which held a pug, With the other a fiery face she fanned; A Yankee with a soft felt hat; A Coptic priest from Ararat; An English girl with cheeks of rose; A Nihilist with Socratic nose; Paddy from Cork with baggage light And pockets stuffed with dynamite; A haughty Southern Readjuster, Wrapped in his pride and linen duster; Two noisy New York stockbrokers, And twenty British globe-trotters. To my disgust and vast surprise, ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay

... "apprehension," of "conception," of "intuition." Our knowledge is "clear" or "obscure"; an oration is "brilliant"; an emotion is "sweet" or "bitter." What wonder that, as we read over the fragments that have come down to us from the Pre-Socratic philosophers, we should be struck by the fact that they sometimes leave out altogether and sometimes touch lightly upon a number of those things that we regard to-day as peculiarly within the province of the philosopher. They busied themselves with the world as ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... shaken off none of the grip of tradition, in which his book and college training had placed him. His mind still had greater faith in things because Aristotle or Augustine said them, than because they are true.[124] If the end of education be to teach independence of mind, the Socratic temper, the love of pushing into unexplored areas—intellectual curiosity in a word—Oxford had done none of all this for him. In every field of thought and life he started from the principle of authority; it fitted in with his reverential ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... not? I have a son, and would be glad to lay down my burden and kiss his hand as he sat on the throne. Are all fathers such as I? Nay, and are all mothers such as mine? I know not; and if there be any position that opens a man's mind to the Socratic wisdom of knowing his own ignorance it is that in which my life has been spent. But it can hardly be that the curious veiled opposition which from about this time began to exist between my mother and my sister was altogether singular. It was a feeling not inconsistent ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... mother's guilt, and a justification of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign, over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but they have surely increased the value of those later ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... through the jungle of Kantian theory, with Koerner's critical assistance, and then to return and convert the trail into an agreeable road for the general reader. In the end he chose a different form than that of the Socratic dialogue for the literary presentation of his doctrine, but what he wrote subsequently was based partly at least upon conclusions that he had reached through his correspondence with Koerner; wherefore it will be well to look ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... as ready to learn from the practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence so well as these moments of free discursive ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Athens about B.C. 430, and died probably in 355. He was an Athenian gentleman who in his early-manhood was an intimate member of the Socratic circle. In 401 he joined the expedition of Cyrus, recorded in the "Anabasis," and did not again take up his residence in Athens. The "Anabasis" must be introduced by an historical note. In the year 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian war was brought to a close by a peace establishing the Lacedaemonian supremacy ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Socratic theory is well remarked by Grote to be, that while he resolved all virtue into knowledge or wisdom, and all vice into ignorance or folly, he omitted to notice what is not less essential to virtue, the proper condition of the passions, desires, &c., and limited ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here—we ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... IRONY, SOCRATIC, the name given to a practice of Socrates with pretentious people; "affecting ignorance and pretending to solicit information, he was in the habit of turning round upon the sciolist and confounding his presumption, both by the unlooked-for consequences he educed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... It is more probable that he wished to designate his life as a drama; in this sense, at any rate, the words were accepted by his friends. Schindler says emphatically: "The last days were in all respects remarkable, and he looked forward to death with truly Socratic ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven

... embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see little point. I told him so, and he laughed. "'I am not sure that I am very clear myself. But yes—there IS a point. Supposing you knew-not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... the dominating human motives to but one elementary motive. Belfort Bax, the well-known English socialist writer, makes a very clever argument against the determinist position by comparing it with the attempts of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce nature to one element. His remarks are so pertinent that a brief abstract of his argument is here quoted in his own language. He says in "Outlooks from a ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... feeling, but such a principle is really nothing else than an obscurely conceived metaphysic which inheres in every man's reasoning faculty; as the teacher will easily find who tries to catechize his pupils in the Socratic method about the imperative of duty and its application to the moral judgement of his actions. The mode of stating it need not be always metaphysical, and the language need not necessarily be scholastic, unless the pupil is to ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant

