THE WORLD'S EPOCHMAKER! EDITED BY OLIPHANT SMEATON, LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class THE WORLD'S EPOCH-MAKERS EDITED BY OLIPHANT SMEATON Socrates By Rev. J. T. Forbes, M.A. THE FOLLOWING VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES ARE NOW READY : CRANMER AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. By A. D. INNES, M.A. WESLEY AND METHODISM. By F. J. SNELL, M.A. LUTHER AND THE GERMAN REFORMATION. By Principal T. M. LINDSAY, D.D. BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM. By ARTHUR LILLIE. WILLIAM HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK. By JAMES SIME, M.A., F.R.S.E. FRANCIS AND DOMINIC. By Prof. J. HERKLESS, D.D. SAVONAROLA. By Rev. G. M'HARDY, D.D. ANSELM AND HIS WORK. By Rev. A. C. WELCH, M.A., B.D. MUHAMMAD AND HIS POWER. By P. DE LACY JOHNSTONE, M.A.(Oxon.) ORIGEN AND GREEK PATRISTIC THEOLOGY. By Rev. WILLIAM FAIRWEATHER, M.A. THE MEDICI AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. By OLIPHANT SMEATON, M.A. PLATO. By Prof. D. G. RITCHIE, M.A., LL.D. PASCAL AND THE PORT ROYALISTS. By WILLIAM CLARK, LL.D., D.C.L. EUCLID: HIS LIFE AND SYSTEM. By THOMAS SMITH, D.D., LL.D. HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM. By Prof. R. MACKINTOSH, D.D. DAVID HUME AND HIS INFLUENCE ON PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY. By Prof. JAMES ORR, D.D. ROUSSEAU AND NATURALISM IN LIFE AND THOUGHT. By Prof. W. H. HUDSON, M.A. DESCARTES, SPINOZA, AND THE NEW PHILOSOPHY. By Prof. JAMES IVERACH, D.D. SOCRATES. By Rev. J. T. FORBES, M.A. THE WORLD'S EPOCH-MAKERS Socrates By Rev. J. T. Forbes, M.A. Edinburgh. T. & T. Clark Printed by MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, FOR T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED. NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNKR'S SONS. TO MY WIFE PREFACE AMONG works dealing specially with the subject of this Manual the most serviceable to me have been those of Grote, Fouillee, and Piat. Of histories I would name those of Zeller, Gomperz, Janet et Seailles, Windelband, Fairbanks, and particularly Burnet, whom I have closely followed in his account of pre-Socratic thought. I am specially indebted to the teaching and writings of Dr. Edward Caird, to Miss Wedgwood's book, The Moral Ideal, and to the introductions and essays in Jowett's translation of Plato, of which con- stant use has been made. For the quotations from Xenophon, I have used the renderings of Mr. Dakyns, whose praise it is to have done for the slighter author, in great measure, what Jowett has done for Plato. The poetical illustrations have been given in the trans- lations of Way, Plumptre, D'Arcy Thompson, and Miss Swanwick, and much help has been received from the introductory matter of the first three, especially that of Mr. Way. I have tried carefully to acknowledge my indebtedness to other writers, but in dealing with ground so often worked over it is difficult to be original. The need of a list of books appears to be obviated by the numerous references given. vii * CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY ...... 1 (1) The Political Conditions .... 1 (2) The Civic Ideal 9 (3) Religion ...... 20 C*<>* Vll. PERSONAL .....;. 53 III. PRE-SOCRATIC REFLECTION AS INFLUENCING ETHICS . 73 ; TEACHING OF SOCRATES" . . . ' .101 Interpretations. V. THE TEACHING continued . . . . .114 (1) Method. Prominence of Negative Criticism, and Misconceptions arising therefrom. J The Idea of Knowledge. (2)^ Method continued. Imperfect Systematisation. Positive Element. No Scientific Epistemology but use of Reflection. Procedure summed up. VI. THE TEACHING continued ..... 151 Interest absorbingly ethical. Standpoint. Value placed on Knowledge as Basis of Action. The -Doctrine "Virtue is Knowledge." VII. THE TEACHING continued . . . . .195 Particular Virtues. VIII. THE TEACHING continued . . . . .212 Religious Belief and Practice. CONTENTS CHAP. . PAGE IX. THE PERSONAL ISSUES . . . . .241 Attitude towards Socratic Teaching of Athenian people. Elements and Character of Opposition. Trial and Death. X. DEVELOPMENTS AND SUMMARY . 265 SOCRATES CHAPTER I INTKODUCTOKY I. THE POLITICAL CONDITIONS THERE never was in ancient free Greece anything of the nature of the political unity which we attach to the idea of national life. Greece was an aggregate of little independent States, cities, each, so far as it was able, absolutely autonomous. 1 So complete was the separation, that only in exceptional cases could the citizen of one small State buy land or houses in another State, contract marriage in it, or be a party to an action in its courts. The ideal in view was that the community should not be too large for each citizen to participate personally in its affairs, and to possess for it a value difficult of realisation in great empires. This held good whether the internal government of the State were democratic, oligarchic, or aristocratic. It was only in circumstances of common peril or under the pressure of the law of the strongest that these States 1 Grote, History of Greece, ii. 183 ; Greece in the Age of Pericles, Grant, p. 2. I 2 SOCRATES could ever continue for any length of time in political union. 1 The confederations that existed at different times were so produced : and they usually lasted no longer than the danger endured, and sometimes not so long ; for often enough the Greek was prepared to sacrifice the common interest of Hellas for the advan- tage of his own particular community Sparta, Athens, or Corinth. Internal rivalries were almost always stronger than the sense of the need of union. And this spirit finally brought its Nemesis in the loss of the liberty the Greeks loved so well. Enemies arose who knew how to play upon these rivalries, to separate the States from each other until at length, worn out by internal dissensions, Greece became an easy prey, first to the ambitious Macedonian princes, and finally to Rome. Opposing this tendency to isolation there existed certain non-political yet most valuable bases of possible union, which at the same time were marks of a much more profound separation between Greek and non- Greek, than any that existed between the citizens of different Greek States. These were the lineage and language, the religion and festivals, the oracles and customs of Hellas. 2 Tradition assigned to all Greeks a common ancestry. To them,- all foreigners were "Barbarians," however highly civilised they might be. All Greeks spoke the same tongue, the dialectical differences not reaching unintelligibility. All practised the same religious rites, and participated from an early period at least in the festivals of the Olympic, Pythi- an, Isthmian, and Nemean games. 3 All revered the Delphian Oracle. All had the negative sign of absten- 1 Grote, iii. 82, 276, 503. 2 Ib. ii. 165, 181. 3 Ib. Hi. 81. AMPHICTYONIC COUNCIL 3 tion from customs found amongst the outer barbarians, such as "absolute despotism, human sacrifices, poly- gamy, deliberate mutilation of the person as a punish- ment, and selling of children into slavery." 1 Besides these influences making for ethical and social unity, although not for political union, there was another great institution the Amphictyonic Council, assembling half-yearly at Delphi and Thermopylae for religious purposes, which was practically a league for the defence of the cities in membership, and for the guardianship of the Temple at Delphi. 2 This body never seems to have realised its possibilities. It certainly sanc- tioned action, supposed to be taken in defence of the honour of the god in the various sacred wars; but motives other than religious were present, and on certain occasions it seems to have become the tool of political schemers. It never developed into what it might have become throughout the struggle against the East, the exponent of united Hellenic patriotism; for its action when Philip de- clared war against Persia is too isolated to give it this character, and was, in any case, only taken after the Grecian States had lost their independence. It seems to have been often lax in observance of its obligations, ineffective in ameliorating the sufferings - of war, and unwise in its judgment of political events in Greece. 3 The pressure of events did indeed dictate to Greece, at some points in her history, the formation of con- federacies with greater cohesive power for defensive action. The Amphictyons were temple guardians : 1 Smith, History of Greece, p. 54. 2 Grote, i. 95, ii. 173 sq. 8 Ib. ix. 461, 462, 465 ; Smith's Antiquities, article "Amphictyons." 4 SOCRATES they were never efficient keepers of Hellenic liberty ; and after Greece, united by the pressure of peril, had beaten back the Persian, it was felt the land could not trust to improvised expedients and the force of racial affinity to meet such a crisis again. Some methods must be adopted to 'unite the scattered elements of Hellas for more efficient resistance to invasion. Up to the time of the capture of Sestos, Sparta, largely by her military prestige, had been virtually acknowledged as leader of the Greek States in war, and the qualities which had elicited confidence at an earlier period were still hers, and exercised much of their former power. " For an instant after the battles of Plataea and Mycale . . . Sparta was exalted to be chief of a full Pan-hellenic union, Athens being only one of the chief members." l But many causes were at work to change this. The treasonous conduct of Pausanias, and the incapacity of his countrymen to readily adapt themselves to that maritime warfare in which the Athenians, confident and skilful, had gained brilliant successes, and for which they possessed much greater resources, inclined men to look favour- ably on the claims of Athens to leadership. The Asiatic Greeks (for the Peloponnesians still leaned to Sparta) were more inclined to trust themselves to a power that could make itself felt on sea and not only on land, and that was in a position to trans- port troops to Ionia, if need be to meet new attacks. 2 Looking, indeed, on the history of the last twelve or fourteen years, it could not but be felt that it was largely through the bravery and enterprise of the Athenians that the Persians had been driven back. 1 Grote, iv. 350. 2 Ib. iv. 346 et seq. CONFEDERACY OF DELOS 5 Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis, and Mycale had wit- nessed their deeds. They had won fairly, it seemed to many, the right to the foremost place in honour, for they had been foremost in sacrifices. Now, when men were planning how to avert a danger which they felt only slept, Athens, by her activity and supremacy in naval skill and power, seemed marked out plainly as the natural leader in a contest which would be decided by victory or failure at sea. Thus the naval" league was formed known as the Confederacy of Delos, to which common proportionate contributions of ships and men were made by the subscribing cities, and the leadership of this league was given to Athens. The preponderating influence which this secured to Athens, while it was, at first, fairly used, was, in time, made subservient to ambitious aims. From the basis of a league of equals, formed for a special object, what was virtually an empire was built up. Through the commutation of contributions of ships and men into money payments, the relationship between the leading State and the members of the confederacy became changed into that of an empire dealing with tributary States. 1 From this cause and from the feeling that the growing wealth and splendour of Athens was owing largely to a misuse of special funds, the jealousy of the rival and revolting States, headed by Sparta, led ultimately to the formation of the Peloponnesian Confederacy, and to the outbreak of that long strife 2 which lasted, with some periods of truce, for twenty- seven years, and ended in the reduction of Athens to a position of political subordination from which she never again emerged. 1 Grote, iv. 428. 3 Ib. iv. 381. SOCRATES the time_of the incipient^ Athenian sup- remacy that Socrates was bora^jind^ he lived through the days o its brilliancy and decline. .From 469 B.C. to 399 B.C. almost, co vjgrs_th^^ieriod. His youth was passed in the time of the changing union. His public life as teacher probably began soon after his thirtieth year. 2 By the time he appears as the citizen-soldier serving at Potidsea the equal alliance has already for years been changed into the connection of the Athenian empire with dependent States. 3 By 449 B.C. the common fund of the league had been transferred from Delos to Athens, an outward sign of the changed character of the confederacy. And from this time forward until her utter defeat at ^Egospotami, the policy of Athens was imperial rather than federal. 4 Great internal changes had taken place in Athens itself. The democratic reforms of Cleisthenes were carried to the logical conclusion of absolute popular supremacy in the time of Pericles. Office was thrown open to members of the first three classes in the State. The power of the Council of the Areopagus, which was regarded as a drag on democratic movement, was nearly all withdrawn. It was reduced virtually to a court for the trial of homicides, but its supervisory and censorial functions were taken away. After 460 it takes its place as a venerable antiquity. Henceforth all power is vested in the Assembly, and nearly all offices are filled by lot. There is no permanent civil service, no professional class of judges or advocates, military or naval officers. Appointments of functionaries of every kind are made by lot ; administration of law and J Grote, ir. 419. 2 Abbot, Pericles, p. 308. 3 Grote, iv. 354. 4 /6. iv. 379. THE AREOPAGUS 7 pleadings are by private citizens acting for the time as jurors, and again as accused or accusers. Every- thing is arranged with the one idea of securing the undisputed sway of the voters. The general Assembly of the Athenian citizens was summoned to forty regular meetings in each year, beside such others as necessity demanded. And in the times of the Pelo- ponnesian War there must have been many extra meetings. After the meeting had been properly con- stituted by sacrifice and prayer, and the business formally introduced by 'the president, any citizen could rise to speak. The power of the Assembly was absolute, and the instrumentality through which the power was used came more and more to be oratory. There was hardly any limit to the influence a skilful speaker could wield through the Assembly. If he succeeded in impressing his views on the people, he might, under the forms of the constitution, be the real ruler of Athens. Such offices as were filled by election would be given to his associates and fol- lowers; those that were filled by lot being very numerous in proportion to the whole number of the citizens, were certain to represent the average feeling of the body out of which they came, and not that of any clique of citizens who, on a system of nomination, might by some management have been able to set themselves in opposition to the will of the Assembly. The legal system at Athens, in the days of Peri- cles, the Sophists, and Socrates, with its complete .absence of professionalism and huge popular juries of citizens paid for their services, was full of con- sequence for the spirit and temper of the Athenian 8 SOCRATES people. Laws at Athens were simple and apparently short, as they had to be read to the people once a year for confirmation or change. But there was a marvellous amount of litigation. Whether it was the Greek intellect delighting in subtleties, or the fact that Athens heard more than the causes of her own citizens during the time of her supremacy, or the system by which those who could successfully sustain against another a charge of defrauding the revenue, for example, received a portion of the fine, and so litigiousness became fostered, that was the cause, is hard to tell, but it remains true that legal proceedings formed a disproportionate amount of the interests and distractions of civic life. And these proceedings went on before huge juries of five hundred members, sub- stitutes, indeed, for the General Assembly of the whole people, which the democratic ideal of Athens would have had to be the true judge. All this tended to give a decided cast to Athenian culture, mental and moral. The pathway to all kinds of public service lay through influence in the Assembly. It is true that occasionally a man like Aristides emerges into pro- minence through sheer force of character; and it is true also that the most influential leader he Athenian assembly ever possessed, Pericles, discarded all the usual demagogic arts, not only without prejudice to his power, but to its increase. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, by the testimony of men widely diver- gent in standpoint, the tendency on the part of speakers and public men in general was toward the gaining of influence by the art of pleasing; people were given, in the speeches, the views they wanted, not those they needed. Government by debate, with ATHENIAN CITIZENSHIP 9 the Athenians, tended to the cultivation of the partisan spirit rather than the judicial; and the culture that could produce clever advocates, men who could give to measures adopted because of their acceptability to many, and their supposed expediency, the appearance of justice, was in great demand. II. THE Civic IDEAL The problems of Greek morality, when they were attacked by philosophic reflection, came to be treated largely as questions in political science. 1 The col- lective unit of the State overshadowed the personal life. A man's moral life could only be approached through a theory of citizenship. 2 True, the concep- tion of the city-State was essentially that of a unity formed by moral relations. But it was the whole that gave worth to the parts. And the idea of an ethic whose claims and ideals should be independent of a man's political environment is of later growth. The significance of the individual qua individual had not emerged. As a Greek, belonging to the race possess- ing a combination of the best qualities of mankind, 3 as a member -of> a city-State wnose highest function was to offer an arena for the play of. intellectual forces, 4 and the cultivation of the intellectual life, a man was of immense worth ; apart from such relationships, he was a barbarian, naturally fitted to serve those whose 1 For much in this chapter I desire gratefully to acknowledge my indebtedness to the lectures of Dr. Edward Caird, as well as to his Evolu- tion of Religion. 2 Duncker, History of Greece, ii. 310 (trans. Alleyne and Abbott). 3 Arist., Polit. vii. 7, 1327,/19 b sq. *lb. vii. 3, 8, 1325, 16 a , 1328, 2P. io SOCRATES call to a higher destiny could be read in their higher natural gifts. According to the Greek idea of the State, intensity of political interest was in inverse proportion to extent of territory. All that a Greek most cared for was included in the range of a few miles beyond the city walls. In the seventh century, Duncker says, " The State did not extend beyond the district, nor law beyond the canton ; personal protection was^restricted to the same boundaries, and freedom to the influence which might be exercised in a privileged corporation." l And when what at first had been necessities of foreign policy led to wider supremacy on the part of successive leading States, the altered conditions never ceased to be regarded as a deflection from the true ideal of Greek polity. Within its limits the claim of the Greek State upon its citizens was absolute. 'Ideally speaking, man ex- isted for the State. It was only through it that he could live a life distinguished from " barbarism." Its institutions came to him either with prescriptive authority from a remote past, or were established by the free choice of the citizens acting under the sanction of the gods. Their public undertakings were not dis- tinguishable as civil and religious functions. The city's life in all its activities was hallowed by the pro- tecting deities Church and State were one. Reined in from expansiveness, not feeling, or not suffering itself to express, sympathy with the great mass of barbarian and servile life, the Greek mind threw itself with the greater intensity into an unselfish enthusiasm for the State. And this disinterested spirit of civic 1 Duncker, History of Greece, ii. 311. ONENESS OF LIFE n devotion touches much that is best and worst in Hellenic life. It touches the noblest forms of sacrifice which his- tory and dramatic art enshrine. It has been stated with truth that Greek patriotism normally bent itself to tasks against which modern nations, except in some extraordinary access of feeling, such as that animating revolutionary France in her contest with the mon- archies ofEurope, would prove recusant. Serving in the army or navy, sitting in the huge juries in the busy law courts, or attending the Assemblies where all important questions of home or foreign policy were settled by direct vote of the citizens, the Athenian was made continually to feel, by direct participation, the oneness of his own life and interest with those of the State. And if the internal polity of aristocratic States differed from that of Athens, there was no dif- ference in the general underlying principle ; the whole moral realisation of the individual, his place and work in life, was found in State membership and State ser- vice ; and the State that gave so much could ask much. States like Sparta, if possible, carried the sense of this even farther. And the forceful brevity of the epitaph on the men of Thermopylae expresses the matter-of- fact fashion in which sacrifice to the uttermost was regarded. It was simple obedience to law. "Go, tell the Spartans thou that passest by, That here obedient to their laws we lie." Traditions like that of Codrus .and dramatic creations like Menoeceus kept alive the same feeling. The Greek was not ^his own. He was the State's. " A complete dependence on the State, and the absolute 12 SOCRATES surrender of the individual member to the body, was the sentiment that had grown with his growth, and formed the groundwork of his moral being. The sum of his duties was to merge his personality in the State, and to have no will of his own distinct from that of the State." l There were various reasons for this absorption of the man in the community. The State was the supreme gain rescued by reason from the chaos of the instinctive life. It was at once the creation and the exponent of law, and in its regulations and institu- tions the citizen bore his own part. He was not under any alien dominion : if he obeyed he also ruled. 2 He and his fellows were linked together by the invisible cord of Law, to which all were amenable, and for the administration of which in democratic States all were responsible. No doubt special tribal kinships were regarded; but the main idea in the union was not pedigree, it was nationality. Other cities were aggre- gations of men and collections of dwelling-places ; a Greek city in the citizens' eyes was a human society, the organism through which the divine power in man ruled the common life. The discourse of reason, that made man what he was, had called the city into being (divine sanctions using human power), and sustained it continually. Law, which the citizen helped to make, was the real ruler. The spirit of rational justification of institutions was only fully applied within the limited area of the life of the ruling citizens. Their scheme of things did not include the barbarian and the slave as subjects of a 1 Dollinger, The Gentile and the Jew, ii. 217. 2 76. ii. 221. THE HELOTS 13 polity rational throughout. Against the theory of Aristotle, which was really finding a reason for a practice convenient to Greeks, namely, that initial incapacity for free life existed in some men and justified their enslavement, is the consciousness of the opposite expressed by Euripides, who shows the posses- sion of a noble spirit to be no monopoly of freemen. The Helots were neither barbarians by race nor in- capable, as history shows, of one of the chief duties of the citizen, soldiership, but their serfdom was severe, even cruel. Everywhere thus, beneath the edifice of free life lies the substructure of slavery. To provide the Greek with the leisure necessary for political dis- cussion, intellectual and artistic pleasures, military exercises and athletics, the needful labours of life had to be performed by slaves. Ideally, politics and soldiering came to be the honoured pursuits. They occupy the foreground in the Greek picture of life. Behind there is a dim mass of slave workers upholding the fabric of leisure and culture, which was the place only of the privileged. To this broad statement there are many modifications needful. All the individuals^ of a community are never prosperous, and there must have been many in all Greek States who were unable to attain the conventional standard, artisans and shop- keepers. As for traders on a large scale it has per- haps never been insuperably difficult for the most aristocratic conventions to harmonise themselves with wealth. It is certain that, in the time of Socrates at anyrate, Greek Assemblies were made up of all sorts and conditions of men within the limits of citizenship. When he is trying to hearten Charmides to make an essay in political speaking in the Assembly, he asks 14 SOCRATES him, " Is it the fullers among them of whom you stand in awe, or the cobblers, or the carpenters, or the copper- smiths, or the merchants, or the farmers, or the huck- sters of the market-place exchanging their wares, and bethinking them how they are to buy this thing cheap and to sell the other dear, is it before them you are ashamed ; for these are the individual atoms out of which the Public Assembly is composed ? " 1 Yet the very tone of this question implies not a little Greek contempt for handicrafts 2 and the fact that democracy had swept into political life great numbers of those who practised them, had not yet quite altered the hold of the original prejudice on men's minds. Further, there was a certain mechanical rigidity about the conception of the unity of the State. It shifted the centre of thought and interest and de- votion from the natural relationships of life to the legal, from the family to the State. There was a fearlessness or rashness in the way that Greek legis- lators and thinkers followed out the idea of State supremacy, that makes modern experiments in social- istic legislation look the merest child's play in com- parison. Lawyers and thinkers were jealous of the family. No rival interest must set itself up in the minds of citizens that might ever conflict with civic loyalty. There is an artificiality here about the Greek State idea. It does not grow. It does not gather up within itself and relegate to a wider unity the unity of the family. It destroys it. The State will suffer no rival near the throne of its citizens' attachment. And in the ideal polity that expressed the deepest thought of Plato there is no room for anything but a thorough- 1 Xen., Mem. in. vii. 6 (Dakyns). 2 Grote, ii. 503, 504. THE STATE 15 going communism. The State in which the essential Greek idea came nearest realisation was Sparta. The idea was never fully realised even there ; 1 nevertheless, the greater degree of approximation to the perfect subordination of the individual's claims to those of the State, to which Sparta succeeded in attaining, 2 rendered her the object of admiring study on the part of Greek thinkers. And Grote shows that the " Kepublic " of Plato is but an idealised Sparta with culture added. 3 Athenian life was felt to be unstable. The relative independence of the citizen made co- herence and solidity difficult. Though the freest Greek democracy suffered interferences with indi- vidual liberty that would be felt intolerable in modern States, this was not enough for the rigour of philo- sophic theory. " It was from the Spartan institutions (and the Kretan, in many respects analogous) that the speculative philosophers in Greece usually took the point of departure for their theories. Not only Plato did so, but Xenophon and Aristotle likewise. The most material fact which they saw before them at Sparta was a public discipline, both strict and con- tinued, which directed the movements of the citizens, and guided their thoughts and feelings ' from infancy to old age/ To this supreme control the private feel- ings, both of family and property, though not wholly suppressed, were made to bend ; and occasionally in a way quite as remarkable as any restrictions proposed 1 Grote, ii. 270. 2 Cf. Pater, Plato and Platonism, p. 182 : "... the Lacedaemonians also, who may be thought to have come within measurable distance of that perfect city ..." 3 Grote, ii. 307. i 6 SOCRATES by either Plato or Xenophon." 1 It was only by an extreme devotion that the small States of Greece could hope to maintain themselves in the independence that was so dear to them. Hence the supreme virtue was patriotism, the limited and intense patriotism of a man whose State was a city. To secure this other things must go. Interests that might conflict with this must be weakened. Thus domestic life and family ties, depreciated by custom, are dissolved in philosophic theory. In the ideal State it is feared that patriotism will suffer if kinship be allowed consciously to exist, and measures are proposed to nullify the natural link. No possibility is to be left of groupings of indi- viduals using relationship to further ambitious pur- poses. Theoretically, the citizen must live for the State as a Jesuit for his order. To this standard of her own thinkers Athens never conformed. Nor, for that matter, though extreme enough in individual subordination, did Sparta. There was a flexibility, a responsiveness to manifold influence and interest, a volatility in the Athenian mind which could not have submitted to any such iron rule. The Athenians got and kept the worst of the central idea the spirit of the subordination of the family with- out getting its best, a prevailing sense of the absolute need of loyalty, as the internal changes made in the face of external perils show. Of course, Spartan methods were never adopted at Athens, but the domestic interest suffered depreciation. Family life suffered. The low conception of it that prevailed reduced the Greek matron to the level of an upper servant. The picture of what is meant by Xenophon to be taken as 1 Grote, Plato and Companions of Socrates, iii. 209. THE STATE 17 a pattern Greek home is, though containing many pleasing features, a little prosaic, if it be judged as anything beyond sublimated housewifery. 1 And as a result of the incapacity for companionship in Athenian wives, specialised forms of irregular sexual relation- ship sprang up, all contributing to the strength of the dissolving forces at work in Greek society, and the shadow of the unnameable corruption that lies on Greek life grew darker. Furthermore, the Athenian culture came itself to be inimical in its prevailing form to the firm consistency of the State. In the time of the city's headship of Greece, the inflow of wealth and the possession of great artistic genius in conjunction resulted in the enrich- ment of Athens with works of art in an unprecedented degree. The Acropolis was covered with architectural masterpieces. Loveliness in marble dwelt in the open spaces of the city. The theatre was served- by genius. In the artistic world of Athens educative influence, in taste and feeling, was thrown round every mind. Art was public, and men lived in an atmosphere of beauty. Suggestion and inspiration were profuse for the sensitive spirit. And while the training of Greek youth remained conservative, mental enrichment went to promote artistic appreciation. But with the advance of popular rule, and the necessity of cultivating those arts of popular address through which lay the avenues to power, a spirit became fostered in men that learned , to set its own personal claims and needs over against f the hitherto all-embracing demands of State loyalty. In the old days when a conflict had risen, it had been, as in Antigone, between the " Sacred and Eternal laws * l Economist, vii. 7-10. Of. Benn, The Greek Philosophers, i. 158. i 8 SOCRATES of family, reverence to the dead, and the authority of a State Enactment." Antigone gives her life ; but in losing it she saves it, and saves the sacredness of the holy human and divine law for which she dies. But now arises the feeling that the individual as such has rights and claims. And the events of history, the plots and counter-plots of rival politicians, democrats, and oligarchs, are the comment on the new spirit. The man detaches himself from the community, and begins to claim a life of his own. The first effect of a change in conception is often to bring a loosening of life from its moral anchorages. The real advance in the mental stand taken up is disguised amid the general upheaval and unrest that disconcert steadfast minds. Incipient individualism in morals showed itself to many as decadence. It is certain that in some respects the Athenians under Pericles had degenerated from the men of Marathon. 1 < What Pater calls "the ceaseless prattle" of Athens was fostered and sanctioned by government by discussion. All things were treated as subjects for argument. No realm was left, over the border of which the speculator might not tread. Changes that had deprived institutions like the Areo- pagus of much of their power, and had largely destroyed veneration for the past, emboldened men to deal with moral standards in the same way. It was not to be assumed that Athenians familiar with arguments, such as those used to the Melians, which could be reduced to a cynically bald justification from custom of the principle that " Might is right," 2 would all be restrained by veneration for law from seizing their personal advantage in a revolution. The inner unity of the 1 Benn,. op. cit. i. 105. 2 Thuc. v. 89. THE STATE 19 State was not preserved even by the minimising and depreciating of family claims. The effort to deprive the citizens of a possible rival in devotion to the city, simply resulted in a claim for independence being put in, not in the name of domestic life, but of personal self-assertion and free development. The compensa- tion devised by the Greek State for the relative poverty and baldness of the domestic side of things was a splendid civic life, enriched by the resources of art and spectacular religion. This reached its acme under Pericles. It accomplished much. Through an extra- ordinary conjunction of circumstances, the presence of wealth and artistic taste in Athens, and an affluence of genius at command, this policy was pursued for fifty years with results that have become possessions for all time. But the end attained was not perhaps the first end sought. What really happened was that the volatile, discursive, flexible element in the Attic Greek was increased, and the restraint and stability and steel- tempered loyalty which the thinkers found in Sparta the State nearest to their dreams was lessened. (There existed, the7 in the v minds ft-JJ->oqft to whom a traditional idea of devo- tion to the State still influential in the best minds, but reacted upon by the springing up of a claim for the individual, conscious of a life greatly enriched, and before whom possibilities of self-realisation in other ways than in strict subordination to the claims of the city began to rise. ) 20 SOCRATES III. RELIGION It was the case, too, that at this time, when the more stable elements in the Athenian constitution had been greatly weakened, and the general aim was to make all legislation and administration a reflection of the immediate feeling of the citizens, a rationalising process in matters of faith and principle had been going on among the more cultured Greeks, and its results had been filtering through philosophic teaching and poetry into the minds of a wider circle. The religion of the people had at an early stage developed out of the worship of ancient Nature-deities. Tiele says : " Tlie ancient Nature-deities are replaced more and more by gods endowed, not only with the shape of men, but with real humanity, who continually rise in moral dignity and grandeur, and to whom the Greeks transferred the divine element in man." x This religion passed through various stages of development, influenced greatly by the early and continuous contact of Greece with Asia, by the fusion, complete or partial, of various foreign conceptions of deities with their own, and largely by the play of Grecian poetic power on the ideas of the gods thus gained. The Homeric deities are personalised and humanised. They are, indeed, while of immortal strength and beauty, men and women of like passions with mankind, and their life in action or suffering is lived in conditions that read like the sublimated conditions of a Greek city. 2 Nevertheless there is movement. The omnipotent Zeus 1 Tiele, Outlines of History of Ancient Religion (trans. Carpenter), p. 205. 2 11). p. 214. ' RELIGION 21 is influenced by the personified wisdom, Athena ; l and his will, in this way and by the fluctuating supremacy of fate saved from arbitrariness, is declared unto men by Apollo, who had already become the Enlightener of men. 2 Through the influence of the worship and r- oracles of Delphi this system was still further ethi- - cised and purified : the conditions of the religious life > became more spiritual as the conception of its essence changed. This movement was not without its checks ; and before it reached its culmination, signs were not want- ing that the whole conception of Greek religion must undergo a change of emphasis, if it was to retain its hold on men's minds. In the latter half of the sixth century men felt the traditional explanations of the existing forms of things, the world's life, to be un- satisfying, and began to feel for some rational principle that would illuminate their mental world. But specu- lators and thinkers were as yet comparatively few Faith was still strong, and a new extension of power was to be given to the Greek religion by the un- exampled brilliancy of the service rendered it by Greek art, and especially tragic poetry. It was not the professional exponents of religion, the priests, who were to carry the sway of their faith over the national life of Greece to its farthest limit. The most influential members of this class, the priests of Delphi, indeed, rather lost ground during the crisis of the national struggle with Persia. They did not prove themselves worthy guides to the struggling patriotism of their land. Professor Grant says : " If the oracle at Delphi 1 Cf. Caird, Evolution of Religion, vol. i. p. 269. 2 Tiele, op. tit. pp. 215, 216. 22 SOCRATES had boldly championed the national defence, the effect upon the war and upon its own future influence could not have failed to be great. But the oracle gave answers sometimes ambiguous, sometimes directly coun- selling submission and despair." 1 Greece owed little to her professional religious guides. They gave reason for more than suspicion of their integrity, and yielded to party interests what was the sacred trust of Greece. This became so manifest later, in the Peloponnesian War, that the Spartan partialities of an agency sup- posed to give the pure revelation of the Divine Will, helped to destroy Athenian faith in it, and thus aided the influences making for scepticism. But before this state of things came about, Greek religion was to have a time of efflorescence. Such men as ^Eschylus and Sophocles were to reveal the utmost that could be drawn from it for moral culture, until a new standpoint was reached. ^Eschylus 2 was born at the seat of the Greek mysteries, Eleusis, and is supposed to have been ini- tiated. He fought at Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis, and Platsea. The atmosphere of his childhood was one of piety ; the relationships^ of his life those natural to a member of a family of patriots distinguished for their bravery. The most unquestioned genius, love of country, and profound faith breathe in his writing. No setting of the law of retribution more deep or noble than that given in the Agamemnon, the Choephoroiy and the Eumenides was ever held up before the mind of the nation. The leader of the Greek army sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, in obedience to what he accepts as a Divine command, 1 Greece in the Age of Pericles, p. 93. 2 524-456 B.C. ^SCHYLUS 23 in order that the fleet may pass with a favouring wind to the shore of Asia. For this he is slain on his return, in the glory of conquest, to his home, by his wife. Blood will have blood, and in turn Orestes constitutes himself his father's avenger, and executes justice on his mother and her paramour. But in the hour of the triumph of this primitive law the faces of the Furies, the avengers of the matricide, begin to peep and gibber about its executant. Fear seizes him : "Thoughts past control are whirling me along, Their captive slave : while terror in my heart Her peean and her frenzied dance prepares." 1 Unseen by others, at first, these loathly ministrants of the vengeance of the older Gods of primal law and blood feud drive him to seek the protection of Apollo at Delphi. Thither he is pursued, but he finds his way to the stone of sanctuary and is protected by Apollo notwithstanding the clamour of the Furies. Then the scene changes to the Temple of Athena at Athens : Orestes is a suppliant, the Furies his accusers. Athena appears, listens to the statements of the various parties, and institutes the court of the Areopagus to try the cause. The result is the acquittal of Orestes, but the Furies are appeased by having given to them local honours and a home at Athens. They invoke blessings on the city, and their name is changed from Furies to Eumenides, the benevolent spirits. The curse resting on the race of the Atridae is uprooted by the divine intervention. The relative right of the avengers of the law of blood-guiltiness, resting on 1 JEsch., ChoepJt. 11. 1023-1025 (Swanwick). 24 SOCRATES primal instincts, is compromised with the higher claim of sanctity for relations made by law and hallowed by revelation. Retribution is divine, but there is a divine redemption also. A subordinate issue is obedience to authority, the authority of divinely provided institutions. In ^Eschylus, Zeus is intermittently represented as omnipotent and subject to fate ; it would be truer to say fate was the last word of the ^Eschylean doctrine. But it is in its inconsistencies that the doctrine is illuminating. Zeus or some other God "... doth upon the guilty send Erinys' late-avenging pest." And in the Trojan War : " So for the dame, by many wooed, Doth mighty Zeus who shields the guest 'Gainst Paris send th' Atridan brood ; Struggles limb-wearing, knees earth-pressed. The spear shaft rudely snapt in twain In war's initial battle, these For Danaoi as for Trojans he decrees. As matters stand, they stand ; the yet to be Must issue as ordained by destiny." l Retribution is unfailing : man's sin finds him out : " Spoiled be the spoiler : who sheds blood must bleed, While Zeus surviveth shall this law survive. Doer must suffer." 2 "But who unforced with spirit free Dares to be just is ne'er unblest ; Whelmed utterly he cannot be : But for the wretch with, lawless breast, 1 Agam. 58-68 (Swanwick). 2 2b. 1562-1564. ^SCHYLUS 25 Bold seizer of promiscuous prey, I warn you, he, perforce, his sail In time shall strike, when troubles him assail, And breaks his yard-arm 'neath the tempest's sway." l But the moral unit emphasized is the race rather than the individual. The verdict on the soul that sinneth is not merely that it shall die, but that its race shall lie under a ban; and the blessing of the righteous comes upon his seed: "Apart I hold my solitary creed. Prolific truly is the impious deed ; Like to the evil stock, the evil seed ; But fate ordains that righteous homes shall aye Kejoice in goodly progeny." 2 Judgment may not be speedily executed against an evil work, but it is certain: " This the sum of wisdom hear : Justice' altar aye revere, Nor ever dare, Lusting after worldly gear, With atheist foot to spurn : beware, Lurketh Retribution near, Direful issue doth impend ; Honour then with holy fear Thy parents household rights revere, Nor guest-observing ordinance offend." 3 The older views, belonging in their unquestioned firmness to a time and order passing away, find repre- sentation in ^Eschylus. These harsh Goddesses who pursue the avenger of blood are said to have the determination of men's destinies. 4 There is even a jealousy in heavenly minds of human prosperity. 1 Eumenides, 550-556. 2 Agam. 757-762. 3 Eumen. 538-548. 4 /&. 930, 931. 26 SOCRATES Agamemnon fears to accept the honours paid to him at his home-coming, and the chorus share his feeling. The wise preserve their prosperity by resigning some of its blessings : " Sailing with prosperous course elate, Strikes on the hidden reef men's proud estate. Then if reluctant Fear, with well-poised sling, His bales doth into ocean fling, Riseth once more the bark ; and though With evil freighted to the full, Floateth secure the lightened hull." 1 ^Eschylus brings forth out of his treasure things old and new. Transition is in his theology from the harsher and less moralised picture of divine workings of an earlier time, to a softened representation which is virtually the result of a compromise. The Apollo worship and the Apollo revelations represent the newer spirit. The older powers only partially humanised are conciliated ; they reveal to those who grant them rightful honour their benevolent will, and from the Furies become the Eumenides. It is not yet a complete transformation, but one on the way. The rights of the newer theology, that is more in accord with all humane intuitions, find recognition and a place beside what is undisputed in the old. In belief in an order of righteousness, Sophocles is not less strong than his predecessor : "Would 'twere my lot to lead My life in holiest purity of speech, In purity of deed, Of deed and word whose Laws high-soaring reach 1 Agam. 1001-1013. SOPHOCLES 27 Through all the vast concave, Heaven-born, Olympos their one only sire ! To these man never gave The breath of life, nor shall they e'er expire In dim oblivion cold : In these God shows as great and never waxeth old." 1 And: " No ordinance of Man shall override The settled laws of Nature and of God ; Not written these in pages of a book, Nor were they framed to-day or yesterday : We know not whence they are, but this we know. That they from all eternity have been, And shall to all eternity endure." 2 But fate in an eternal rule of right does not find in current events its obvious and invariable support. If it were always seen to be well with the righteous and ill with the wicked, the problems of tragedy and ethics would disappear. But no such simple key can unlock for us the complexities of human experience. It is pleasant to be both good and prosperous, but the link that joins propriety and prosperity often cannot be seen: ' ; If one among the gods shall will it so, The coward shall escape the better man." 3 Hyllus in the Trachinice says of unmerited pain : "... The Gods. ... Oh pardon them not, For the deeds that are ever being done, Who, being and bearing the name Of Fathers, look on such wrong. 1 (Ed. Rex. 863-871 (Plumptre's trans., Tragedies of Sophocles, Appendix of Rhymed Choral Odes, p. 426). a Antigone, 453-457 (trans. D'Arcy W. Thompson in Sales Attici, p. 65). 3 Ajax, 455 (ib. p. 69). 28 SOCRATES What cometh, no man may know, What is, is piteous for us, Base and shameful for Them, And for him who endureth this woe, Above all that live hard to bear." l Philoctetes is not astonished that men like Odysseus and Thersites have survived the perils of war-time : "... For nothing bad will die, So well the Gods do fence it round about ; And still they joy to turn from Hades back The cunning and the crafty, while they send The just and good below, what thoughts can I Of such things form, how offer praise, when still, Praising the Gods, I find the Gods are base." 2 He voices moral perplexity and the sense of the mystery of pain. It is true that he tries to make the burden of the moral apportionments of the Gods lighter by showing how the sufferers are sinners also. But this is much less strongly brought before us than the passive helplessness of those who are swept along in the stream of fate. Ajax is guilty of rousing the goddess Athena to fierce wrath by boastful words, of asserting that his own right arm will get him victory, and he is punished with madness. 3 His spirit is Nebuchadnezzar's, and his fate more dreary. Still here is not the purging of ancestral wrong, but suffer- ing for individual sin. Philoctetes 4 and Hercules 5 and others are personally guilty in some (and these very unequal) particulars. In such cases, while the discrepancy between the wrong and the penalty may 1 Trachinice, 1266-1274 (Plumptre). 2 Philoc. 445-452 (Pluniptre). 3 Ajax, 766-769. 4 Philoc. 1326. 5 Track. 269-278. SOPHOCLES 29 seem often amazing, yet the personal offence precedent to personal suffering simplifies the problem. In other cases the adjustment is less easy, Strange as it appears at first, the assertion in Sophocles, both of the social and personal moral relations of the indi- vidual, seems more unqualified than in ^Eschylus. 1 He is to carry the moralisation of the religion a stage further ; but his method does not seem at first to pro- mise this. No doubt he stands for a milder type of Grecian orthodoxy. The general outline is the same, but harsh features are softened so that the general effect is one of exquisite beauty rather than of the tre- mendous and even oppressive grandeur of the ^Eschy- lean tragedy. There are modifications and restrictions of the older statements and developments that are new. But these do not at first seem to tend in the direction of clearing of moral difficulty. Punishment from the Gods descends with overwhelming weight on those who have not, like Orestes, chosen to violate law (granting that his choice was made in obedience to a divine command, which is shown to possess a higher claim), but whose experience is one of suffering, not of conscious sin. The thought of a personality that is not individual, of a character and destiny belonging to a race, of guilt and righteousness as real and meriting punishment or reward, while yet they have their roots not in the will of him whom the Gods bless or ban, meets us constantly in Sophocles. With him the tendency is to shift the interest rather from divinity to humanity. 2 In his view of guilt and punishment he seems sometimes to 1 Cf. The Moral Ideal, Wedge wood, p. 95. 2 Zeller, Socrates, p. 31 : "The tragedy of Sophocles moves entirely in the world of men." 30 SOCRATES occupy the same ground as ^Eschylus. In both, the fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. The hereditary curse plays its great part in his dramas, too ; and from it there is no escape. But the emphasis seems to fall differently. Lives in themselves free from stain are made to feel the bitterness of sin's penalty. In the older poet the doctrine is simpler, a message of retribution, man's sin will find him out; in Sophocles the feeling is more complex; there is a greater sensitiveness to the frequent unintelligibility of the world's moral order- ing; to the complexity of the problem of individual suffering for family offences, and its resistance to a perfectly simple solution. The process of disentang- ling the individual from the unity of the family or clan has gone a little farther than in ^Eschylus. 1 The position of these writers may be roughly illus- trated from Hebrew ethics. In the Second Command- ment it is virtually stated, and, in the early history of Israel, constantly illustrated, that the individual as such has no true existence. The strand of the separate life has never been separated from the unity of the family or tribal cord, in which alone it finds its meaning and value. There is no shock ex- perienced by the Hebrew conscience in receiving the statement of transmitted guilt. Men act upon the principle, and slay with stones or swords the wives, the infants, and all the connections of guilty persons. Later, the mind reacts upon the command, and through its spiritual intuitions the command takes a modified 1 Cf. Miss Wedgewood's chapter, "Greece and the Harmony of Opposites," in The Moral Ideal, to which I am indebted in this whole section ; pp. 96, 97, on (Ed. Col. SOPHOCLES 31 form. God requites the sinner in his proper person. 1 Later still in Ezekiel, guilt and goodness alike become purely personal. 2 The proverb that describes the nation as suffering for ancestral transgression is no more to be used in the land of Israel ; the single per- sonality, buried hitherto in its natural environment of relationships, family and national, is brought out into the light, and an ethic that is truly individual is born. It is only, of course, in the crudest fashion that this progress of thought, spread over centuries, helps to make clear a progress spread only over two genera- tions. The parallel breaks down at many points. Nevertheless there are elements of correspondence. The morality of ^Eschylus consists of the doctrine of retribution; and the individual is still inextricably bound up with his race. Nor is it that in Sophocles his personal destiny is disentwined from the family fate; but there is more consciousness (and still more in Euripides) of the fact that there is a destiny to be accounted for. The (Edipus of Sophocles protests eloquently his unconsciousness of evil at the time that he fell into his greatest offences against Divine law, but his race must go on "dreeing its awful weird." 3 Part of the punishment of sin ^Eschylus believes to be the voluntary repetition in another form of the primal offence ; there is a personal endorsement of the preceding fall ; 4 but in Sophocles the incidence of the stress seems to be plainly on the absolute separation of the individual from the willing initiation of the deed 1 W. E. Addis' translation of The Documents of the ffexateuch, ii. 68. 2 Ex. xx. 5 compared with Deut. vii. 9, 10 ; Ezek. xviii. 3 The Moral Ideal, Wedgewood, pp. 95-99. 4 jEsch., A gam. 758-760. r\r 32 SOCRATES that is punished. It is not that, as in Antigone's case, for example, there is complete explanation of the tragic issue from her disobedience to the laws which have a relative claim upon her life, in loyalty to those which are of everlasting validity. It is that she and all the persons of the play, indeed, are caught up in the sweep and embrace of a law of vindicative righteousness, the action of which takes its spring behind all their lives. If the importance of the per- sonal life and the part of character in shaping destiny are to be emphasised, it would seem that the writer will only do it in conjunction with the emphatic statement of collective responsibility for the violation of Divine prescriptions. There is no reasonable relation between the fate of (Edipus, as is brought out clearly by Miss Wedgewood, and the desolation of his house. 1 Personally, he is free from offence in the matter for which he is judged; if, to be unconscious of wrong, innocent of evil intent, is to be free. It is not for killing a man, but for killing his own father, with all the consequences of that act, that he is punished, in fulfilment of the oracle. His protests make clear the idea of individual guilt; and his suffering emphasizes the ancestral wrong. He does not consciously accept a task from a God's hands which means the incurring of guilt. He glides unconsciously into sin. It is here that Sophocles carries us a little farther toward the conception of the moral personality. Job said that, though he should die, he would hold fast his integrity. And the Greek (Edipus 1 The Moral Ideal, p. 96. SOPHOCLES 33 does not dream of affecting a contrition that he does not feel. "Chor. Thou suffer'dst . . .* (Ed. Yes, I suffered fearful things. Chor. And thou hast done? (Ed. I have not done. Chor. What then? (Ed. I did but take as gift what I, poor wretch, Had, at my country's hands, not merited. Chor. Poor sufferer, what but that ? And didst thou kill . . . ? (Ed. What sayest thou now? What wishest thou to learn? Chor. Thy father? (Ed. Ah, thou strikest blow on blow. Chor. Didst slay him? (Ed. Yea, I slew him ; but in this . . . Chor. What sayest thou ? (Ed. I have some plea of right. Chor. How so? (Ed. I'll tell thee. Not with knowledge clear I smote and slew him ; but I did the deed, By law, not guilty, ignorant of all." Here is the clear conception of sin as born in thought, which was to emerge more clearly into light. But the statement of the individual's concern with it is not completely made when this is set forth. There re- mains, besides the moral unity of the individual, the unity in which his life has its roots, of ancestry and society. And, without this thought having its rights, neither Jewish nor Greek religious ideas can become clear to us. The saints of Judaism, the Jeremiahs and Ezras and Daniels, not only suffered w T ith their people, but felt that they had sinned with them. They con- fessed the nation's sin as their sin, and accepted national punishment as their punishment. "We must, if we 1 (Ed. Colon. 537-548. 3 34 SOCRATES would be in sympathy with the spirit of ancient life, accept the belief that ancestral is, in some sense, real guilt. We must teach ourselves to regard the dogma of original sin as a great historic influence, what- ever we may think of it on theologic ground. The sense in which the individual is a fragment and the sense in which he is a unity must both be taken into account if we would reach the point of view from which Greek feeling confronted Fate and Guilt." 1 In all life, now as then, there are the fixed and the free elements. And the consideration of the fixed affects the estimate of the action of the free. If it is to sophisticate the moral con- sciousness to father sin on ancestry or circumstances, it is utterly to misjudge it to suppose that any perfect estimate of guilt can be gained without seeing the larger unity to which the Greek so per- sistently attributed moral attributes and a moral destiny. All pain is not mysterious. It is often disci- plinary. In it the reverential and submissive spirit grows. The hasty interpretation, which misses the profounder meanings of events, is abandoned, and pride and anger die in resignation. QEdipus pleads for exile to save the city from harm, 2 and is full of concern for his helpless girls. 3 Neoptolemus returns to his truth and simplicity through sympathetic pain felt for Philoctetes. 4 The aim throughout seems to be the construction of 1 The Moral Ideal, Wedgewood, pp. 96-97. 2 (Ed. Rex. 1449, 1450. 3 Ib. 1462 sq. *Philoc. 902, 903, 965, 966, 1074-1080, 1224, 1228, 1234, 1236. SOPHOCLES 35 a theodicy. Rest comes to the perturbed and shamed Ajax in the grave : "His death hath brought . . . Great joy to him ; for what he sought to gain, Yea, death that he desired, he now hath won." 1 And in the Grove of the Gracious Ones, the spirits of remorse and vengeance become the friends of the heart- broken king, and receive him to their asylum of peace, through which he passes to his final haven. He is taught to pray : "Eumenides, the Gentle ones, . . . With gentle hearts receive and save your suppliant." 2 With him who seeks mercy they show themselves merciful. He has the vicarious pleadings of an inno- cent daughter on his side, about which he says : " For one soul working in the strength of love Is mightier than ten thousand to atone." 3 And when he dies it is by the mysterious but peaceful agency of the reconciled Gods : " What form of death He died, knows no man, but our Theseus only. For neither was it thunderbolt from Zeus With flashing fire that slew him, nor the blast Of whirlwind sweeping o'er the sea that hour, But either some one whom the Gods had sent, To guide his steps, or else the abyss of earth, In friendly mood, had opened wide its jaws Without one pang. And so the man was led With nought to mourn for did not leave the world As worn with pain and sickness ; but his end If any ever was, was wonderful." 4 1 Ajax, 967, 968. 2 (Ed. Col. 486, 487. 8 Ib. 498, 499. Ib. 1656-1665. 36 SOCRATES When we pass to Euripides the change is great. He is the poet of the new spirit of democratic and philo- sophic Athens, the friend of Socrates, the man who did for tragedy what his friend was said by Cicero 1 to do for philosophy, called "it down from heaven and established it in the cities, introduced it even into private houses, and compelled it to investigate life, and manners, and what was good and evil among men." The main interest of the drama representing life is not theological but human. It is less the sustaining of a thesis, and more the presentation of a picture. The end is an ethical interest, which seems almost hidden in an emotional one. But there were other great differences between Euripides and his predecessors. The times were altered. Education was in the hands of the Sophists, and was largely a training in debat- ing power, the usage of knowledge and rhetoric for practical ends in gaining pleas or places. Everyone either discussed or listened to discussions, or did both daily, and on all subjects. Changes had taken place in politics ; men had become accustomed to instability, one might say. Institutions crumbled and principles were abandoned. And the stage reflected this. And, because of this, Euripides has been misunderstood and decried by men who have allowed their dislike of the prevailing conditions at Athens to extend to the man in whose writings they have seen reflections of the upheaval and unrest of the poet's time. He has been called a rationalist, an unbeliever, a stage rhetorician, an unprincipled declaimer ; one who, while he is shak- ing the foundations of religion, plays the moralist. 2 1 Cicero, Tusc., Disp. v. 4, 10. 2 A. W. von Schlegel, trans, in Donaldson's Theatre of the Greeks, p. 227. EURIPIDES 37 It has been said that Aristophanes "might assert without any excess of malice or exaggeration that Euripides had persuaded men there were no Gods." 1 This is obsolete criticism. Euripides was the poet of the new spirit, the teacher who gave a new statement of religion, the humanitarian prophet. He used the critical acid of his keen reflection to eat into the decaying Homeric theology, but his end was not negation. He meant to moralise the Greek creed. To men who could not understand the end of his reflection, he seemed merely another dissolving force in Athenian life, distinguished from others by his genius. They cannot see that this man, to whom the Gods of Greece appear often as at a lower moral level than their worshippers, can be the preacher of a purer faith. All that wit, inspired by malice and principles of reaction, could do to blight his power was done by Aristophanes ; but he could not be prevented from securing the ver- dict, first of an " acute and honourable minority," and then of a larger circle that widens still. " More, per- haps," it has been said, " than any other ancient writer, he reveals to us the true inner Greek life, lays bare the secrets of its hearts." 2 His was not the spirit of fear. It was not the spirit of ideal calm and classic perfection. He represented the perplexity and passion, the suffering and love, the new doubts and new standards of a time of transition. It is hard, but not impossible, to discriminate be- tween sentences spoken in character and those which express the author's own view. And there are some 1 Dollinger, The Gentile and the Jew, i. 289. 2 Way, The Tragedies of Euripides, vol. ii. p. 1, from which work the translations that follow are taken. 38 SOCRATES things in which we may fairly consider that we have the true thought of Euripides. Scepticism springs from the moral inequalities of life. Talthybius, con- sidering the sorrows of Hecuba, asks : " What should I say, Zeus ? That thou look'st on men ? Or that this fancy false we vainly hold For nought, who deem there is a race of Gods While chance controlleth all things among men ? " l Yet the sufferer herself is firm in the faith that omnipotence serves righteousness, of whose existence in heaven we assure ourselves by its presence among men : "Yet are the Gods strong, and their Kuler strong, Even Law ; for by this Law we know Gods are, And live : and make division of wrong and right." 2 Agamemnon holds by the ethics that teach that experience reflects moral condition : "Now fair befall : for all man's weal is this Each several man's, and for the State that ill Betide the bad, prosperity the good." 3 The man who has warped his own moral sense feels life to be : " a tale Told by an idiot ; full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." He says : " Nought is there man may trust, nor high repute, Nor hope that weal shall not be turned to woe ; But the Gods all confound, hurled forth and back, Turmoiling them, that we through ignorance May worship them." 4 1 Hecuba, 488-491, trans, by Way, The Tragedies of Euripides in English verse. 2 II. 799-801. 3 76. 902-904. 4 Ib. 956-960. EURIPIDES 39 But others can see in Polymnestor's own life the work- ing of the law of retribution. 1 Foul treachery meets its just doom. 2 Sometimes action, which is to lead to the expiation of ancestral wrong, is represented as being divinely ordained. For the sin of Tantalus, it is said of his descendant Atreus, son of Pelops : "... born to him was Atreus For whom with, her doom-threads Fate twined a strand Of strife against Thyestes, yea, his brother." 3 In this light Atreus was a fated criminal. And so was Orestes : "What boots it to lay wrong to Phoabus' charge Who thrust Orestes in to slay the mother That bare him? few but cry shame on the deed Though in obedience to the God he slew." 4 But fated sin can yet breed remorse. If a relative moral claim be made absolute, 5 the passing identified with the permanent, the experience that ensues is that of self -accusation ; the dread of vengeance distracts him. 6 The deed believed to be God-inspired is yet felt to be accursed. 7 The sin is laid at the door of the Deity, 8 not in the spirit of the Hebrews who felt that there was ultimately only one real power in the world, and said, " God, why hast Thou hardened our hearts from Thy fear, and caused us to err from Thy ways ? " but because of a supposed divine command. 9 It is true that conscience and the spirit of reflection play so 1 Hecuba, 1085-1087. 2 Ib. 1247, 1248, 1254. 3 Orestes, 11-14. 4 Ib. 28-31. 5 Ib. 579-581. 6 Ib. 37, 38. 7 Ib. 285-287. 8 Ib. 594-599. f sYiqta^'mTtg fatigue. Wis endnrano.p. was simply marvftllrms when, I being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without food on such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to everybody ; there was no one to be compared to him. . . . His fortitude in enduring cold was also sur- prising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or, if they went out, had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces : in the midst of this Socrates, with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress, marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them." ] He fought also at Delium, and shared in the retreat of the de- feated Athenians ; and again at Amphipolis, when Brasidas the hero and Cleon the demagogue both fell. 1 Symposium, 219 E, 220 A, B. 62 SOCRATES These military expeditions in which Socrates partici- pated did not reflect much credit on his country's prowess. The service at Potidaea was a slow blockade of two years, issuing eventually in an Athenian success. Delium was a sore defeat, and Amphipolis a shameful one, marked by panic in the men and cowardice in the general. But the part of Socrates, though only that of a private man, would, we are sure, be played in such a way as to bear out his own words, when, refusing to make any unworthy compliances to save his life, he says, " Strange indeed would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I, who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidasa and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man facing death if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil the philosopher's mission of searching into myself /ind other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death or any other fear ; . . . and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the existence of the gods if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death, fancying that I was wise when I was not wise." l \ And although, in obedience to the conviction that Grbd had summoned him to abstain from voluntary participation in politics, he never entered public life,' yeji he was neither unfaithful nor timid in the discharge of the civic duties which Athens laid upon her sons. After thevictory of Arginusse, when the generals were ~put on their triaTjEor jnegleuting to save the wounded and to recover the bodies, of the Athenian dead-irom the triremes^hat had been .pnLoui of action, 1 Apology, 28 E, 29 A. SOCRATES'S JUSTICE 63- an illegal proposition was put forward, in_a. .moment of passioji^tcrthe effect that all the accused shoulrlbft o.rm- demned or acquitted by a single vnf.p. pf thp. assembly without bejng_jieard in their defence before sworn jurors,and the senators of the presiding tribe were overawed by popular feeling, SociateSr^ykQ-^was one of thePryta,nes. could be moved by n n r.1fl.nnmir to Depart f rom Jhis solitary protest against thia4Hegal and morally wrong course. 1 And again, when in the reign oFTerror at Athens, under the Thirty, Socrates was one of five citizens whom, in accordance with their customary policy of involving others in their criminal acts, the Tyrants ordered to proceed to Salamis to arrest Leon, he declined obedience and went home. 2 He says in the Apology : " That government with all its power did not terrify me into doing anything wrong ; but when we left the Council-Chamber the* other four went over to Salamis, and brought Leon across to Athens ; and I went away home : and if the j-ule of the Thirty had not been destroyed soon after- wards I should very likely have been put to death for what I did then." These were the most noteworthy incidents of his life, so far as it was impinged upon *" by the politics of his time. He took no voluntary part in public life. ( He met the claims of the State upon his services by loyal obedience. But where a conflict be- tween civil claims and conscience emerged, he followed the inner light. ^ Of what we understand by home life neither he nor others of his time knew much. The Greek matron was not the companion of her husband. Her education 1 ApoL 32 A, B, C ; Xen., Mem. I. i. 17, 18, iv. iv. 2. J Apol. 32 (Church) ; Xen., Mem. iv. iv. 3 ; Diog. Laert. ii. 24. 64 SOCRATES fitted her for domestic duties, but not for intellectual comradeship. And when the Athenians of that day sought this in woman, they usually found it in the formation of those irregular relationships, typified by that of Pericles and Aspasia, which were so marked a feature of Greek life. The wife of Socrates. Xanthippe, has had perhaps scant justice done her in history. She was said to have a bitter tongue, and has been generally treated as the type_ oj_the_juitamed shrew. There is something perhaps to be said from her point of view. No doubt Socrates was a trial. He cared nothing for business or anything but his philosophic mission. He seems to have been able to live without following any other avocation. Unless the explana- tion 1 be true, that the rich Crito supported him, one must suppose that he had a little property, for he took no fees from his disciples,. He describes himself at the end of his life as being in great poverty, owing to this devotion of his to philosophy. One suspects that he was not " a good provider," and that Xanthippe needed all her philosophy when he took people unexpectedly home to supper, and sought to quiet her distress by saying, " Be of good cheer ; if our friends are sensible people they will take us as they find us ; if they are paltry folk, we won't trouble about them." 2 There are many stories and bits of petty gossip about Xanthippe in late authors. Such as that, when on one occasion she had finished her passionate abuse of Socrates by flinging water upon him, lie answered : " Did not I remark that Xanthippe was thundering and was going to rain ? " 3 Or that other bit of gossip which asserts that ^Eschines procured 1 Diog. Laert. ii. 20, 121. 2 Ib. ii. 34. 3 2b. ii. 36. HOME LIFE 65 dialogues written by Socrates from Xanthippe and passed them off as his own, 1 the value of which may be gauged from our knowledge of the general agree- ment of testimonies that Socrates wrote no dialogues, nor, indeed, anything else, unless the prison exercises of which Plato tells us be supposed to count. Such stories appear about all great or singular characters, almost in parallel streams of idealisation by disciples, or depreciation by pickers-up of " unconsidered trifles," such as some of the later Greek writers. A juster view of a relationship which cannot be regarded as happy is to be gained from considering what the great authorities Plato and Xenophon relate. Xenophon, 2 indeed, in the very passage in which I^g-mprocles^ the t eldest son of p. Socrates, is brought in as complaining that his mother's ill-humour is unendurable, represents Socrates as ex- postulating with him, and showing him what he has owed to his mother's love and care all through life. Whether her children understood her or not, it would seem plain that Socrates could discern the real affection often hidden by Xanthippe's shrewishness of speech. And although the parting scene in the Phcedo seems to us repellently cold, the grief on the woman's side at least is evidence of genuine attachment. Socrates him- self manifested no deep feeling. His last hours w^r^ spent talking with his friends, his wifp> a.nr1 *>>nlrlTo|^ having been dismissed to be readmitted before the end, only to say farewell. There is little more to be said about the matter. \The marriage relationships of great men are often infelicitous. The question only seems to engage a bit oftheir minds. They are like Thales, " when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the 1 Diog. Laert. ii. 60. 2 Mem. n. ii. 5 66 SOCRATES stars ... so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before his feet." l The real life of Socrates was that of the thinker and philosophic missionary. By the time he was satirised in The Clouds of Aristophanes (424 B.C.) he must have become well known as a philosopher. He was then well on in middle life, forty-four, and for how many years he had been engaged in his pursuit we cannot tell. The account he gives in the Apology, while it reads as the description of his call, even if it cannot be accepted as historical, does at least imply that by some (of whom Chaerephon was a type) he was already recognised as exceptional for wisdom, his own con- sciousness of ignorance notwithstanding, even before that complete devotion of himself to the examination of his own and other minds which filled his remaining years. 