Hayagrīva: Now Socrates, as a teacher, in addition to believing in the value of insight or meditation, Socrates also believed that knowledge can be imparted from one person to another. He therefore believed in the role of a guru or teacher, which he himself was for many people. He believed also in good association amongst people who were interested in self-realization, and he followed the method known as the Socratic dialogue as a means for evoking the truth. Now, he would use a method called Socratic irony, in which he himself, Socrates, would pose himself as an ignorant person and would ask questions of his young disciples. He would never offer the answers, but would try to draw the answers out of his disciples, and this was called the mayudic (?) method. So he considered himself to be a kind of midwife—in fact his mother was a midwife—who would draw the truth from the repository in the soul. He felt that the truth was there within but had to be drawn out, and that the truth is dormant within everyone, that the individual possesses the truth previous to birth in an existence previous to earthly existence.
Prabhupāda: Yes. So almost similar to our method, because we advised, we advised in this Vedic principle, that for the truth one must approach a guru. That is the version everywhere. In Bhagavad-gītā also, same instruction is there:
