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“You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond.”

“And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction applied to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, the phenomena of-“

“What?”

“I can’t tell you; or, rather, I will not. I have my own opinion about what those trees and stones are; but it will require a few years’ more verification before I tell.”

“Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant state of mind.”

“Why not? Can truth do anything but conquer?”

“Of course-assuming, as every one does, that the truth is with you.”

“My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be a far better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use his Common Sense.”

“Common Sense? That really sounds something like a bathos, after the great big Greek word which you have been propounding to me as the cure for all my doubts.”

“What? Are you about to ‘gib’ after all, just as I was flattering myself that I had broken you in to go quietly in harness?”

“I am very much minded to do so. The truth is, I cannot bring myself to believe that the universal panacea lies in an obscure and ancient scientific method.”

“Obscure and ancient? Did I not just say that any man might be a dialectician? Did Socrates ever appeal to any faculty but the Common Sense of man as man, which exists just as much in England now, I presume, as it did in Athens in his day? Does he not, in pursuance of that method of his, draw his arguments and illustrations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, from dogs, kettles, fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace? Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of God’s image in him, and in every man? And has not my complaint against Mr. Windrush’s school been, that they will not do this; that they will not accept the ground which is common to men as men, but disregard that part of the ‘Vox Populi’ which is truly ‘Vox Dei,’ for that which is ‘Vox Diaboli’-for private sentiments, fancies, and aspirations; and so casting away the common sense of mankind, build up each man, on the pin’s point of his own private judgment, his own inverted pyramid?”

“But are you not asking me to do just the same, when you propose to me to start as a Scientific Dialectician?”

“Why, what are Dialectics, or any other scientific method, but conscious common sense? And what is common sense, but unconscious scientific method? Every man is a dialectician, be he scholar or boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he does not understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expression of them, by that Reason which is at once common to men, and independent of them.”

“As M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it. Well- I prefer the unconscious method. I have as little faith as Mr. Carlyle would have in saying: ‘Go to, let us make’-an induction about words, or anything else. It seems to me no very hopeful method of finding out facts as they are.”

“Certainly; provided you mean any particular induction, and not a general inductive and severely-inquiring habit of mind; that very ‘Go to’ being a fair sign that you have settled beforehand what the induction shall be; in plain English, that you have come to your conclusion already, and are now looking about for facts to prove it. But is it any wiser to say: ‘Go to, I will be conscious of being unconscious of being conscious of my own forms of thought’? For that is what you do say, when, having read Plato, and knowing his method, and its coincidence with Common Sense, you determine to ignore it on common-sense questions.”