His book is a kind of encyclopaedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture; and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at that early age.

It was at this period that I read, for the first time, some of the most important dialogues of Plato, in particular the _Gorgias_, the _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 under the guidance of popular phraseology.
The close, searching _elenchus_ by which the man of vague generalities is constrained either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms, or to confess that he does not know what he is talking about; the perpetual testing of all general statements by particular instances; the siege in form which is laid to the meaning of large abstract terms, by fixing upon some still larger class-name which includes that and more, and dividing down to the thing sought--marking out its limits and definition by a series of accurately drawn distinctions between it and each of the cognate objects which are successively parted off from it -- all this, as an education for precise thinking, is inestimable, and all this, even at that age, took such hold of me that it became part of my own mind.