Tempering may be called a mystery of the smith-shop; this operation has that attraction which characterises every process that is mysterious, especially such as are connected with, or belong to mechanical manipulation. A strange and perhaps fortunate habit of the mind is to be greatly interested in what is not well understood, and to disregard what is capable of plain demonstration.He left his support, swam across the smaller channel, carefully, and secured the life preserver which had dropped into a heavy clump of the grass and then had floated free of the mud, held only by the end of a tangled stringand the skin of an empty, oilskin pouch, torn and ripped to tatters, that hung to the cord.Prout rose and bowed to Hetty.Plotinus follows up his essay on the Virtues by an essay on Dialectic.498 As a method for attaining perfection, he places dialectic above ethics; and, granting that the apprehension of abstract ideas ranks higher than the performance of social duties, he is quite consistent in so doing. Not much, however, can be made of his few remarks on the subject. They seem to be partly meant for a protest against the Stoic idea that logic is an instrument for acquiring truth rather than truth itself, and also against the Stoic use or abuse of the syllogistic method. In modern phraseology, Plotinus seems to view dialectic as the immanent and eternal process of life itself, rather than as a collection of rules for drawing correct inferences from true propositions, or from propositions assumed to be true. We have seen how he regarded existence in the334 highest sense as identical with the self-thinking of the absolute Nous, and how he attempted to evolve the whole series of archetypal Ideas contained therein from the simple fact of self-consciousness. Thus he would naturally identify dialectic with the subjective reproduction of this objective evolution; and here he would always have before his eyes the splendid programme sketched in Platos Republic.499 His preference of intuitive to discursive reasoning has been quoted by Ritter as a symptom of mysticism. But here, as in so many instances, he follows Aristotle, who also held that simple abstraction is a higher operation, and represents a higher order of real existence than complex ratiocination.500