2 Perhaps it would not be far wrong to say that before he was much more than thirty years of age he had found some discerning spirits with whom he held fellowship in philosophy, and was becoming recognised in Athens as a moral thinker. Henceforth for a generation he made reflection and examination of him- self and others the business of his life. He was no professional teacher. He received no fees. His pupils were companions, fellow-searchers for truth. He felt himself to be called of God to this work. His bodily wants ^were few and simple; his mental needs and the needs of those about him he felt to be imperative. To obtain satisfaction for them, and to help others to a similar satisfaction, was for him the most useful work of the time. In the streets and markets, the wrestling \ 1 Thecetetus, 174 A. 2 Phcedo, 96 A ; cf. Zeller, Socrates, pp. 59, 60 n. 3, 61 n. 1. A STUDENT OF MAN 67 schools and gymnasia, he found his academy, and in every listening group his pupils. Among all her citizens Athens had no more constant lover than this keen critic of her institutions and her life. "I am a lover of knowledge," he said, " and in the city I can learn from men ; but the fields and the trees can teach me nothing." 1 No man was further from the mood expressed in Wordsworth's lines : " One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can." His delights, like Wisdom's, were with the sons, .of men : men of all sorts and conditions, mechanics, sculptors, poets, politicians, teachers, all were of interest to him, and from all he gathered matter for philosophic thought. "He was always in the public eye, for he used to go early in the morning to the public walks and gymnasia; and when the market was full he was to be seen there, and the remainder of the day he was always where he would meet most people." 2 Disclaim- ing the power to impart a positive body of knowledge to others, he was incessantly on the outlook for those truth. And with such receptive spirits as he found he kept continu- ally discoursing upon human duties, examining what was pious or impious, good or bad, just or unjust, sane or insane, brave or cowardly. He asked what a State was and what a statesman, what the nature of rule over men and the quality of a governor, and about other matters ; and he thought those who understood 1 Pha'driis, 230 D. 2 Xen. Mem. I. i. 10. 68 SOCRATES these things were good and noble, and those who knew nothing about them might properly be called slaves. 1 This kind of life Socrates pursued cextainlyjox_at least thirty years, probably longer. And during this time he put the stamp of his thought upon the finest minds among the younger men of Athens. ^ The in- genuous and impressionable inquirer in matters of moral principle or statecraft found a fascination in his society and teaching, which amply compensated for some conversational discomfiture at their first meeting. wit_and gQQjj ^fellowship, admiration for per- sonal beauty or dexterity, interest in every phase of life, insatiable appetite for speech, all were means of attraction to one or other class of his fellow-country- men. li they continued_with him for a little time the Alcibiades was one out of some "-few men who, while they felt the greatness of Socrates, never really caught his spirit, who remained misthriven products of the Socratic training, and whose after careers, so harmful to their country, were turned into an argument against the teaching of the man whom they once owned as master. But he made no mistake as to the character of the influence that for a time held him, and that fully yielded to might have made him us prominent in service to Greece as he came to be in injuries. At the words of Socrates, he says, 2 "my heart leaps within me more than that of any Cory- bantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling ; my soul was not 1 Xen., Mem. i. i. 16. 2 Symp. 215 D, E, 216 A, B, C. INFLUENCE ON ALCIBIADES 69 stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought of my own slavish state. But this J^lars^as has often brought me to such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit) ; and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him, and fly as from the voice of the siren, my fate would be like that of others, he would transfix me, and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians ; therefore I hold my ears, and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popu- larity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad, if he were to die, so that I am at my wits' end." But the course of life Socrates pursued made him enemies as well as friends. 1 Fascinated by the ideal of a true knowledge and deprecating the pretence of its possession, his examination of all assumptions was searching and merciless. Self-conceit was pierced, and imaginary mental riches disappeared. Not all men could endure this. Nor could others understand the incessant raising of questions about what they con- 1 Apol. 21-23. Of. remarks of E. Von Lesaulx, DCS Socrates Leben, Lehre und Tod, p. 62. 70 SOCRATES sidered to be matters of common understanding. It was felt to be unsettling. Not understanding the aim of the preacher, to give a rational basis to ethics, his inquiries were considered simply an addition to the sum of dissolving and revolutionary influences in the State. Free expressions of criticism, directed against the invocation of chance in the Athenian democracy, in the method of filling offices by lot, were distorted into seditious utterances, .and harmless quotations from the poets were said to have been repeated as slanders of the sovereign people. The tendency, moreover, of the Socratic political teaching to commit affairs to an aristocracy of intellect, was more freely interpreted as a support of oligarchical principles, a thing hateful to a democracy that had suffered much at the hands of aristocratic revolutionists. A combination of influ- ences was at work, in fact, all making against the safety of the philosopher, with the result that, in 399 B.C., Uie was indicted as an irreligious man, a corrupt er of youth, and an innovator in worship.) Anytus, the chief actor, was an active politician: he had shown great zeal on the democratic side In the time of the oligarchical troubles, and had acquired influence with the Athenians. He is brought before us in the Meno as showing great hostility to sophis- tical teaching, and displaying also much irritation 1 at the remarks of Socrates, which seem to imply the impossibility of teaching virtue, illustrating this from the cases of distinguished Athenians whose sons were commonplace persons. And in the closing words of the dialogue, Socrates seems to display some appre- hension on account of his veiled threats. Meletus 1 Meno, 94 E. THE JUDGES OF SOCRATES 71 was an unsuccessful dramatist. His character comes down to us painted by enemies, it is true, but he seems to have been a poor creature. It is hinted in the Apology l that he was incited to action by resentment at the free Socratic criticism of the poets. Of Lycon we know nothing but his participation in this bad business. As this must be reverted to again later on, it is suffi- cient here to say that the case came on for trial before a large popular jury; that, in accordance with custom, the accusers made their speeches, then the accused replied in a speech, the thought, at anyrate, of which has been preserved for us in the Apology, that the jury then deliberated, and found Socrates guilty, by a t^^^lL^MMKMMKMMMiMMMUMMMM f__ " fn Vr, T ^ narrow majority : the prosecutor then proposed death us the penalty ; the accused, by Athenian practice, was permitted to propose an alternative. Socrates, after protesting that what he really felt himself to deserve was public maintenance in the Prytaneum, a reward reserved for Olympic victors and others whom the State delighted to honour, consented, in consultation with his friends apparently, to propose a tine of thirty minae. Irritated by his independent attitude, many of those who at first had voted for his acquittal now gave their votes for his death ; and, after again addressing tnjnself to the jurors, he was conducted to prison . Owing to a peculiar Athenian custom, commemorative of a deliverance wrought by Theseus in legendary days from the terrible tribute exacted by the Mino- taur of Crete, which custom decreed the sending of a periodic sacred embassy to Delos, and, further, that during the days occupied in the complete voyage no 23 E. 72 SOCRATES public execution should take place at Athens, an in- terval of thirty dayd elapsed between the verdict and the execution. This interval was filled with inter- course with attached friends, discussions on immortality, and poetic exercises. Unfortunately we are left in some uncertainty as to much that is handed down to us as uttered by Socrates during this period ; or rather, we are sure that much in the Phcedo could not have been uttered by him, for reasonings on immortality are there made to hinge on doctrines only developed by his disciple Plato. In the Crito we have what nothing hinders us from accepting as a true account of the refusal of Socrates to avail himself of the help of his friends to effect his escape, and his determination to abide his fate rather than break the law. In the end of the Phcedo we have the story of his death : the dismissal of the weeping women and children, the interchange of courtesies with his gaoler, the farewell to his friends, the last charge to Crito to sacrifice a cock to ^Esculapius the Healer, in thankfulness for deliverance from the sickness of life into the health of immortality, and the calm of the last act. CHAPTEE III PRE-SOCRATIC REFLECTION AS INFLUENCING ETHICS WHEN Socrates began his work, Greek reflection had already a considerable history. It is true that at first, and for some time, the eye of philosophy was on the world. Thought was directed to the outward. It had not become strictly self-conscious. Out of the mani- fold appearances presented to sense it was labouring to discover reality. Dissatisfied with mythological statements referring phenomena to the arbitrary and capricious actings of quasi-human deities, early thinkers tried to find some rational clue that would guide thought out of the maze of appearances in which it was lost, and would take it to a point from which could be seen the principle by which they could be arranged, the law which they obeyed. The greatness of the pioneers of thought is not to be estimated by their occasional forecasts of explanations, for the establishment of which ages of investigation were necessary, but by their faith in the rationality of the world. Until the belief was overthrown that anything might be expected to occur at any time, and it was asserted that there was an order of things, an inherent reason, no movement of mind was possible. " An early Greek 73 74 SOCRATES philosopher," says Grote, "found nothing around him to stimulate or assist the effort" (after a rational explanation of things), " and much to obstruct it. He found Nature disguised under a diversified and omni- present Polytheistic agency. It is perfectly true (as Aristotle remarks) that Hesiod and the other theo- logical poets, who referred everything to the genera- tion and agency of the Gods, thought only of what was plausible to themselves, without inquiring whether it would appear equally plausible to their successors. . . . The contemporary public . . . know no other way of conceiving Nature than under this religious and poetical view, as an aggregate of manifestations by divine personal agents, upon whose volition some- times signified beforehand by obscure warnings in- telligible to the privileged interpreters, but often inscrutable the turn of events depended." l " First that which is natural " was the order followed by the speculations of those who could not rest content with tradition. They simply turned away from ex- planations felt to be puerile, and without initiating, at first, a polemic of destructive reasoning, ignored the polytheistic theology in their search for a rational scheme of the natural order. By the middle of the seventh century B.C., in the prosperous settlements of Asiatic Greece, the new spirit of inquiry began to show itself. Wealth had brought leisure, contact with other types of civili- sation had contributed to the enrichment of science, and the need and opportunity for intellectual ex- pansion met. 2 Thales (b. 640 B.C.) stands at the 1 Grote, Plato and Companions of Socrates, i. 89, 90. 2 Windelband, Hist. Anc. Phil. p. 16 sq. THALES AND ANAXIMANDER 75 head of those who tried to reach by reflection along the lines of "Dynamical Physicism," as it has been called, the physical substance which, by transmuta- tions and permutations, might be conceived as the essence of all things in the world. And the answer that he gave was that all things in the world were made of water. How he reached his way to this conclusion we do not know. We have none of his writings; we do not certainly know whether he left any. And it is only conjecture that he was led by study of the facts of nutrition and reproduction in animal life, 1 or by the ancient cosmogonies, 2 or by the ever-present importance of the sea in the lives of his people, 3 to fasten on the element of water as the basis of physical being. Professor Mayor's sug- gestion is, that it was probably "also from the fact that water supplies the most obvious example of the transmutation of matter under its three forms solid, fluid, and gaseous." * Thales was followed by Anaxi- mander (b. 610 B.C.), whose aim also was to reach the primary matter of the world, but whose notion of which appears at first more metaphysical than physical that is, he sought the origin of all things in the indeterminate and infinite. This seems at first a deviation from the physical explanations initiated by Thales, in so far as no matter to which experience introduces us is boundless. 6 It is not certain, however, that the infinity of which he conceives is more than a corporeal richness that meets all the demands upon it of life and growth, change and decay. Anaximander 1 Arist, Meta. i. 3 ; 9836, 20-27. - Ib. 3 Windelband, Hist. Anc. Phil. p. 37. 4 Mayor, Anc. Phil. p. 3. c Windelband, p. 39. 76 SOCRATES had evidently great talent for natural science. Gom- perz l says : " We may fairly look on Anaximander as the author of the natural philosophy of Greece, and consequently of the Occident." The point about his method is that it scientifically corrects the sense judgments by a principle of reason. Anaximenes (fl. c. 520 B.C.) kept without ambiguity within the range of physical elements in his search for what is primary. He assumed this primary substance to be air, from which, by processes of condensation and rarefaction, all things come. All the Ionian physical school were hylozoists, i.e. matter to them had in itself life and moving power, and in finding the primary matter in air Anaximenes chose the sub- stance apparently finest and most clearly possessing these qualities. After the first three names of Ionic philosophers, absolutely exact agreement ceases amongst historians of philosophy as to the order in which the names should be treated according to the succession in thought. The order followed here is that adopted by Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy. The reasons, substantial and convincing, cannot be detailed. Following upon the work of the Ionic thinkers mentioned, came some- thing of the nature of a religious reaction which is connected with the name of Pythagoras (fl. 532 B.C.). Zeller says 2 Pythagoras " desired to effect, chiefly by the aid of religion, a reform of the moral life." The connection of this reform with scientific theory, which Zeller goes on to speak of, is a much more speculative matter. Aristotle scarcely speaks of Pythagoras, but of 1 Greek Thinkers, i. 40 (trans. Magnus). 2 Pre-Socratic Phil. i. 358 (Eng. trans.). PYTHAGORAS 77 those l who are called Pythagoreans, in his references to the philosophy of the school. Pythagoras himself was a religious reformer, full of moral earnestness, who worked, through the machinery of politics and by means of the fraternal communities he established, to infuse into Greek moral life the strenuousness which new influences, such as the great but precarious affluence of Ionia and the speculations of its thinkers were making so essential; but what his special opinions were is a difficult question to answer. He taught transmigration and inculcated abstemiousness, his early disciples refraining in general from animal food and beans. In the regulations of his associated followers there was a mixture of ethical precepts and positive rules of a ceremonial character, but the details of prescription are not historical but projections into the past of a later system. In the religious associations of the Greeks there was a general aim of cultivating those elements of religion that appealed to the need felt of purification and the desire for the care of the Gods. 2 There were mystic elements in the ceremonies of initiation and suggestions of another life. Professor Burnet thinks that the scientific theory of Pythagoras was dualistic, 3 and that he held that the " air " of Anaximenes' theory " was identical with the space which the geometer studied, and thought of things as made of space, bounded in various ways." 4 The opposition to the explanations of poetical theo- logy implied in the Ionian speculations was emphasized by Xenophanes of Colophon (b. 569 B.C.), whose whole attitude to the polytheistic creed was polemic and 1 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 98, n. 35. - Ib. pp. 85-87. 3 Ib. p. 107. 4 2b. p. 108. 78 SOCRATES reforming. 1 He was not only dissatisfied with the popular creed, but revolted by it. He said : " One is God, supreme midst Gods and men, not like in body to mortal nor yet in mind all eye, all mind all ear." 2 " Homer and Hesiod attributed to the Gods all things which are disreputable and worthy of blame when done by men; and they told of them many lawless deeds, stealing, adultery, and deception of each other. 3 " But if cattle or lions had hands so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies in form like their own; horses like horses, cattle like cattle." 4 His strictly philosophical theories seem to have been regarded by himself as of less importance than his assault on a false theology, and not to have been con- sistently developed. He thinks, in line with his pre- decessors in seeking a physical basis of existence, that " all things come from earth and return to earth," 6 and again that " earth and water are all things that came into being and grow." 6 But it is God who " without effort sets all things in motion by mind and thought." 7 Aristotle apparently 8 does not think that Xenophanes had a clear conception of unity, whether of reason or matter, for he says : " He did not make anything clear, nor did he seem to get at the nature of either of 1 Windelband, Hist. Anc. Phil. p. 46. 2 Mullach, Frag. Grcec. Phil. i. 101. 3 Ib. p. 102 (Fairbanks, pp. 68, 69). 4 Ib. p. 102 (Fairbanks, pp. 66-67). 5 Ib. pp. 102, 8. 6 Ib. pp. 102, 10. 7 Ib. pp. 101, 3. 8 Meta. i. 5 ; 986&, 22. HERACLITUS 79 these things, but looking up into the broad heavens he said, ' The unity is God.' " The fact is, there were two elements in his thought not unified. His impulse to rationalise the current creed leads him in the direction of a unity that is pantheistic. Out of this divine unity, in itself unchangeable 1 and immoveable, 2 everything must proceed. There is here a deadlock. The primary principle cannot be both unchangeable and changed into all the variety of existing things. There remains this inner contradiction. It almost seems uncertain sometimes whether the unity is finally spiritual or material, did close examination not show that, rightly understood, all the early philosophies are material. He treats as real the world of sense, and develops crude theories in natural philosophy; and along with this asserts an unchangeable, universal being, the source of all life and movement ; and the more he emphasizes this divine unchanging unity, the more unreal becomes the world of objects and events which he still treats as real. With Heraclitus (fl. 504 B.C.) it was the transforma- tion of one ethereal substance into many forms that produced the world of variety, and he called this cosmic principle fire ; but the thing emphasized in his scheme was not the substance, but its changes. 3 Nothing was permanent. All was an eternal flux. It is the con- ception of a continual becoming throughout the universe that he presents. All things pass into their opposites, or are constituted by the union of opposites. The only permanency seen amid the flow is the law of change. This dominant principle he calls in poetical language " War, the Father of all." It is supreme. It is reason. 1 Diels, Doxog. Grccc. p. 565. 2 Mullach, p. 101, 4. 3 Mayor, Anc. Phil. p. 4. 8o SOCRATES It is Deity. Nothing sense can grasp carries us to a permanent substance. Nothing strictly is. Things only become. The ultimate is a principle of motion which he names from its closest analogy in the world of sense fire. " Fire is the ap%fi, but not as a stuff identical with itself in all its changes, but rather as the ever uniform process itself, in which all things rise and pass away." 1 He says : " This order, the same for all things, no one of Gods or men has made ; but it always was, and is, and ever shall be, an ever-living fire, kindling according to fixed measure and extinguished according to fixed measure." 2 He is quoted by Aristotle as saying that "the first principle is soul, as it were a fiery exhalation of which all other things consist." The ethereal fire is also God. He identifies it with the world-all. 3 The later interpretation of his teaching is entirely against the spiritualising of it into a series of metaphorical state- ments, and he is held to be in the strict line of Ionic native philosophy. 4 Parmenides (b. c. 515 B.C.) taught that the universe is a universe of eternal, homogeneous matter, with no empty space at all, subject neither to motion nor change of any kind. That which can be thought is Being and this is body. 5 Nothing else can be thought, and the inconceivable does not exist. 6 There is neither in it 1 Windelband, Hist. Anc. Phil. p. 52. 2 Frag. 20, Fairbanks' First Phil, of Greece, pp. 28-29 ; ib. p. 57 ; De Anima, i. 2 ; 405a, 25. 3 Ueberweg Hist. Phil. i. 38, 41. 4 Windelband, op. cit. p. 53 ; Burnet, Early Greek Phil. p. 169 ; Diels, Doxog. Orcec. pp. 475, 558 ; Fairbanks, p. 60. 5 Burnet, pp. 13, 190. 6 Ib. 191 ; Windelband, p. 61. PARMENIDES 81 plurality nor qualitative difference. It knows no beginning and no end. It is limited, "Complete on every side, equally poised from the centre in every direction, like the mass of a rounded sphere." 1 " It is the same thing that can be thought, and for the sake of which the thought exists ; for you cannot find thought without something that is, to which it is betrothed." 2 The senses lead us to illusion. We must gain reality by thought, and we reach thus the unchangeable fulness of the universe with no room for growth or decay or change of any kind. He says : " Nor let habit force thee to cast a wandering eye upon this devious track (of common opinion), or to turn thither thy resounding ear or thy tongue; but do thou judge the subtle refutation of their discourse uttered by me." 3 A second portion of the poem in which Parmenides conveys his philosophy contains theories variously interpreted as a portion of his own philosophic creed held inconsistently with the foregoing reasoned view, 4 or given out as a concession to popular pre- judice and uninstructed opinion, 6 or as a statement of Pythagorean principle held forth as a negative example.* It is quite clear that Parmenides puts forth the views of the second portion of his poem as having no truth at all. 7 He is showing his learner what are the " opinions of mortals," the " arrangement as it seems to man," "men's opinions," who "go astray from the 1 11. 102-104 (trans. Burnet, p. 187). 2 Ib. v. 94 f., pp. 186, 187. 8 Ib. v. 55 f., p. 185. 4 Windelband, p . 63. 5 Mayor, Anc. Phil. p. 16. 6 Burnet, p. 196 ct scq. 7 Ib. p. 195. 6 82 SOCRATES truth." They stand in no relation save of opposition to his clearly enunciated theory. 1 Empedocles (b. c. 500 B.C.) was a reconciler. To obtain from the eternally self -identical Being of Parmenides, excluding motion and change of every kind, the appearances of the world of sense, as to which the help of the witness of sense must be accepted, he postulated four everlasting elements, water, air, fire, and earth, three of which appear in the systems of previous thinkers. Upon these four elements, existing in a mixed mass, two other substances, 2 poetically named Hatred and Love, impinge by necessity as moving powers, and through the continuous separating and combining processes thus set up all existences and experiences are accounted for. The predominance of the severing or uniting power is decided by the stage attained in the slowly moving cycles of the world. When Love has gained complete sway, all things rest in the perfect sphere only to be dissolved again by strife and to begin the process of formation and decay anew. 3 The human soul is a mixture of both powers, and, in obedience to the principle that only like things can know each other, can know those things the ele- ments of which it possesses in itself. 