... illustrations of serious propositions, partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, in an odd conception, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... Mendelssohn still professed Orthodox Judaism. A paradox this to Maimon, and roundly denied as impossible when he first heard of it. A man who could enter the lists with the doughtiest champions of Christendom, whose German prose was classical, who could philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion of Plato—such a man a creature of the Ghetto! Doubtless he took his Judaism in some vague Platonic way; it was impossible to imagine him the literal bond-slave of that minute ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... by mixing brandy in his wine, he decoyed this pedagogue into a debauch, during which his caution forsook him, and he exposed himself to the censure of the company. Sometimes, when the conversation turned upon intricate subjects, he practised upon him the Socratic method of confutation, and, under pretence of being informed, by an artful train of puzzling questions ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... affirmed. Truly Aristotle, who had his surname from Stagira, and Xenocrates of Chalcedon, his companion, through the genius, almost Divine, which Nature had put into Aristotle, knowing this end by means of the Socratic method, with the Academic file, as it were, reduced Moral Philosophy to perfection, and especially Aristotle. And since Aristotle began to reason while walking hither and thither, they were called, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... Such is Neoplatonism. The pre-Socratic philosophers, declared by the followers of Socrates to be childish, had freed themselves from theology, that is, the mythology of the poets, and constructed a philosophy from the observation of nature, without troubling themselves about ethics and religion. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... that this is merely a personal opinion of the writer and might well have been prefaced by the Socratic "it seems to me." Too much criticism reminds us of wine-tasting—Mr. So-and-So likes port, Mr. So-and-So sherry. The object of fair-minded appreciation is to understand clearly just what each composer set out to do, i.e., what ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... who conduct the higher Analysis of Ethical Philosophy.—Pyrrho demonstrates the Uncertainty of Knowledge.—Inevitable Passage into tranquil Indifference, Quietude, and Irreligion, as recommended by Epicurus.—Decomposition of the Socratic and Platonic Systems in the later Academies.—Their Errors and Duplicities.—End of the Greek Age of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... shall be conscious of their duties, and useful to families, to their fatherland, and to humanity." [5] We are therefore in the ambit of secondary schools. The lesson we cite is a practical application of the principle of giving lessons by means of interrogation (Socratic method), and deals with a moral ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... original as that is. Whoever accepts Bacon's doctrine of cause must accept at the same time his theory of the way in which the cause may be sifted out from among the phenomena. It is evident that the Socratic search for the essence by an analysis of instances—an induction ending in a definition—has a strong resemblance to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... countries,—they know all about the newest scientific discoveries (which, by-the-by, they smile at blandly, as though these last were mere child's play), and they discuss our modern social problems and theories with a Socratic-like incisiveness and composure such as our parliamentary howlers would do well to imitate. Their doctrine is.. but I will not bore you by a theological disquisition,—enough to say it is founded on Christianity, and that at present I don't quite know what to make ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... adviser, of a certain Victorian novelist. The Canon, who came of an old Oxfordshire family, which for three hundred years at least had served the Church or State, was himself the author of two volumes of "Socratic Dialogues." He had bequeathed to his son—a permanent official in the Foreign Office—if not his literary talent, the tradition at all events of culture. This tradition had in turn been handed on to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... victory. A great contemporary of his, whom he never met, and whom, if he had met, he would probably have insulted—Benjamin Franklin, to wit—preferred winning the case to winning the argument. While still a boy, he tells us, he was fascinated by the Socratic method, and instead of expressing opinions asked leading questions. He ceased to use words like "certainly," "undoubtedly," or anything that gave the air of positiveness to an opinion, and said "I apprehend," or "I conceive," a thing to be so ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes journals or autobiography. It is an introspection which talks; a psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most trivial, and the ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... do to the mind of a child. It was long before the new world of ideas which had been sought after with such passionate yearning was set in order and made ready for use. To us the fallacies which arise in the pre-Socratic philosophy are trivial and obsolete because we are no longer liable to fall into the errors which are expressed by them. The intellectual world has become better assured to us, and we are less likely to be imposed upon by ...
— Euthydemus • Plato

... from theme to theme, Discuss'd the books to love or hate, Or touch'd the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream; ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... then for nearly a mile, when the man of the Socratic Method had an idea and burst out with, "But Lordy gracious, you do not need a mongoose to kill the snakes a fellow sees who has delirium tremens—for they are only imaginary snakes!" "I know," said the owner of the box, tapping his precious package gently, "I know that delirium-tremens snakes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... stupidity of those who dwell in "homes," and into the arms of the submerged by the coldness and heartlessness of those who walk prosperously upon the surface; the figure of this fantastic child, this satyr-saint with the Socratic forehead, this tearful mummer among the armies of the outcasts, will rise up and write ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... Dorado. But as he possessed, according to the usual phrase, more wit than money, and no one will discount a check from the aforesaid wit on change, the zeal of Epictetus Moonshine, some time after the breaking up of the Socratic institution for benefitting the human race, so much got the better of self-love, that he committed several petty larcenies in hopes of being transported thither; but whether his courage or his luck failed him, certain it is ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... humorous details,—discerning the symptoms of labour, carrying the child round the hearth, fearing that Theaetetus will bite him, comparing his conceptions to wind-eggs, asserting an hereditary right to the occupation. There is also a serious side to the image, which is an apt similitude of the Socratic theory of education (compare Republic, Sophist), and accords with the ironical spirit in which the wisest of men delights to ...
— Theaetetus • Plato

