Irony concerns only a manner of speaking in relation to people; without this per sonal direction, the essential movement of thought is dialectic, and Plato was so far from treating the dialectic kl in itself (fiir sich let alone irony, as the ultimate factor and as the Idea itself that, on the contrary, he ended the to and fro of thought, and particularly of subjective opinion, by submerging it in the substantiality of the Idea.