Note 5 — INTRODUCTION.

Footnote 5: In its leading and primary use, this was a mode of debate, a duel of wits, in which two men engaged before an audience. But the same form could be used, and was used, notably by Socrates, not in an eristic spirit but as a means of awakening people to the consequences of certain admissions or first principles, and thus making vague knowledge explicit and clear. The mind being detained on proposition after proposition as assent was given to it, dialectic was a valuable instrument of instruction and exposition. But whatever the purpose of the exercise, controversial triumph, or solid grounding in the first principles—"the evolution of in-dwelling conceptions"—the central interest lay in the syllogising or reasoning together of the separately assumed or admitted propositions.