... upon the same line, namely, the practical usefulness of the virtue, the knowledge, or the method, for increasing the probability of a practical success in worldly affairs. Among the articles inculcating morality which he used to put into his newspaper was a Socratic Dialogue, "tending to prove that whatever might be his parts and abilities, a vicious man could not properly be ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... became staff-captain, in place of Weir, who went home. To all the Leicestershires, and to me especially, Thorpe's going was a heavy loss. 'I could have better spared a better man.' I must henceforth botanize alone. No longer could he teach young subalterns to 'practise music'—in the Socratic sense, that the best music was philosophy—to be repaid with their affectionate regard as 'Daddy.' He wrote to me, a month after his going, that he was becoming as 'great a horseman as John Wesley'; and he lost weight during that summer. He lost a good deal his ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, that first essential of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric buffoon, Lucian is certainly the Socratic. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... write me, there were two Platos; I carry in me all the flowers of Socratic talk. But Panaetius concluded me to be spurious; yes, he who concluded that the soul was mortal, would ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... dialogue in which most of them are conveyed. Plato, indeed, and Xenophon, had, before his time, been even more strictly dramatic in their compositions; but they professed to be recording the sentiments of an individual, and the Socratic mode of argument could hardly be displayed in any other shape. Of that interrogative and inductive conversation, however, Cicero affords but few specimens;[200] the nature of his dialogue being as different from that of the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... had scarcely missed an evening at the "Chapter" for forty-five years. His strictures on the events of the day were thought severe but able, and as a friend of liberty he had argued all through the times of Wilkes and the French and American wars. His Socratic arguments were very amusing. Mr. Murray, the great referee of the Wittinagemot, was a Scotch minister, who generally sat at the "Chapter" reading papers from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. He was known to have read straight through every morning and evening paper ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... Manlius' year with me, Whate'er you bring us, plaint or jest, Or passion and wild revelry, Or, like a gentle wine-jar, rest; Howe'er men call your Massic juice, Its broaching claims a festal day; Come then; Corvinus bids produce A mellower wine, and I obey. Though steep'd in all Socratic lore He will not slight you; do not fear. They say old Cato o'er and o'er With wine his honest heart would cheer. Tough wits to your mild torture yield Their treasures; you unlock the soul Of wisdom and its ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. For instance, we might say, "Do you ever speak of being free from good health, or free from a good character, or free from prosperity?" I fancy not; and yet copiously ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... which had begun when Socrates five centuries before had fought his battles with the sophists. Rhetoric appeals to the emotions and obscures the issues (such had been Socrates's position); the way to elicit truth is by short question and answer. The Socratic method, illustrated by Plato, had become, if not the only, the accredited instrument of philosophers, who, so far as they are genuine, are truth-seekers; Rhetoric had been left to the legal persons whose object is not truth but victory. Lucian's abandonment of Rhetoric was accordingly in some sort ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... should find themselves confronted with men, not personally involved, who control enough facts and have the dialectical skill to sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and elaboration. It is the Socratic dialogue, with all of Socrates's energy for breaking through words to meanings, and something more than that, because the dialectic in modern life must be done by men who have explored the environment as well ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... "as a system of stoical endurance," "a kind of stoicism." But we must not let Xenophon, who is a Socratic, talk of the Stoa. If we knew certainly that the chapter was a much later production, the ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon

... of the world'—and in which the learned Hippias and the grammarian Prodicus had also shared, as well as Alcibiades and Critias, both of whom said a few words—in the presence of a distinguished company consisting of disciples of Protagoras and of leading Athenians belonging to the Socratic circle. The dialogue commences with a request on the part of Hippocrates that Socrates would introduce him to the celebrated teacher. He has come before the dawn had risen—so fervid is his zeal. Socrates moderates his excitement and advises him ...
— Protagoras • Plato

... harmony, in prose or in verse, and if in verse, either in some one or in a plurality of metres. This form of imitation is to this day without a name. We have no common name for a mime of Sophron or Xenarchus and a Socratic Conversation; and we should still be without one even if the imitation in the two instances were in trimeters or elegiacs or some other kind of verse—though it is the way with people to tack on 'poet' to the name of a metre, and talk of ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle

... nearly a twelvemonth, I returned by a natural impulse to the Greek authors of antiquity; I read with new pleasure the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, a large portion of the tragic and comic theatre of Athens, and many interesting dialogues of the Socratic school. Yet in the luxury of freedom I began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every book, and an object to every inquiry; the preface of a new edition announced my design, and I dropped without reluctance from the age of Plato to that of Justinian. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... directed the mind towards the idea that morality is the sole object worthy of knowledge, and that the ancient religions were immoral, or of such a dubious morality as to deserve the desertion and scorn of honest men. Christianity fought paganism with the arguments of the disciples of Socrates—with Socratic arguments; modern philosophies and creeds are all impregnated with Socraticism. When it was observed that the Sophists form the most important epoch in the history of ancient philosophy, it was because they taught ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... dilemma, no doubt, is the thing To stagger Big Bounce, in a fashion Socratic. I fancy I know now to plant a sharp sting, The success of my bayonet-play is emphatic. Remember a picture I once chanced to see, A Pompeian sentinel posed at a portal, And "faithful to death" though fire threatened. That's Me! As my country's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various

... to the best restaurant in the neighbourhood, and the three adventurers made a less Socratic dinner ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... The Socratic and dogmatic dialogues—the Phaedo, the Gorgias, the Symposium, Protagoras, Ion, Phaedrus—abound in allegories, aphorisms, and in aspirations toward an ideal, more or less clearly defined, which end, however, not by any means in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... that God is the Whole, and that every man is a necessary part of the Whole, has no need to placate or please an intangible Something. All he has to do is to be true to his own nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on Compensation." This intelligence in which we are bathed rights every wrong, equalizes every injustice, balances ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard



Words linked to "Socratic" :   pre-Socratic, Socratic method, Socrates



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