Did you know Socrates, born of a midwife mother, described himself as a midwife of thought?
Have you never heard that I am the son of a midwife...and that I practice the same trade? It is not known that I possess this skill, so the ignorant world describes me in other terms: As an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity...
The only difference [between my trade and that of midwives] is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is experiencing birth pangs. And the highest achievement of my art is the power to try by every test to decide whether the offspring of a young man's thought is a false phantom or is something imbued with life and truth.
I am like the midwife, in that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom. The common reproach is true, that, though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in…