4 All living things are composed of elements united by Love and dissolved by Hate. Plants, as to which he affirms sex and sensa- tion, are combinations of earth and water and fire. The animals that were originated when Strife ruled were originated in separate parts, then, as organised, but 1 Cf. Gomperz, pp. 180 f., for opposite view. 2 Frag. 11. 79, 80, 87, quoted by Burnet, 246, to show that corporeal substances are meant. 3 Mayor, p. 17, Frag. 11. 65 sq. 4 Ib. 17. EMPEDOCLES 83 often monstrous wholes. Some, however, were adapted for survival. Now, the principle of Unity is decaying and Separation increasing in power. The creatures originated early in this period were without sex or distinctness of species, but these are now clearly marked. Scientific theories of growth and nutrition respiration, hearing, vision, perception generally, sleep and death were advanced. In perception, effluences from the objects without entered the organs of sense through the pores. Perception was not distinguished from thought, and was supposed to reside in the blood. All things had a share in thought. Our knowledge was a matter decided by the constitution of the elements of our body. 1 Theologically, Empedocles seems to have combined as many differing beliefs as in physics. He speaks of Gods "composed of elements" as men are, and subject like them, after a longer time, to death. He speaks of the divinity of the orb of matter, and of the elements which compose it ; and of daemons doomed to inhabit mortal bodies for ages as an atonement for sin. And he asserts that there is a deity who is more than these, " sacred and ineffable mind." 2 What was the ethical value of his doctrine of transmigration is hard to say. He was himself, he said, one of the daemons atoning by an incarnation for former offences. But if a moral explanation is sought of all the processes of metempsychosis, we can only grasp it by getting into the range of ideas where kinship to animals 3 and the 1 Of. Burnet, pp. 256-268, for exposition. 3 Hist. Phil. GTCKC. , Ritter et Preller, 180 (1. 344 f. ). Fairbanks, p. 200. 3 Burnet, pp. 100 f. and 270 (and Frag. v. 430 f.); Grote, Plato, i. pp. 9, 48. 84 SOCRATES confusion of soul and sense seem natural. Empedocles had been by his own assertion a bush and a bird and a fish. It seems eviscerating some statements as to transmigration 1 of meaning to say that all Empedocles' " needs would be amply provided for by the reappear- ance of the same corporeal elements in different com- binations." What he needs is that metempsychosis should have a moral interpretation. There is something that offends and suffers, and in the consciousness of this endures thorough changes. It is quite immaterial whether this be held with a conception of the distinct- ness of soul and body or not. There is an identity that abides ; and if all things participate in thought, to be a bush and a bird is no check to its persistence. Anaxagoras (b. c. 500 B.C.) is the writer who was approached by Socrates with such eager expectation, only to be left in disappointment because of the inconsistent application of the idea of Mind in his philosophy. His system was a mediating one. The mass of matter can neither know increment nor loss. It remains unchangeable. 2 " Nothing comes into being nor yet does anything perish, but there is a mixture and separation of things that are." 3 He does not treat motion as impossible and change as decep- tive ; but sets himself to account for these by combina- tion and division. "Wherefore they say that every- thing was mixed in everything, because they saw everything arising out of everything." 4 What Empe- docles had treated as elements earth, water, air, and fire were to Anaxagoras compounds. The substances 1 Frag. 1. 369 et seq., Hitter et Preller, 181. 2 Frag. 14 (Fairbanks), p. 239. * Frag. 17. 4 Arist., Phys. i. 4 ; 187, 1, 26. ANAXAGORAS 85 that make up the unchangeable quantity of being are composed of seeds which contain in themselves all the original opposite qualities ; they are rare, dense, warm, cold, light, dark, dry, moist in various proportions ; and according to the predominant quality is the character of the thing. Our senses give us a partial knowledge of things, but cannot detect the qualities opposite to the apparent nature, when these qualities are present only in minute proportions. These qualities, Burnet shows, are called " things," 1 and are present in every- thing small and great. The seeds of all the matter in the world are composed of the same elements the original opposites of the Nature philosophers but in different proportions. And from the proportion comes the quality that classifies substances. Hence, so under- stood, all the particles of a particular substance are homogeneous with the whole mass. And, in the same way, all the particles of the different substances differ from each other only in the proportions of their com- binations and not in the ultimate constituents. The beginning of all motion, the principle of order and life, is Nous. We can render this Mind, but we have not for all that reached a truly spiritual concep- tion. It is something unmixed, extended, tenuous, the cause of motion and life and all-knowing. 2 It is the rational order of things, without being pure intelli- gence. When life is present there it is, but it cannot manifest itself in all things alike because of the imperfection of the corporeal instrument. 3 The work of Pythagoras as the agent of a religious reaction accompanied by moral reform is separable 1 Early Greek Phil. pp. 287, 288. 2 Frag. 6, 7. 3 Arist., Part. Anim. iv. 10 ; 687a, 7 (Hitter et Preller, 160 J). 86 SOCRATES from the philosophic developments, under the name of Pythagoreanism. An activity that was monastic and political is the prominent thing in the one case ; in the other, a speculative system so extraordinary that parts of it seem intractable to a rational interpretation. The secret Pythagoreanism has to yield, then, is that the world is made of numbers. These numbers were not, however, abstractions. No more than other thinkers before the Sophists had the Pythagoreans gained the immaterial in thought. They did not mean to posit an abstraction as the foundation of all things. They meant that numbers were in their scheme of thought what to the earlier philosophers, seeking for the primary matter, water, air, or fire, was, the physical basis of things. Re- ferring to their arithmetical and mathematical studies, Aristotle says : " And being brought up in them they thought that the first principles of these were the first principles of all things. 1 . . . And, further, discerning in numbers the conditions and reasons of harmonies also; since, moreover, other things seemed to be like numbers in their entire nature, and numbers were the first of every nature, they assumed that the elements of numbers were the elements of all things, and that the whole heavens were harmony and number." 2 These numbers were not separated from sensible things : " The Pythagoreans say that there is but one Number, the mathematical ; but things of sense are not separated from this, for they are composed of it." 3 Their num- bers were not conceived of as severed from things that can be seen and touched. They are not to be con- l Meta. i. 5 ; 9856, 23. Fairbanks, p. 136. 2 lb. i. 5 ; 985J, 31. Fairbanks, p. 137. 3 2b. xii. 6 ; 1080&, 16. Fairbanks, p. 142. PYTHAGOREANS 87 founded with a law of development or an inner har- mony of things. Yet there was a way of speaking about them which seemed to separate them from substances : " The Pythagoreans, however, while they in similar manner assume two first principles, add this which is peculiar to themselves: that they do not think that the Finite and the Infinite and the One are certain other things by nature, such as fire or earth or any other such thing, but the Infinite itself and Unity itself are the essence of the things of which they are predicated, and so they make Number the essence of all things." l The Monad, however, which begets Limit, shown in the odd numbers, and by union of which with the even numbers flowing from the Dyad each indi- vidual thing arises, is spatial limit, and that with which it unites is the Unlimited. 2 The identification of the Unlimited with air and the void, and of Limit with border and measure of concrete realities, completed the physical character of the Pythagorean theory. " And the Pythagoreans say that there is a void, and that it enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though it the heaven were breathing ; and this void defines the nature of things, inasmuch as it is a certain separation and definition of things that lie together; and this is true first in the case of numbers, for the void defines the nature of these." 3 In the ordinary expositions of the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers the theory appears largely as an unexplained eccentricity of the human mind, or its historical character is departed from, and it is repre- sented as the statement of a law of proportion and 1 Arist., Meta. i. 5 ; 987a, 9. 2 Mayor, p. 11 ; Burnet, p. 310. 3 Arist., Phys. iv. 6 ; 21 3&, 22 (Ritter et Preller, 75). Fairbanks, p. 134. 88 SOCRATES harmony in nature. Professor Burnet's exposition, which holds the spatial character of the numbers, is followed here. They are really parts of the Unlimited, i.e. of Space (which is not mere emptiness, but a material conception), separated off by union with the principle of Limit. One thus is equal to a point, two means a line, three a plane, and so with higher numbers and many planed figures. "The theory that things are numbers then comes simply to this, that things are built up of geometrical figures, that they are portions of space limited in a variety of ways." The point of the Pythagoreans is not a mathematical point without magnitude, but the unit of space, the line has breadth and the plane depth. 1 It is not an abstract and ideal system, but something dealing with quantities and shapes of things. 2 There were multitudes of other applications of the doctrine of a fantastic and capricious nature ; not only concrete objects, but events of life and moral qualities were capable of numerical definition. Justice was the first square, four ; marriage, five ; opportunity, seven. One was the central fire with ten spheres dancing round it, on the outside that of the fixed stars, then within this the five planets, then sun, moon, earth, and counter earth the last between the earth and the central fire, shutting off its direct light from us, and only allowing the reflection of it by the sun to reach us. 3 This con- ception of the counter earth, apparently for the purpose of securing numerical symmetry in the cosmology, appears an extraordinary instance of intellectual levity in the scheme, and raises questions as to the worth of 1 Burnet, pp. 312-314 ; cf. note, p. 315. 2 Cf. Benn, Gk. Phil. i. 35. 3 Mayor, p. 11. PYTHAGOREANS 89 effort to grasp theories so framed. " And they assume yet another earth opposite this, which they call the counter earth, not seeking reasons and causes for phenomena, but stretching phenomena to meet certain assumptions and opinions of theirs and attempting to arrange them in a system." 1 This fitting of facts into the mould of system is also alluded to in the words : "And where there was a slight misfit, some gentle pressure would be applied for the sake of rendering their theory a homogeneous whole " 2 (lit. " and if there was any falling short anywhere they were most eager that the whole system should be connected with these (exceptional facts))." On the other hand, the Pythagorean astronomy has been justly described as " one of the most original and brilliant creations of the Greek intellect." 3 Its later developments were fruitful. Ecphantus taught the rotation of the earth on its own axis. The combination of the movements of the planets Mercury and Venus with the Sun's first emerged. Guesses were made at the relative proportions of sun and earth ; and there was approximation, to be consummated later, to the heliocen- tric astronomy. Mayor says, speaking of the Pythago- rean contraries : " These mystical extravagances appear to have been the necessary introduction to the sciences of Arithmetic and Geometry, just as Astrology and Alchemy were the introduction to Astronomy and Chemistry. Indeed, we find that men like Copernicus and Kepler were to some extent influenced and guided in their investigations by the ideas of Pythagoras." 4 1 Arist, Meta. ii. 13 ; 293a, 19. 2 Ib. i. 5 ; 986a, 6 (Gomperz' rendering). 3 Gomperz, p. 111. 4 Mayor, Hist. Anc. Phil. p. 12. 90 SOCRATES Zeno of Elea (b. c. 490 B.C.) set himself to refute argu- ments against the conclusions of Parmenides, by reason- ings framed to show the absurdities logically deducible less from current beliefs than from Pythagorean theo- ries. 1 The admission of multiplicity of phenomena issued in contradictions. From the infinite divisibility of space and time he argued the impossibility of motion. Benn summarises his reasonings thus: "A whole composed of parts and divisible ad infinitum must be either infinitely great or infinitely little; infinitely great if its parts have magnitude, infinitely little if they have not. A moving body can never come to the end of a given line, for it must traverse half the line, then half the remainder, and so on for ever." 2 These reasonings were not mere captious argumentation, but the statement of real difficulties involved in the acceptance of the unitary theory of space and time. They involve questions at the basis of metaphysics, only successfully to be approached by later mathematical methods. 3 Melissus of Samos (fl. 440 B.C.) laboured, not by showing the contradictions to which an opposite assumption led, but directly 4 to show the truth of the doctrine of space-filling being. Space was infinite, and was wholly occupied by reality, which had always existed and would continue to exist without change. When he has asserted all this about the Eleatic Unity, it is held by some interpreters that he still teaches inconsistently the incorporeality of being. 5 It seems more likely, on the other hand, that the true view is that the words relied on to establish this constitute 1 Burnet, p. 327 f. 2 Benn, The Greek Philosophers, p. i, 20. 3 Windelband, p. 67. 4 Ib. p. 59. 5 Gomperz, p. 190. LEUCIPPUS 91 part of a conditional argument, and are not to be taken as stating immateriality. 1 Leucippus was the originator of the atomic theory, better known in the more fully developed form given to it by Democritus. It is not known when he was born or when he died, or whether he wrote anything or not. He is taken to be somewhat earlier 2 than Democritus (b. 460 B.C.) "He assumed innumerable and ever- moving elements, namely, the atoms. And he made their forms infinite in number, since there was no reason why they should be of one kind rather than another, and because he saw that there was unceasing becoming and change in things. He held, further, that what is " (primary matter) " is no more real than what is not " (empty space), " and that both are alike causes of the things that come into being ; for he laid down that the substance of the atoms was compact and full, and he called them what is, while they moved in the void which lie called what is not, but affirmed to be just as real as what is." 3 The theory was a great effort to do justice to the testimony of the senses and to philosophic thought. Parmenides would have nothing but the one immoveable reality, the homo- geneous sphere. Unfilled space was unreal to him, but he had not dealt with the problem of the " beyond." Empty space was non-being. This doctrine had led to pluralism to make motion and change possible. The elements of Empedocles, the homogeneous fragments of Anaxagoras, the spatial units of the Pythagoreans, were all put forward in the same interest. But the 1 Burnet, pp. 344, 345. 2 Gomperz, i. 317. 3 Theophr., Physic. Opin. in Doxog. Orcec. 483, 16 (trans. Burnet), p. 353. 92 SOCRATES criticism of Zeno had found joints in the armour of such reasonings. Starting from infinite divisibility, 1 he had shown the contradictions in which Pytha- goreanism was involved. Then came Melissus, who saw the necessity of spatial infinitude for the material One of Parmenides, if unity was to be preserved. Limi- tation involved multiplicity. The theory of Leucippus denied infinite divisibility, assumed in Zeno's reason- ings, and postulated atoms each as ultimately un- changeable as the One of Parmenides. And going back to his denial of empty space, Leucippus affirmed its existence. Without it motion was impossible. But sense testified to things coming into being, to their passing away, and to their multiplicity. The " reality " of the void that made change possible was different to the " reality " of the material One, but it existed. A new conception was being grasped by thought. Space not material in character, not body-filled, was being dealt with. The Atoms were " what is," and the void in which they moved was " what is not," each asser- tion understood in the sense conditioned by previous thought. Incorporeal reality was asserted as strongly as corporeal. 2 The atoms, again, were incapable of division, as there were in them no interstices enclosing void ; they were qualitatively alike, but differed in form, position, and arrangement. 3 By the attraction of similar things for each other, bodies gather in the void, and " innumerable worlds " are formed from the collision and adhesion to each other of like atoms. 4 1 Burnet, p. 355. 2 Ritter et Preller, 194 ; Burnet, 357. 3 Theophr., Physic. Opin. Fr. 8 (trans. Burnet, p. 353); Arist., Meta. i. 4 ; 985&, 4. 4 Hippol., Eef. i. 12. 2 ; Diels, Doxog. Grcec. p. 564 ; Burnet, 358. DEMOCRITUS 93 Diogenes of Apollonia was an eclectic of encyclopaedic knowledge, who endeavoured to unite Anaxagoras' principle of Mind with the primary Air of Anaxi- menes. Air possessed intelligence, 1 it was the soul and mind of animals and men. 2 Rarefied and become fiery, it produced the sun. 3 And again he speaks of sun and heavenly bodies as pumice-like, with pores that the fire flows through. Archelaus was the successor of Anaxagoras in the school of Lampsacus. Air with him represented the original mixture of the " seeds " of Anaxagoras. It was also the seat of mind. But mind was not the world-maker, though air and mind were God. 4 He was said to be the teacher of Socrates. There was neither originality nor consistency in these writers. With all their knowledge and scientific interest, philosophically speaking, they were simply en- gaged in compounding earlier ideas. There was much progress in knowledge without movement in thought. The conclusion of the period, in which the explanation of things was sought in direct examination of and speculation upon a world naively apprehended, was reached. The question of knowledge was to be raised. The interest was moving from the world to man. The dividing line between Leucippus and Democritus, whom most historians treat together, 5 Burnet thinks must be drawn where the new questions as to our power of knowing emerge. Democritus is on the 1 Frag. 4, Mullach, i. 254. 2 Frag. 5, ib. 254. 8 Ritter etPreller, 215 ; Plut., Strom. 12 ; Burnet, 363. 4 Burnet, 361 ; Aet. i. 7. 14 ; Diels, p. 302. 5 Zeller, Pre-Soc. Phil. ii. 207 (Eng. trans.). 6 Burnet, Intdn. p. 1 n. 1, p. 358. 94 SOCRATES hither side of this line, Leucippus on the farther. "The first in time of the subjective philosophers is Democritus. . . . The philosophy of Democritus marks an advance on that of Protagoras." l Democritus (b. 460 B.C.) was a contemporary of Socrates, and in his time questions of the knowledge of reality had arisen. All knowledge was relative to the individual, according to the sensualistic and sceptical formula of Protagoras : "Man is the measure of all things." The possibility of science was denied. And it is in the atmosphere of these theories and in relation to them that the doctrines of Democritus are put forth. The questions of epistemology once effectively raised, philosophy takes a new form. 2 Democritus deals with them in the interest of Atomism. Socrates, recognising the importance of this sceptical movement as directed by the Sophists, applied himself to the establish- ment of a doctrine of knowledge through conceptions, that he might find a sure and certain base for morality. The transition time, from the predominatingly physi- cal interest of early philosophy to the anthropological period that began with Socrates, was filled by the work of the Sophists. A controversy not lacking in acerbity has raged round the philosophic position of these men and their ethical influence. The repre- sentations of them which have been decisive in fixing modern views are principally those of enemies, Aris- tophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle. They are mainly unfavourable and often contemptuous. And the older historians of philosophy have reproduced this unfavour- 1 Brocliard in Archivfiir Geschichte der Phil. ii. pp. 374, 377, referred to in Burnet, p. In. 1. 2 Burnet, p. 369. SOPHISTS 95 able view. The Sophists were charlatans, corrupters of morals, empty phrasemakers. But for a long time this view, in its unqualified form at any rate, has been obsolete. The strongest defence of the Sophists, no doubt, was put forward fifty years ago, in Grote's seventh volume ; but the force of the reaction from the view he was opposing carried him into partiality. As the dust of controversy has settled down, their true position has come to be seen. They were men of a transition period. Bearing a name originally meaning sage or man of capacity, but by this time carrying the sense of professional teacher, they devoted themselves to the training of young men for public life, specially in the art of rhetoric, which in the increasingly democratic conditions of Athenian politics had become a highly valued attainment. This training rested with some on philosophic principles, but in the case of the more prominent names the principles were of such a type as to associate the name of Sophist with philosophic scepticism and practical deductions tending to moral laxity. They were not a philosophic school, there was no standard of Sophist orthodoxy; but, in the pursuit of practical ends, theories which were in the air came to be adopted, in varying forms and with different degrees of consistency, which have a sufficient connection to bear treatment together. 1 It is less distant from the truth to recognise in them a certain community of type than to emphasize their separateness. It is not, moreover, with their general services to Greek culture so much that we are concerned, as with the attitude of a few prominent men to scientific and 1 Cf. Ritchie, Plato, p. 65. 96 SOCRATES philosophic questions. And here their importance is in the expression of the negative moment in Greek thought at the point of its exhaustion on the path of nature philosophy, and before a new basis of certitude was found. This may seem at first not to differ from the traditional opinion, or only in an unimportant modification; but even the warmest apologist of the Sophists must admit that deservedly or not they are in men's minds the exponents of the average man's conclusions from his knowledge of the contradictory views of philosophers, and the mouthpiece of a time of weakened conviction. It is undeniable that Prota- goras and Gorgias are rightly associated with views that on any interpretation undermine science. The question of their personal character and aims is an interesting one, and has long been decided in their favour ; l but is not vital for philosophy. The point is, was their philosophic position analogous to the lack of moral conviction, the unrest and upheaval of the time, in its expression of acquiescence in failure to reach reality ? Henry vin. was a strong man, and in many respects a great monarch ; but the facts are strained if we are asked to believe that he was also a person of ascetic spirit and admirable in his family relationships. The Sophists were respectable men and able teachers ; but a strain is put upon the facts if it is denied that their philosophic influence was negative and dissolving. It was from the breakdown of effort to ascertain the truth of things along the line of physical speculations that " Sophistic," in so far as philosophy entered into it, took its departure. Various thinkers had said that truth was not given in uncorrected sense-impression; 1 Cf. the services of Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus to their states. PROTAGORAS AND GORGIAS 97 and practical confirmation of this was found in the conflicting answers given as to the nature of the real worlds. The different principles of the Nature-philo- sophers were no satisfying explanations, but had become cries of controversy. If earnest students reached such opposed conclusions, the explanation must be in defec- tive tools of investigation ; we could not reach objective truth. Protagoras (c. 491-c. 422) is the author of the formula, " Man is the measure of all things ; of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence of things that are not " ; l and, farther, " things are to you such as they appear to you, and to me such as they appear to me." All knowledge was reduced to sense perception ; and while the formula is not void of ambiguity, it is the interpretation that treats this perception as individual that fits in best with all the expressions used. It is unlikely, as Jowett 2 and Campbell point out, that the idea of contrasting the " universal with the particular subject" 3 could at this point be in the mind of Protagoras. It was rather the idea of bringing into recognition the part the human mind played in knowledge. It is with him the all-important factor. Knowledge on the strictest interpretation of the formula is reduced to pure subjectivity. And even with the modification which M. Brochard suggests, we have the intermittent reality of an object which emerges into being with and during sensation. 4 In neither case is there the ^obndation of science. Even less equivocally Gorgias (fl. 427) stated his 1 Thccetetus, 152 A. 2 iv. 146. 3 ThecKtetus (Campbell), Appendix C, p. 257. 4 Archiv fur d. Geschjjler Philosophic, ii. pp. 372, 375. 7 98 SOCRATES thoroughgoing scepticism. For him nothing existed ; and if anything did exist it would be unknowable, and if known its knowledge would be incommunicable. Hippias of Elis and Prodicus of Ceos, both younger than Protagoras, were distinguished, the first for his application to law of the principle that contradictions and changes destroyed its validity, and his assertion that it is tyrannical in its resistance to Nature; the second, for studies of words. Other and less able men pushed the principles of subjective relativism, in its application to morals, to the point of making might into right, or degenerated into mere exhibitors of dialectical battles on a level with professional boxing. The service the Sophists could do to philosophy was done when they, by their assertion of principles which compelled the re-examination of what had been naively assumed, brought into view the problem of the basis of certitude. They made the unconscious dogmatism of the earliest period for ever impossible. No doubt that unconsciousness had been occasionally broken by glimpses of the uncertainty of sense-knowledge. And from the time of Parmenides 1 and Heraclitus especially, there had risen up a sense of an opposition between reflective thought and sensuous perception which was destined to come to an open issue. Yet it was not the contribution of mind to the complex whole of knowledge with which these and later thinkers were concerned, but simply review of the data of sense with its necessary correction of these. 2 The basis of know- ledge was still ultimately sense, and it was left after reflection pervious to attack as before. 1 Hist, de la Phil, Janet et Seailles, p. 670. 2 Jb. p. 671. THE WORK OF THE SOPHISTS 99 The sense of this, and the idea that confirmation was given to distrust in sense by the multiplicity and con- tradictory character of the answers of the Nature- philosophers to the question, " What is Reality ? " constituted the strength of the Sophist position ; and the force with which they asserted the subjective side of things, interpreted individually, was their service and their partial justification. Practically, of course, they claim as teachers to have met a " felt want " ; they supplied an article for which there was a demand. Considerations of philosophic devotion to truth had nothing to do with the case. Their teaching was regulated by public requirements, as the work of a coach by the standard of the exami- nations for which he prepares men. Their disservice (and this is clearest in the later members of the order) was that they took themselves, and were often taken by others, as philosophers. Often they were men engaged in turning the per- plexities of philosophy and the exigencies of a time of public unrest to their personal advantage. If the genuine philosopher concludes that there is no real knowledge, he will not content himself with falling back upon common convictions. If there is nothing to say, the genuine sceptic will say nothing. But from the supposed illusory character of sense-knowledge the Sophists went on to conclude, by their more degenerate representatives, the shifting character of ethics. And the training given to their pupils came to be supported, on the supposition that if all opinions were equally false, all were equally true, and justifica- tion could be found for their support. In Athens, careers lay open to talents. A man's firmest conviction might ioo SOCRATES be his own capacity to guide the State and also to serve his own ends. " Sophistic " supplied him with the means to impress the multitude. There were plenty of clever men in Athens ready to conclude, from the con- tradictions of philosophers, that there was nothing in philosophy, and to draw the further inference that ethical convictions rested on no certain basis ; just as there are plenty of men to-day to argue, from the differences of Biblical critics, that the question of reli- gion " lacks actuality." The reproach of " Sophistic " is that it gave quasi-philosophic form to these conclu- sions, and supplied a certain class of men with reasons for believing what they wanted to believe. It is from Socrates that the movement takes its origin by which knowledge is to be newly based. He follows the Sophists in turning from the old path of philosophy to the study of the subjective conditions of knowledge ; but it is with a different conviction as to the possibility of its attainment, and in a new spirit of moral earnestness. It is to the consideration of his pursuit and the measure of its success that we must now turn. CHAPTER THE TEACHING OF SOCRATES THE PROSAIC AND IDEAL INTERPRETATIONS THE CRITERIA THE question of authorities for the teaching of Socrates meets us at the outset of any attempt to deal with the subject. To two writers mainly, Plato and Xenophon, we are indebted for our knowledge ; their testimonies being supplemented or corrected by what comes to us from Aristotle and others. Broadly speaking, out- side the three named, allusions to Socrates are scanty, or of poor authority. The testimonies of Xenophon and Plato are very full, but differ much from each other. The references of Aristotle are brief, but of great value. What, then, was the historic connection of our two chief witnesses with their subject ? Xenophon is sup- posed to have become a follower of Socrates at an early age. The story of his life being saved by the philosopher in the retreat from Delium (424 B.C.) is not now accepted on account of its chronological incon- sistency with the impression received from the Ana- basis as to the author's age. 1 Another story, which 1 Dakyiis, The Works of Xenojyhon, vol. i. Note iii. 101 102 SOCRATES relates his first contact with Socrates, tells how the philosopher met the youth in a narrow lane, and, barring the path with his stick, asked him where this and that kind of thing could be purchased. The lad answered him modestly, and was then asked " where men were made good and virtuous." And on his answering that he did not know, Socrates said, " Follow me, then, and learn." 1 This was the begin- ning of his discipleship. 2 From the same source we learn that he kept records of the informal discourse of his master. Out of these doubtless the Memorabilia grew. The number and variety of the incidents and teachings recorded imply a lengthy and close inter- course between the philosopher and his pupil. They include correction of personal faults in disciples, dis- courses on filial and fraternal duty, on public life and military command, on finance and statesmanship, and many other practical matters interesting to a practical mind. To the truth of some of the stories he relates, he testifies of his own knowledge. Many times he says he himself heard such and such teachings. As to counsel given to himself, for example, he relates 3 that, when invited by Proxenus to join the expedition of Cyrus, who had been the friend of the Lacedaemonians in the war, he had consulted Socrates as to his accept- ance or refusal of the invitation, and had received the counsel to consult the Delphian oracle; but having, like many another, first decided on his course, he inquired of the oracle to which of the Gods he ought to pray in order to successfully accomplish his journey. After he had received the response, he returned and told Socrates the result of his visit, and was censured 1 Diog. Laert. ii. 48. 3 Circa (?) 415 B.C. 3 Anab. in. i. 4-7. PLATO AND XENOPHON 103 by him for not inquiring first of all whether the journey was one to be undertaken or not. After this determination his whole life-course was altered. His exile resulted from his connection with the enemy of his country. It is uncertain whether he ever returned to Athens. Socrates was sentenced to death in 399 B.C., and if Xenophon did return before then it can only have been for a brief period. But he had enjoyed years of close intercourse with the philosopher, and it was a labour of love to write a vindication of the faith and morality of that misjudged heretic. Plato's connection with Socrates was perhaps scarcely so lengthened. It appears to have begun about 410 B.C. It is not marked by any very special incidents. But the enthusiasm of discipleship has glorified Socrates by making him the spokesman of the Platonic Philo- sophy, and by preserving pictures beyond price of the living as of the martyred teacher. In the closing years of the Peloponnesian War, and thence right on to the fatal year 399 B.C., Plato was in the closest intimacy with his master. So far as opportunity is concerned, both men, Plato and Xenophon, were most favourably situated. Long and close connection with a teacher whose pupils were in each case personal friends, equalises circumstance, and leaves the accounting for differences in the pre- sentation of the Socratic philosophy to the personal equation. Here there is the greatest possible differ- ence. Xenophon, it has usually been held, was an essentially simple nature, a man neither inclined toward speculative thought nor fitted for it, but one who conceived philosophy as largely a process of moral training. He was a cavalry officer and a country 104 SOCRATES gentleman, and at the same time a literary man, interested in history, politics, war, and sport; fully alive to the practical side of things, but apprehending less clearly the relation of all this to ideal principle. He disliked Athenian democracy and admired Spartan institutions ; and soon after his return from the East ceased to be an Athenian citizen, and, making a virtue of his exile, became as much of a Spartan as he could. His bent was practical. Philosophic discussion was not for the purpose of gaining intellectual satisfaction in the possession of a consistent scheme of things ; it was a true training as opposed to the culture of the Sophists; an implanting of pious convictions and virtuous habits. The metaphysical basis of his master's theories could not be expected to attract such a mind. What he would give us, according to this view, we should expect to be a popular pre- sentation of the easier and more external aspects of the Socratic teaching. His Socrates would be the moral censor of his time and the preacher of practical virtue, but hardly the leader of a philosophic revolution. The case with Plato is altogether different. It is manifest that his presentation of Socrates is largely ideal. He chooses to put his own boldest speculations into the mouth of the teacher whose own thoughts, original and powerful as they were, clothed themselves in plain and homespun dress, and took a more modest range. The truth Plato is concerned about is ideal truth, not historical and chronological accuracy. It is his way of honouring the memory of his great master, to represent him setting forth cosmical and epistemo- logical theories foreign to his actual thought. His own mind is the antithesis of Xenophon's. He breathes PLATO AND XENOPHON 105 freely in the upper air of abstractions. His view of anything may be unusual, extraordinary, wrong ; it is never likely to be commonplace. Hence the Socrates we expect to find in his pages, and do find, is an enlarged, idealised figure, in which it is not easy sometimes to discern the homely lineaments of the original. Now, when it was held that the one drawback to Xenophon's testimony was, to put it bluntly, his some- what prosaic mind, incapacitating him from seeing the deepest things in his subject, and that, so far as he saw, his testimony could be absolutely accepted, which was, till recently, the orthodox view, the problem was simpler. Plato could enter into the full mind of his master, and, while persuading himself that his pre- sentation was but the full development of what was germinally present in the Socratic teaching, did, it was certain, sometimes expand and idealise that teaching beyond recognition. What was said, then, was this, " We must go to Xenophon for the plain facts of the case : and if he only gives a limited and prosaic view, we can fill this out by the generous Platonic interpretation in so far as the two views are not flatly in contradic- tion." Xenophon is thus the check on Plato, who is really the deeper and truer interpreter so far as he can be accepted, which is, when held to fact by the plodding record of the humbler writer. But it becomes clear to any patient reading that the matter is less simple. Xenophon is no more a mere recorder or annalist than Plato. In his own way he writes history " with a thesis." If he has not a special philosophy to teach in the same full sense, he writes, in any case, in a particular apologetic interest. He is 106 SOCRATES concerned to minimise the revolutionary aspects of the thought of Socrates. He wants to present a picture of the blameless teacher of virtue, the pious worshipper of the Gods ; and he certainly succeeds in his aim. But we cannot but feel that it is at the expense of com- pleteness. If Xenophon relates of his master nothing but what is true, he can hardly be cleared of sins of omission. The man he describes is too much clipped and shorn of his originality ; not as daring or as radical as we feel the real Socrates must have been ; too purely a moraliser, and even a proser. He could neither have inaugurated a new philosophy nor met a reformer's death. But this is not all. Xenophon has a construc- tive scheme in his mind. He writes not as a simple chronicler, but as a practised literary man. And his thesis is indeed constantly before him as he writes: He is not penning history in the modern sense. It is a eulogy that he gives us, not a biography, much less an estimate ; and his view is limited by his apologetic and eulogistic aim as much as by his personal inca- pacity for pure speculation. There was doubtless a temptation to each writer to simplify the complex personality of his subject by selection and omission. It was not easy to reduce to the simple moralist the man who could sit out the strongest at a drinking party, whose jests touched themes on which silence is deemed best to-day, and who could apply the principles of his philosophy to the arts of the courtesan. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to recognise as a purely speculative thinker one who tells Aristippus that he knows nothing of any but relative good. It is plain, indeed, that we do not attain to colourless PLATO AND XENOPHON 107 history in either of the great witnesses. We cannot escape from an altered Socrates by the simple process of taking Xenophon as final. It is as serious an error to lessen and make commonplace what was great and original, as to idealise and magnify. Plato's view is that of the poet and the idealist, but there is little question that he saw the inner truth of Socrates more clearly than the practical Xenophon. It has been seen before that the Memorabilia partakes little of the nature of notes. Xenophon is not a Greek Boswell, keeping chronological records of his master's words and doings. What he gives is a defensive plea with a collection of sample teachings, and a description of the method of their impartation. The individual characters of the discussions recorded are but indifferently realised. The answers put into the mouths of those who converse with Socrates seem sometimes prepared so as to minister to the greater glory of the principal speaker. It may be no objection that the opinions of Socrates are the opinions of Xenophon, for he may have accepted his philosophy complete from his teacher ; but whether an objection or not, it is true. There is, too, about the whole of the Xenophontic portraiture a flatness that contrasts with the dramatically sharp realisation of individual features in the Platonic dialogues. Some few passages, like the talk with poor Euthydemus, make an approach to vigour and vividness, but a good deal of the matter of the Memorabilia is a little dull and insipid. Now, the charm of the conversation of Socrates was, we may be certain, very great, to attract men as it did through so many years, and it is per- missible to think that some of its fascination has been missed in the record, as well as some of its less facile io8 SOCRATES elements, and much of the deep radical thought covered by its light play. The most modern view of Xenophon's Socratic writings, 1 is that they are really composed in the spirit of "tendency." As Xenophon departs from history in his idealisation of Agesilaus, and makes Cyrus the central figure of a historical romance con- taining views of his own on education and govern- ment and many other matters, so in his Socratic writing he^s no* by aT1 Y m.^" 1 ^ a rigid historian, but an artist in literary portraiture, and the Socrates of the Memorabilia and he (Economicus is to some extent an imaginative production. According to this view, we have to deal not with the plodding chronicler whose historic veracity is unquestionable if his vision is limited, but with a literary artist who presents a picture of his hero's life and teaching in accordance with a certain thesis of personal goodness in character and positive philosophic content in teaching. If he has read his master aright, a true picture may be given, but it is not got by historical exactitude. On its literary and quasi-historical side it will be a view analogous to his view of Agesilaus. Philosophically, other views representing the negative and hortatory sides of the Socratic work had been put forth with which Xenophon was dissatisfied, not because of incor- rectness so much as of incompleteness. He was deter- mined to show his master not as the perpetual questioner so much as the oracle of his friends, the teacher of positive truth, the guide in personal per- plexity, the trainer of intellectual gifts for the public service. And religiously, too, he felt that he could 1 Dakyns, Works of Xcnophon, iii. pp. xxi, xxii. PLATONISM 109 give a more satisfactory representation of Socrates the pious man and the good citizen than could be gathered by those who had not personally known him, and whose impressions came to them from accounts that emphasized the perplexity in which, from their negative character, his discussions left men, modified by praises of his personal faith and piety. Of the record thus given, the doctrine that virtue is s knowledge and the dialectic of definitions are absolutely ( certain Socratic teachings. These things, indeed, are known as such through the testimony of Aristotle and the agreement of the Socratic schools. Teachings there are, it is thought, in the Memorabilia which find no analogies in the other writings of Xenophon ; and, pro- vided other more probable sources do not offer them- selves, these may turn out to be truly Socratic. Other matter must be judged by its affinity with the ascer- tained teaching. The result is that we fall back inevit- ably on more or less subjective grounds of judgment. The references of Aristotle being accepted as of unques- tionable accuracy, there remains the task of sifting Socratic teaching from the mass of Plato's dialogues and the Socratic works of Xenophon. One or two principles tend to safeguard the truth of the matter. If Platonism is Socratic teaching idealised and developed in some directions almost beyond recog- nition, the artistic sense of Plato, as FouilleV remarks, is too perfect for him to attribute to his characters doctrines of which they could not even have possessed the germ. The outgrowth is not monstrous but har- monious. And again in Xenophon the special appeal of his apology would have missed its aim had the 1 La Philosophic de Socrate, Methode Genfrale, i. ix. no SOCRATES real Socrates been to the ordinary Athenian a figure broadly irreconcilable with Xenophon's presentation. It is a view something like that of the unprejudiced man of average intelligence, although written by a man who is to the limit of his capacity a devoted disciple. Taking whatever truth this view may hold into consideration, what we shall be led to will be careful judgment of all Xenophon's testimony, and the elimi- nation of whatever can be shown to spring from his idiosyncrasies. In his Socratic writings it is evident, from criticism, 1 that there is much that is suspiciously like a personal contribution rather than a record, the interest in strategy and cavalry generalship generally, in field sports and the management of a country estate, the fondness for Persian illustrations, the comparisons of Lacedsemon with Athens. We cannot build a true account of the Socratic philosophy merely by making an uncritical collection of quotations from all writings that mention the name of Socrates. There must be a "discerning of the spirits." But with the few but sure criteria given, the task, while difficult, is not im- possible. It is not contended that much will not remain doubtful, nevertheless we may by taking pains reach a substantially correct view. The difficulty, indeed, of this is not to be minimised. Take one point, supposed to be, above all, well estab- lished, the jSocratic confession e| ignorance, so beauti- fully dealt with in the Apology, as the basis of the oracular verdict awarding Socrates the crown of wisdom. Turn to Xenophon, and, as Benn has shown, nothing is more certain than that, if his testimony is to be accepted, Socrates was of all persons the least 1 Cf. Dakyns, Zoc. cit. TENDENCY OF THE TEACHING in self -distrustful. He was accused sometimes of virtually saying, " Come unto me and I will give you restless- ness " ; l but in the Memorabilia he appears as a person who has no doubt whatever as to his own competency to pronounce verdicts on matters the most difficult and the most diverse. He can instruct a field officer or a statesman, can pluck out the heart of the mystery of artist and artisan alike. As was said of Macaulay, many would be glad to be as sure of anything as he is of everything. Compare this somewhat self- complacent state of mind with the enquirer of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, and it will be seen immediately how great must be the allowance for the point of view. Can we simply, as Benn does, attribute Socrates' confession of ignorance to Plato, who had a rigorous conception of knowledge, and who here puts his own idea into the mouth of his master and draws " a discreet veil over the positive side " of his teaching (for which we must resort to Xenophon), or can we reach a point where these apparent contradictions are reconciled ? As to this particular point we have incidental but emphatic testimony from Aristotle, from whom words can be quoted that seem to deny positive teaching to Socrates, of whom he says that he asked questions but did not give replies, confessing that he had no knowledge. 2 But while such an utterance establishes the point against which Benn contends, by showing the characteristic attitude of Socrates, it cannot, of course, in view of other and ampler testimonies, be taken as more than a mere description of a method that was habitual. 1 Drummond. 2 Arist., De Soph. Eleiich. 183i, 7. H2 SOCRATES The authority of Aristotle again enables us to say that of the mass of matter put forward in the name of Socrates, certain doctrines belong to the Platonic Socrates, not to the Socrates of history. He is "accredited" by Aristotle with two things, inductive arguments and definition by universal concepts ; x and with being also the first to apply this procedure in the province of ethics. 