EXAMPLE OF SOCRATIC QUESTIONING.--As an example of Socratic questioning may be noted the following taken from Plato's _Minos_. Socrates has questioned his companion concerning the nature of Law and has received the answer, "Law is the decree of the city." To show his companion the inadequacy of this definition, Socrates engages with him in the following dialogue:
_Socrates_: Justice and law, are highly honourable; injustice and lawlessness, highly dishonourable; the former preserves cities, the latter ruins them?
_Socrates_: Well, then! we must consider law as something honourable; and seek after it, under the assumption that it is a good thing. You defined law to be the decree of the city: Are not some decrees good, others evil?
_Socrates_: But we have already said that law is not evil?
_Socrates_: It is incorrect therefore to answer, as you did broadly, that law is the decree of the city. An evil decree cannot be law.
Having shown his pupil the fallacy of his first definition, Socrates proceeds to teach him that only what is right is lawful. This part of the dialogue proceeds as follows:
_Socrates_: Those who know, must of necessity hold the same opinion with each other, on matters which they know: always and everywhere?
_Socrates_: Physicians write respecting matters of health what they account to be true, and these writings of theirs are the medical laws?
_Socrates_: The like is true respecting the laws of farming, the laws of gardening, the laws of cookery. All these are the writings of persons, knowing in each of the respective pursuits?
_Socrates_: In like manner, what are the laws respecting the government of a city? Are they not the writings of those who know how to govern--kings, statesmen, and men of superior excellence?
_Socrates_: Knowing men like these will not write differently from each other about the same things, nor change what they have once written. If, then, we see some doing this, are we to declare them knowing or ignorant?
_Socrates_: Whatever is right, therefore, we may pronounce to be lawful in medicine, gardening, or cookery; whatever is not right, not to be lawful but lawless. And the like in treatises respecting just and unjust, prescribing how the city is to be administered. That which is right, is the regal law; that which is not right, is not so, but only seems to be law in the eyes of the ignorant, being in truth lawless.