2 But these concepts, upon which knowledge must rest, have not in the thought of Socrates become hypostatised into independent realities of a world above sense upon which the .mind prepared by dialectic discipline alone can gaze. 3 This is Platonic doctrine. What with Socrates is as yet a product of abstraction, having reality in the mind only, is in the Platonic development an existence above and beyond individual objects, is indeed the only reality. Where this doctrine is taught, and where knowledge is traced to the mind's prenatal view of an eternal ideal world, recollection of which is awakened through the dialectical process, we have left the historic Socrates behind and are listening to Plato. In the identification of virtue and knowledge, too, Socrates and Plato agree ; but there is, as Zeller points out, 4 a difference not negligible. Socrates knows but one virtue which, because it is science, is communicable. Plato does not consider conventional virtue altogether valueless ; 5 it is a step to that which is based on knowledge. 6 Nor does his doctrine of the unity of virtue coincide with that of Socrates, for he admits the existence of particular 1 Meta. 1078&, 27-30. 2 Ib. 10786, 17-23. 3 Ib. 10786, 30-32 ; 1085a, 37. 4 Plato and the older Academy, p. 448 sq. 5 Meno, 97 sq. 6 Repub. 518 D, E. THE SOCRATES OF PLATO 113 virtues, such as temperance and bravery, fostered by music and gymnastic, 1 in the absence of the know- ledge upon which alone, he yet holds, perfect virtue can be based. By the use mainly of such criteria as the Aristotelian testimony, the artistic verisimilitude of the Xeno- phontic and Platonic portraits, and the study of the various developments of the Socratic philosophy, a view at once self-consistent and faithful to critically sifted testimony may be gained. It is by its success or failure in- approximating to this that any attempt must be judged. 1 Kepub. 410 ; Zeller, Plato, p. 451. CHAPTER V THE TEACHING continued 1. SOCRATIC METHOD. NEGATIVE CRITICISM. PRO- MINENCE OF THIS, AND MISCONCEPTIONS ARISING THEREFROM. THE IDEA OF KNOWLEDGE HOWEVER it may be as to the respective selection by Plato and Xenophon of the negative and positive elements, as the main matter of their representation, each is found in each. The positive in Xenophon is relieved by examples of negative criticism; 1 the negative in Plato by such positive doctrines as the doctrine of the knowledge that measures pleasures, 2 and the doctrine that virtue is knowledge. 3 And it is also certain that the negative, critical side of the Socratic philosophy was so prominent that it was in danger of being taken for the whole. Xenophon 4 speaks of those whose words and writings have given rise to the belief that "however powerful Socrates may have been in stimulating men to virtue as a theorist, he was incapable of acting as their guide himself," and wishes those who hold such views not to confine them- selves to what " Socrates effected ' by way of castiga- 1 E.g. Euthydemus, Xen., Mem. iv. ii. 2 Protagoras, 357. 8 Jb. 361. 4 Mem. I. iv. 1. 114 THE METHOD OF SOCRATES 115 tion' in cross-questioning those who conceived them- selves to be possessed of all knowledge, but " to weigh " also his everyday conversation with those who spent their time in close intercourse with himself." He is anxious to show, as against impressions created by certain writings (of Plato, Antisthenes, and others (?)), that Socrates is a successful practical moralist and teacher as well as an inquirer. Now, while we may admit that Xenophon succeeds in this, it is plain that the thing which struck many of his contemporaries about Socrates was just his negative criticism of current opinions. It seemed to them the characteristic of his philosophy. But even Xenophon himself, in a passage already quoted, 1 estab- lishes the very thing he is attempting to modify " He himself never wearied of discussing human topics." And his discussions were inquiries, searches for defini- tions, proceeding by way of rejection on examination of successive instances of the imperfect and the in- applicable until some statement was reached which was felt to satisfy the intellectual necessities of the case. The thing to be remarked is, that it was the process apparently much more than the conclusion which impressed many of the contemporaries of Socrates. Everywhere he complained that he found unreal knowledge, ignorance unconscious of itself and posing as knowledge. He asked for definitions, and was fur- nished with instances. People were moving in mental ruts, and without a clear conception of the end of their activities. They were accepting as knowledge terms and phrases standing for something that lay aside, 1 Mem. i. i. 16. n6 SOCRATES outside of their minds, round which their own intellect had never played. Society, custom, conventional re- ligion were supplying them with the framework of their mental life ; their minds were building no man- sions for themselves. It was this irreflective accept- ance of convention that must first be shaken before knowledge could be gained. He found everywhere the conceit of it but not the reality. Orators, men of affairs, poets, craftsmen, were guilty alike. Eloquent speeches were made in the assembly, in which terms such as justice, virtue, courage were freely used, without the speakers being able to define them. Men judged them- selves fit for statecraft because of success in some handicraft ; poets could give no rationale of their pro- ductions, but were the subjects of a kind of divine madness. 1 He could find no one who could rationally justify the conceptions he held of the nature of things. Thus, of necessity, the destructive and negative side of Jiis mission came to be prominent; 'W^rnliiji , -for fi;r_- ample, was a great element in Athenian life. If the time had not come when it was " easier to find a god than a man at Athens," it is certain that acts of religion were liberally interspersed through Greek life. All its normal activities were consecrated. And if any conception should have been clear to the mind of an Athenian, it should have been that of piety. Take the case of Euthyphron. Socrates meets him in the porch of the King Archon, he himself having been impeached as impious at the instance of Meletus. After explaining the matter to Euthyphron, who is greatly astonished at finding him about the place, Socrates, in his turn, inquires what is the business which has brought 1 Apol. 22. DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 117 Euthyphron there. He receives the answer that Euthyphron is indicting his father for homicide, as having caused the death of a slave by violence and neglect. Socrates marvels very much at the course of action his acquaintance has adopted, and asks him if his "knowledge of religion, and of things pious and impious is so very exact that, supposing the circum- stances to be as he states them, he is not afraid lest he too may be doing an impious thing in bringing an action against his father." Euthyphron has no mis- givings in the matter. He is regarded as a prophetic man, and considers himself a specialist in religious knowledge. According to his view, it is a pious thing to prosecute a homicide, even when the homicide is his own father. Socrates professes himself greatly im- pressed by a knowledge which in such circumstances can impart unswerving confidence of being right to its possessor, and conceives that his own cause would be greatly strengthened by instruction at the hands of Euthyphron ; but in the meantime he is eager to learn the nature of piety and impiety which his friend knows so well. " Piety," Euthyphron answers, " is doing as I am doing." And he proceeds to support, from the myths of the gods, the propriety of punishing the guilty, whatever relationship he may hold to the avenger. He does not answer the question of Socrates, what piety is; he supplies an instance of what he deems pious conduct. As to the mythological support adduced, Socrates asserts that, for his own part, he doubts these stories ; and he asks Euthyphron if he himself seriously believes them. Euthyphron's faith is of a hardy kind, and he is anxious to impart of the fulness of his know- ledge of the affairs of the gods to Socrates, who, how- n8 SOCRATES ever, defers this to a more convenient season, and succeeds in bringing the discussion back to the question of piety. He wants to get at the general idea, " which makes all pious things to be pious." Euthyphron an- swers that it is " what is dear to the gods." Socrates has now got an answer of the type required, whether true or untrue. It turns out, however, on examination, that as there are, by admission, differences amongst the gods as amongst men, about questions of justice and honour, no course of action can be described as " dear to the gods " without qualification, for the same thing may please some and displease others. Thus by the definition the same action would be both pious and impious. The definition is then amended so as to de- clare that what all the gods hate is impious, and what they love pious or holy. Euthyphron accepts this. The question then arises, does the quality of the act precede and cause the love of the gods, or is it created by their love ? It is decided that the gods love what is holy because it is holy ; it is not their love that makes it such. The question still remains, In what does the pious or holy consist ? " My question, Euthyphron, was what is holiness ? But it turns out that you have not explained to me the essence of holiness. You have been content to mention an attribute which belongs to it, namely, that all the gods love it. You have not told me what is its essence. Do not, if you please, keep from me what holiness is; begin again and tell me that. Never mind whether the gods love it, or whether it has other attributes ; we shall not differ on that point. Do your best to make clear to me what is holiness and what is unholiness." l 1 Euthyph. 11 (Church). DEFINITIONS 119 " But, Socrates, I really don't know how to explain to you what is in my mind. Whatever we put forward always somehow moves round in a circle, and will not stay where we place it." "I think that your definitions, Euthyphron, are worthy of my ancestor Daedalus. If they had been mine, and I had laid them down, I daresay you would have made fun of me, and said that it was the con- sequence of my descent from Daedalus that the defini- tions which I construct run away, as his statues used to, and will not stay where they are placed. But, as it is, the definitions are yours, and the jest would have 110 point. You yourself see that they will not stay still." " Nay, Socrates, I think that the jest is very much in point. It is not my fault that the definition moves round in a circle and will not stay still. But you are the Daedalus, I think : as far as I am concerned my definitions would have stayed quiet enough." "Then, my friend, I must be a more skilful artist than Daedalus : he only used to make his own works move ; whereas I, you see, can make other people's works move too. And the beauty of it is that I am wise against my will. I would rather that our defini- tions had remained firm and immovable than have all the wisdom of Daedalus and all the riches of Tantalus to boot. But enough of this. I will do my best to help you to explain to me what holiness is; for I think that you are indolent. Don't give in yet. Tell me, Do you not think that all holiness must be just ? " " I do." In obedience to this suggestion a new definition is sought in the idea of justice. The question whether 120 SOCRATES justice and piety are coextensive is settled in the nega- tive. Justice is the more extended notion. Euthy- phron now ventures on the statement " that piety and holiness are that part of justice which has to do with the attention which is due to the gods"; the other side of justice is in application to human things. Socrates thinks this a good answer. But it needs elucidation. If attention means here what it means, say, in grooming and tending cattle, it implies the conferring of benefit on the object. Do we benefit the gods by our care ? We do not, Euthyphron admits. The " attention " paid to the gods, then, requires quali- fication before it can appear in a definition of piety. Euthyphron seeks to mend matters by saying that the attention he means is the attention of slaves to their masters. As masters use slaves, so the gods use men. Precisely what the results of this instrumental activity are is what Socrates wants to know, and Euthyphron replies : " I told you just now, Socrates, that it is not so easy to learn the exact truth in all these matters. However, broadly I say this : if any man knows that his words and deeds in prayer and sacrifice are acceptable to the gods, that is what is holy ; that preserves the common weal as it does private households from evil : but the opposite of what is acceptable to the gods is impious, and this it is that brings ruin and destruction on all things." " Certainly, Euthyphron, if you had wished, you could have answered my main question in far fewer words. But you are evidently not anxious to instruct me : just now, when you were on the point of telling me what I want to know, you stopped short. If you DEFINITION OF HOLINESS 121 had gone on then, I should have learnt from you clearly enough by this time what is holiness. But now I am asking you questions, and must follow wherever you lead me ; so tell me, what is it that you mean by the holy and holiness ? Do you not mean a science of prayer and sacrifice ? " "I do." The conclusion reached this time is that holiness is " an art of traffic between gods and men," the asking of what we stand in need of from them, and giving back to them what they stand in need of from us. This is agreed to. But a difficulty arises. It is easy enough to see how human needs are met by the gods, not how divine needs are met by man. Euthyphron thinks that the gifts we give the gods are not benefits, but " honour and homage," and " what is acceptable to them." But this is to deliver himself anew into the hands of Socrates, who asks : " Then holiness, Euthyphron, is acceptable to the gods, but it is not profitable, nor dear to them ? " " I think that nothing is dearer to them." " Then I see that holiness means that which is dear to the gods ? " " Most certainly." But the definition has now assumed a form already rejected. Holiness and what is dear to the gods, it was decided, are quite different things. Euthyphron has just repeated a definition which mistakes the attribute for the essence, and all the work is to do again. The inquiry has so far been futile. But, for his part, Socrates does not mean to give in. He urges Euthyphron to give his whole mind to the question, and to tell him the truth. He must know exactly 122 SOCRATES the distinction between the holy and the unholy, or he would never surely have dared to undertake the prosecution of a parent for homicide, for fear of the divine anger if he were in the wrong. Socrates is at a juncture where he has special need of guidance in such matters, in order to repel the charge brought against him by Meletus. Will Euthyphron not impart the secret? But Euthyphron has had enough. The discussion must wait. He is in a hurry, and it is time for him to be off'. This dialogue is a perfect example of Socrates' cross- examining method in its simpler form. A question is started. Deprecating any ascription of knowledge to himself, that people may be disposed to make, Socrates presents himself as the earnest inquirer, yearning for instruction ; he receives answers in succession, shown by their opposition to admitted principles to be in- sufficient or on other grounds inadmissible. The process is really a stripping of the interlocutor of his mental armour wherein he trusted, and reduction of him to defenceless embarrassment. Incapable of fatigue, Socrates is ready always to begin the quest anew; but the exhausted spirit of his companion usually craves repose.^ Protagoras has great admira- tion for the argumentative skill of Socrates, but is not prepared at the end of a long discussion to join him in fathoming the questions that have engaged them to the bottom; "it is high time for him to betake himself to other business." 1 No satisfac- tory solution of the problem set has been reached : all that has been done is to demonstrate the in- sufficiency of common answers. Socrates is the 1 Protag. 361 E. SOCRATES ON EUTHYDEMUS 123 deadly enemy of the commonplace in explana- tions. Eutliydemus wished to be a successful man of action, and believed the way to attain this to lie through knowledge of what was in books. He had collected a large library, consisting of the most celebrated poets and philosophers; and already, through his effort to know "the best which had been thought and said in the world," conceived himself to have profited above many his equals, and looked forward confidently to a political career though he had not yet made his maiden speech in the assembly. Socrates believed that the ruling art must be learnt like other arts, and could be best learnt by intercourse with men of light and leading. He took, therefore, the oppor- tunity of stating his opinion in jocular fashion in the hearing of Euthydemus, who had displayed anxiety "not to be thought to have learnt anything from anybody," and was trusting solely to his bookish training. " It is clear from his customary pursuits, is it not, sirs, that when our friend Euthydemus here is of full age, and the State propounds some question for solu- tion, he will not abstain from offering the benefit of his advice ? One can imagine the pretty exordium to his parliamentary speeches which, in his anxiety not to be thought to have learnt anything from any- body, he has ready for the occasion. Clearly, at the outset, he will deliver himself thus : ' Men of Athens, I have never at any time learnt anything from anybody ; nor, if I have ever heard of anyone as being an able statesman, well versed in speech and capable of action, have I sought to come across him individually. I have 124 SOCRATES not so much as been at pains to provide myself with a teacher from amongst those who have knowledge; on the contrary, I have persistently avoided, I will not say learning from others, but the very faintest suspicion of so doing. However, anything that occurs to me by the light of nature I shall be glad to place at your disposal.' " And then there came the usual comparison of the political art with other arts, in its need of a special training : " . . . How appropriate would such a preface sound on the lips of anyone seeking, say, the office of State physician, would it not ? How advantageously he might begin an address on this wise : ' Men of Athens, I have never learnt the art of healing by help of anybody, nor have I sought to provide myself with any teacher among medical men. Indeed, to put it briefly, I have been ever on my guard not only against learning anything from the profession, but against the very notion of having ever studied medi- cine at all. If, however, you will be so good as to confer on me this post, I promise I will do my best to acquire skill by experimenting on your persons.' " By and by Socrates enters into direct conversation with the young man, and learns from him the object of his studies: he wishes to be a statesman and an ad- ministrator. Socrates commends his ambition, and inquires whether he thinks it possible to excel in these matters without being just and upright. Euthy- demus both believes himself to be an upright man and to be able to " expound the works of righteousness." The opening is now given for the process of examina- tion. Socrates suggests an attempt at classification of actions. Under R for righteous, all apparently just CLASSIFICATION OF ACTIONS 125 and upright deeds shall be put. Under W for wrong, all unrighteous and unjust deeds. Well, then, on which side must lying go, and deceit, and chicanery, and en- slavement ? All are clearly wrong, Euthydemus thinks. Well, but, Socrates goes on to ask, if in war a general enslaves an unjust, wicked, and hostile State, what is the moral colour of the action ? This is right, Euthy- demus believes; and to deceive the foe, he suggests, while at war with them, is not thought wrong; or to steal their possessions. Thus, everything which at first was set down to the side of injustice must now be placed also on the side of justice. Thus, to define injustice is something different than to instance specific acts which are not constant in their quality. If the statement of what injustice is lands us in contradictions, it cannot be true. The definition is then amended to this effect : " that while it is right to do such things to a foe, it is wrong to do them to a friend ; but in dealing with the latter an absolutely straightforward course is necessary." 1 Euthydemus agrees to this change. But here still difficulties emerge. Casuistical questions arise. It is suggested that a general, in stress of war, may revive the courage of his demoralised men by a false state- ment ; that a parent may, by an act of deceit, admini- ster to a sick child medicine which may save his life ; that one may take from a friend in melancholia the weapon with which otherwise he might commit suicide. What is the character of the act in such cases? Euthydemus now wishes to withdraw his wholesale assignation of such acts to the side of injustice, /^hus, in spite of himself, Socrates compels his interlocutor to 1 Mem. ii. ii. 16. 126 SOCRATES review his own thoughts, to challenge them, and to refuse to rest in mere current conventions. No satis- fying definition of justice is reached ; the conclusions are negative, but, at anyrate, the ground is cleared. Reflection is awakened. The common practice with him, which was, as we have seen, to press for a provisional definition of the subject of inquiry, may be further illustrated. In the Laches, beginning with the question of the education of the sons of Lysimachus and Melesias, and specially with the suitability of a particular accomplishment, that of fighting in heavy armour, Socrates is no sooner summoned as counsellor than he characteristically turns the inquiry to the nature of courage, the. special part of virtue immediately under consideration. He asks Laches : " Tell me, if you can, what is courage ? " l Laches gives a definition which is found on examina- tion only to meet certain cases. The heavy armed Greek infantry soldier figjits in one way, the Scythian cavalryman in another. The Spartans at Platsea showed courage, not by remaining in their ranks, but by a flight and sudden rally. And Socrates goes on to show that there are many other kinds of courage. Courage is not shown in war only, but in storms, illness, hardship, in political conflict, and in personal struggle against self-indulgence. " What is that com- mon quality which is the same in all these cases, and which is called courage I" 2 Another effort resolves courage into endurance. But there is an endurance which is unintelligent, and thus evil and hurtful. And yet Laches thinks that one devoid of foresight and calculation who faces odds, is braver than one who faces 1 Laches, 190 E. 2 Laches, 191 E. COURAGE 127 battle with full knowledge of all the circumstances. Thus the inquiry lands again in contradiction. Cour- age is a noble thing, and the uncalculating endurance which Laches thinks to be courage is decided to be evil and hurtful. Thus courage is at once noble and base. Something is wrong. "Then, according to your statement, you and I, Laches, are not attuned to the Dorian mode, which is a harmony of words and deeds ; for our deeds are not in accordance with our words. Anyone would say that we had courage who saw us in action, but not, I imagine, he who heard us talking about courage just now." l Laches is bewildered. He is a practical man, has fought beside Socrates in the wars, and thinks he knows what courage is ; but he halts : " I am really grieved at being thus unable to express my meaning. For I fancy that I do know the nature of courage ; but somehow or other she has slipped away from me, and I cannot get hold of her and tell her nature." 2 In the end courage is left without accurate definition, though, in the tentative definitions, elements that any scientific definition must take account of are brought forward. It must include, not only the natural unmeaning im- pulse which Laches wishes at one point to identify with it, but the clear-eyed consciousness of those who in- telligently face moral or physical dangers^) The same course is pursued in the Lysis with a like negative result. " What is friendship ? " is the question. Is the friend the lover or the loved? Is friendship one-sided or reciprocal ; is it a relationship of the good or evil, like or unlike or indifferent? No satisfying 1 Laches, 193 D, E. 2 Lathes, 194 B. 3 Jowett, i. 83. 128 SOCRATES definition is reached, but reflection is made to play on the subject from every side. Suggestions of friendship as a ministry and means to virtue are thrown out ; but all is questioning and tentative. The first object of the discussion is attained if the speakers and bystanders are made to feel that they have no full and true con- ception of so important a relationship, and one that played so great a part in Greek life. A similar method is followed in most cases. The provisional definition is put upon the rack until its inadequacy is revealed. The examples by means of which this result is reached are not selected and sifted in any rigid scientific fashion. They are taken from current speech and life. His practice in the matter came to be well known. It was this that Critias alluded to at the time that he and Charicles were seeking to " suppress " Socrates. " You had better have done with your shoemakers, carpenters, and copper- smiths. These must be pretty well trodden out at heel by this time, considering the circulation you have given them.' 1 1 And in the Symposium, Alcibiades touches on the same custom of adducing handy and familiar illustrations and cases from daily life to test the defini- tions advanced in the course of discussion. " He clothes himself in language that is like the skin of the wanton satyr for his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers, and he is always repeating the same things in the same words." 2 To overturn the first conception of justice entertained by Euthydemus he brought, as we have seen, instances of common practices in war and medicine ; to set aside the soldier's definition of courage given by Laches, well-known 1 Xen., Mem. i. ii. 37. 2 Symp. 221 E. ROUSING OUT OF SLUMBER 129 practices of barbarian warfare and a notorious in- stance of Spartan tactics are adduced. His instances are simple and matter of fact. They speak "plain russet yeas and honest kersey noes." They are level to the average comprehension. And their skilful selection and application made them most effective for their purpose. With ingenuous minds the result of talk with Socrates on any great subject resulted in an honest admission of the unsus- pected difficulty of the subject and the speaker's own ignorance. With the self-sufficient it led to evasions and excuses amusing to read, but hardly amusing to the victim, as we saw in the case of Euthyphron. 1 With some it led to anger, as in the case of Anytus, whose belief in the teachableness of virtue is so ill- supported by Athenian examples, and whose petulant warning to Socrates seems almost to hide a threat. 2 But it did its work. It shook minds out of their self-complacent slumber, and started reflection. It made men see that the ideas that led them must bear the play of their intellect ; that the mind must learn to challenge claimants for its allegiance. It is easy to see how the constant repetition of this process gained for Socrates the reputation of one who was perpetually engaged in the criticism of current opinions without himself making any positive con- jfcributiQn_tQ_the_gum of knQwledg^ -a thing which, indeed, he was constantly professing his inability to do. There is plenty of evidence to show that by many his usual methods of inquiry were regarded as issuing in nothing but perplexity. And he himself is reproached as apparently caring above all things to preserve a 1 Cf. Protag. 361 E. 3 Meno, 94 E. 9 130 SOCRATES non-committal attitude of mind that he may be the freer to criticise all views and opinions. Meno's words are well known. He wonders whether Socrates is in earnest or not when he says that he does not know what virtue is; and after talking together for some time, he declares himself bewitched : " O Socrates, I used to be told before I knew you that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt ; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits' end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me, both in your appearance and in your power over others, to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you ; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches abcrtjt virtue before now, and to many persons, and very good ones they were, as I thought, at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is." l It was experiences like this, often repeated, that made men hold of Socrates the opinion, which Xenophon labours to dissipate, that he was " an adept in the art of stimulating people to virtue nega- tively, but scarcely the man to guide his hearers on the true path himself." 2 If many went away like Euthy- demus from an interview with Socrates feeling them- selves to be " no better than slaves," or experiencing, like Meno, a temporary paralysis of thought ; and if, of these, numbers less ingenuous than these men never cared to submit themselves to a further experiment, 1 Meno, 79 E, 80 A, B. 2 Xen., Mem. i. iv. 1 (trans. Dakyns, vol. iii. pt. i. 25, note 4). A DESTRUCTIVE REASONER 131 arid so never got beyond the primary negative cross- examination by which all comers were tried, it is cer- tain that they would come to regard Socrates merely as a destructive reasoner, the effect of whose conversa- tion was to induce uncertainty and doubt. \This prevalent opinion has not lacked support amongst interpreters of the teaching of Socrates. It has been thought that his work was essentially that of** critical analysis, and that his teaching had no positive " content of truth philosophically wrought outn Cicero '' considered apparently that Socrates' confession of ignorance was equivalent to a denial of the possibility of knowledge, and says of the Platonic dialogues, in which his teaching is given, that they contain no positive affirmations, but are inquiries in which all arguments are listened to but no positive result reached. 1 Amongst moderns, Grote, e.g., is extremely anxious to show him to be a Sophist and nothing more, distinguished by his non - professional method and various idiosyncrasies, but not of another order. In examination, that is, of current opinions, Socrates relentlessly uses every negative test known to him by which he can show the unsound basis of such opinions and the wrong method of their formation; but, when anything affirmative is to be said, the methods of philosophy are abandoned, and he dog- matises without subjecting his own positive conceptions to the play of mind so freely directed against the notions he rejects. 2 Grote regards the two sides of the Socratic teaching as absolutely unconnected, the philosophic reasoned side is the negative, which yields nothing but the discipline of examination and the 1 Acad. i. 12, ii. 23. ' 2 Grote, Plato, i. 292. 132 SOCRATES rejection of unsound views; the affirmative side is reached by intellectual sallies, and a prophetic and dogmatic attitude is assumed which has really no connection with the mental preparation for reasoned 'conviction in which such stress has been laid. It may be at once conceded that Socrates was more successful in pointing out the insufficiency of current views than in supplying substitutes for them. He. disclaims the name of teacher. He denies that ho ever taught anybody. What he did was to inquire, in company with his friends, into matters of common interest. But if the conclusion of these discussions was to prove that neither he nor they had true know- ledge, this conclusion was not the confirmation of an essential scepticism (which, indeed, Grote does not charge him with, but only with using his philosophy when engaged in pulling down, and with separating from it in building up). Another failure to satisfy the craving for true knowledge, and to realise the ideal of it which Socrates cherished, was registered ; that pas all. There was no denial of the possibility of true knowledge. There was, on the contrary, a fervent belief that man could attain to it, and that in its attainment lay the universal remedy for the ills of the time. But such knowledge as Socrates dreamed of was high, and he could not easily attain to it. Never- theless, it was in the light of the ideal of. knowledge held so firmly in his mind that he was led to turn the assault of his dialectic upon the lazy, haphazard, or conventional methods by which were formed the opinions which passed current for knowledge. If his large ideal could never secure its own realisation, it was, at anyrate, the power by which he saved himself CONVENTIONAL MORALITY 133 and others from bondage to the tyranny of custom, or the blind following of monitions and inspirations in which reason played no co-operating part. If he could never reach the perfect, he would not in mere despair of it settle down contented with the imperfect. And here Zeller is absolutely right in saying that the spring of his activity and the central thought of his philosophy was the idea of knowledge. For want of knowledge life all around him was becoming un- regulated. J*he periods of terrible strain in Athenian history through which he had passed, when the ordinary moral supports of conduct seemed to fail, were just to him the necessary counterpart of the mental chaos in the nature of his contemporaries. Conventional morality had given way. Reverence and faith must feed on something other than old time theology. But the substitute had not come from such philosophy as existed. Its effect had rather been to increase scepticism by casting doubt on " the evidence of the senses, by listening to which men had been led to adopt such strange and contradictory theories of the physical universe. Some teachers were accepting the situation, and showing men how to use the scepticism rising from the clashing of opinions and the strife of tongues in the interests of a selfish ex- pediency. There could be no way out of such a scene unless by some path of knowledge riot yet trodden. It could not be by a naive acceptance of the evidence of the senses ; it could not be by a recurrence to the unquestioning ethics of custom, nor by a search after the aids of an . intermittent and unreasoning impulse such as agitated the poets, the heart of whose mystery Socrates had sought to pluck out ; it could only be by 134 SOCRATES introducing, as had never been done before, the play of reason in the formation of ideas, the challenge of the intellect to the thoughts that proposed to constitute themselves the furniture of each mind. 2. SOCRATIC METHOD continued. IMPERFECT SYS- TEMATISATION. POSITIVE ELEMENT. PROCEDURE SUMMED UP. No SCIENTIFIC EPISTEMOLOGY BUT USE OF REFLECTION There has been much harm done by imposed syste- matisation. In their anxiety to secure for the splendid work of Socrates its full measure of recognition, men have been led to attribute to it more of scientific pro- cedure in method than it can fairly claim. It does not -follow because he was dissatisfied with the hetero- geneous mass of prejudices, traditions, and customary beliefs which sought to pass themselves off as know- ledge, and showed his dissatisfaction by his criticism of their formation, that he was able himself to con- struct a scientific epistemology, and assign its proper weight to every contributory factor in the formation of the conceptions which he regarded as of such supreme importance. The only way in which great systematisation can be secured for the loose and in- formal Socratic teaching, is by calling in the imagina- tion to do for us what the sources fail to do. And this is sometimes openly done. Professor Ferrier said : * " In attempting to work out the philosophy of Socrates, I shall be compelled in the absence of full and accurate historical data to draw considerably on my own reflections for materials, and to fill in details which, 1 Lectures and Philosophical llemains, i. p. 212. SYSTEMATISATION 1 3 5 though implied and hinted at, are not explicitly pre- sented in any of the remains which are extant of the Socratic doctrines." In the interests of consistency and intelligibility he feels himself " obliged to attribute to him opinions which even Plato does not articulately vouch for as belonging to Socrates." For this course he considers himself to have " sufficient warrant in the general scope and spirit " of the philosophy of Socrates. " It is bad," he thinks, " to violate the truth of history ; but the truth of history is not violated, it is rather cleared up, when we evolve out of the opinions of an ancient philosopher more than the philosopher himself was conscious of these opinions containing." Which sounds rather like a precept for symbolic prophetic interpretation, than for the sober study of the history of philosophy. Or consider Fouillee, who wrote two large volumes on the philosophy of Socrates, with a con- tinuous attempt at systematisation, with much about his ontological and volitional theories, as to whose whole laborious effort the adjudicators of the French Academy, while admitting its great ability and success, say : " Est-ce a dire que meme avec une science aussi exacte et une critique aussi forte, un tel esprit et une pareille me"thode ne soient pas quelque peu sujets a des explications trop ingenieuses qui transforment plus ou moins la pense"e de 1'original ? . . . il est difficile a un esprit aussi original de garder toujours la juste mesure, en cherchant constamment le c6te" nouveau et profond des choses, ... on risque parfois, en accou- chant les textes, d'en faire sortir de ces idees qui font penser au pretendu mot de Socrate sur 1'infidelite de son disciple Platon " ; 1 the " mot " being that recorded 1 La Philosophic de Socrate, i. pp. 398, 399. 136, SOCRATES by Diogenes Laertius, who relates that when Socrates heard the Lysis of Plato read he said : " By Hercules, what a number of untruths the young man has told of me ! " l i But if we discard the attempt to force the pliant, conversationally loose discussions of Socrates into rigidly accurate scientific moulds, we shall find a cer- tain unity of principle and plan running through all his inquiries. Issuing directly from his conviction that the false knowledge, the conceit of knowledge so widely prevalent, was the worst barrier to the attainment of true knowledge, came the necessity of his intellectual iconoclasm. His first work was destructive, and could not be otherwise. As he looked round on Athenian life he could see nothing that commended itself to him as worthy the name of Science. Young, inexperienced men like Euthydemus, older men, held in repute as specialists of a kind, like Euthyphron, displayed on examination similar poverty of real knowledge. Yet everywhere fancied wealth existed; artists and arti- sans, statesmen and private citizens, were all living in the fool's paradise of a supposititious knowledge. The first duty of a Keformer and Teacher was plainly, then, that which we have seen already performed in the cases of Euthydemus and Euthyphron, to strip the mind of the wrappings which hid its real bareness and poverty ; to shake false confidence, awaken doubt and self-distrust. So long as men believed themselves to have xreal knowledge in ethics or politics, or any other field, so long would they be impervious to true teach- ing. Submission to the process of mental spoliation of fancied wealth was not pleasant; and the more a 1 Diog. Laert. iii. 35. \ CONSTRUCTIVE EFFORTS 137 man was entrenched behind walls of convention and tradition, the harder was it to get him to come out into the open and contend for the faith that was in him. It was the experience of Socrates that the Scribes and Pharisees of Athens were farther from the kingdom of knowledge than the humble. Much less impressive, therefore, to many of his con- temporaries, than his destructive criticism, were the constructive efforts Socrates seems to have made to- wards the realisation of his ideal of a true knowledge based on concepts reached by reflection. As we have seen, some would deny that Socrates had any reasoned contribution to make to the sum of positive knowledge. According to this view, Socrates' mind only worked philosophically when engaged in its iconoclastic task ; when he aimed at positive teaching he was simply uttering the language of unreasoning dogmatism ; what he said might claim attention as a prophetic utterance, but had no claim to be reasoned truth. If this were absolutely established it would mean a very serious deduction from the estimate ordinarily put on the Socratic work as " the invention of morality," the establishment of ethics on a rational basis; but is it established ? It is true that often he contented himself with clearing the ground without beginning any new build- ing of knowledge. But it is not true that all his positive teaching is in the form of oracular declara- tions or mythical fancies. When in the conversation with Aristippus he finds the principle through which objects are beautiful in utility, his teaching may be untrue, but it is not unphilosophic. It is a^reasoned theory. He holds a doctrine of firiality. Adaptability 138 SOCRATES to a consciously conceived end is, in his mind, what confers beauty on objects. Whether in the rigour of his theory he does not show blindness to facts is another matter; but he has something which is the result of philosophic reflection to impart : "And when Aristippus, returning to the charge, asked him ' if he knew of anything beautiful,' he answered : ' Yes, many things.' " ' Are they all like each other ? ' "'On the contrary, they are often as unlike as possible.' " ' How then can that be beautiful which is unlike the beautiful ? ' " ' Bless me ! for the simple reason that it is possible for a man who is a beautiful runner to be quite unlike another who is a beautiful boxer; or for a shield, which is a beautiful weapon for the purpose of defence, to be absolutely unlike a javelin, which is a beautiful weapon of swift and sure discharge.' " ' Your answers are no better now than when I asked you whether you knew any good thing. They are both of a pattern.' " ' And so they should be. Do you imagine that one thing is good and another beautiful? Do not you know that relatively to the same standard all things are at once beautiful and good? In the first place, virtue is not a good thing relatively to one standard, and a beautiful thing relatively to another standard ; and in the next place, human beings, on the same principle, and relatively to the same standard, are called " beautiful and good " ; and so the bodily frames of men relatively to the same standards are seen to be " beautiful and good," and in general all things capable RELATIVITY OF BEAUTY 139 of being used by man are regarded as at once beautiful and good relatively to the same standard, the standard being in each case what the things happen to be useful for.' " ' Then I presume even a basket for carrying dung is a beautiful thing ? ' " ' To be sure, and a spear of gold an ugly thing, if for their respective uses the former is well and the latter ill adapted.' " 1 This doctrine may be sound or unsound. It seems an example of the blinding power of theory ; but in any case it is a reasoned explanation. The element by which beautiful things are what they are is common capability to minister to some human require- / ment. Beauty is subsumed under utility. Corre- spondence with end makes things beautiful. Again, when Hippias of Elis presses Socrates for his own view of justice, he succeeds in eliciting a positive statement philosophically reasoned. " We have had enough of your ridiculing all the rest of the world, questioning and cross-examining first one and then the other, but never a bit will you render an account to anyone yourself, or state a plain opinion upon a single topic." Socrates pleads, first, that he has been giving a practical exposition of justice in his life for many years ; but pressed, he goes on to say, " I assert that what is ' lawful ' is 'just and righteous.' " He then goes on to demonstrate the identity of observance of the law with justice ; but after arguing this point at length, he calls the attention of Hippias to the existence of unwritten laws which possess a 1 Xen., Mem. ill. viii. 140 SOCRATES self -avenging power. And the justice which he has in his mind is manifestly identical with the observance of these laws. For the purposes of the argument cer- tain customs are regarded as imperfect transcripts of fundamental unwritten laws. The just man, then, will not limit his obedience to the written law, but will beware of incurring the certain penalty " affixed to the transgression of the divine code," for "there is no escape for the offender after the manner in which a man may transgress the laws of man with impunity, slipping through the fingers of justice by stealth, or avoiding it by violence." l . There is apparently made here the assumption that human law represents the divine mind. And there are problems started ; for if the full conception of justice includes obedience to unwritten laws of God, then, while there may be advance by one who may be supposed to have preceded his fellows in insight into these gradually unfolding truths, it may easily bear the aspect of contradiction. Yet it is not really trans- ferring the ground of action to something essentially different when, at the last, Socrates places his own obedience to the law of God, uttered in the voice that summons him to his mission, over against the verdict of his fellow-citizens. The advance must appear flat contradiction when it comes from growing insight. Justice working through the stubborn medium of Israel's early tribal formation can only utter itself in the crude and partial decisions that identify the indi- vidual's guilt and righteousness with those of his tribe. The more sensitive and discriminating mind of later time could not tolerate this merging of man in the 1 Xen., Mem. iv. iv. 21. JUSTICE AND PIETY 141 mass. 1 Creon so believes in the divineness of State law that he can understand no advance and no super- session of it in the interests of a larger view. Antigone abides by her sense of the unwritten laws, which can only appear to the narrow nature of the king as a contradiction and not an advance. There is no contradiction between the obedience of the just man to the laws which the Grito celebrates and the dis- obedience because of fuller insight which the Apologia records. In any case there is here a theory of justice ration- ally based, whether pervious at points or not, sustained by appeals to observation and experience, capable of adaptation to widely different circumstances, and con- sistently held. Not to be ignored either are other examples which Xenophon gives of positive theory and precept. The definition of piety 2 is wrought out on lines parallel with the conception of justice: it is narrowed to the point of legalism, but within its limits is reasoned. It may mean little more than ritual cor- rectness, but the principle is that of conformity to law ; the question of the truth of the worship, the being and moral quality of the gods, is not raised. In similar fashion he discourses on the wise, the good, the beauti- ful; on courage, governments, and politics, and the character of a good citizen. We may sum up the philosophic procedure of Socrates on this wise : the ruling conception of his mind was that of knowledge. Regarding himself as a man with a mission to his countrymen, bewildered in mind by the conflict of opinion and relaxed in moral 1 Josh. vii. 24 ; cf. Deut. xxiv. 16 ; Ezek. xviiL 4. 2 Xen., Mem. iv. vi. 1 42 SOCRATES tone by the loosening of conviction, he saw that no remedy lay in a return to crass conservatism " the disease of thought must be expelled by thought." Morality must be built on a new foundation of knowledge. Holding, as he did, that choice inevit- ably followed the apparent best, the secret of wrong action for him lay in ignorance : the people " perished for lack of knowledge." A moral renovation must follow the clarifying of men's thoughts by the admis- sion of mental light ; to implant the ideal of knowledge in them, and induce them to seek its realisation, became thus his life work. Against the false knowledge the conceit of knowledge which blocked the way to the entrance of the true, he directed the force of his cele- brated "JgQny," by which, "awaiting in an affected deference" the opinions of others, tys ignorance not permitting him to propound any of his own, he sub- jected to searching analysis every proposed definition of the matter in hand, until those to whom he spoke were reduced to the same healthy confession of ignor- ance that he himself had made at the outset of the inquiry. This irony of his became a winnowing fan to separate grain from chaff. Those who endured its operation and still remained bent on the pursuit of truth, became then the subjects of that idealisation of Greek companionship and purification of the debased idea of love which constituted the Socratic Eros, that is, the mood or atmosphere in which common inquiry after truth was undertaken. But the testing, critical, and negative aspect of his work did not cease with the formation of a spirit congenial with his own as a " pilgrim of truth." The most favourable dispositions were subjected to the process which he humorously INDUCTION AND DEFINITION 143 described as his art of intellectual maieutic, 1 by which he aided the mind in its delivery of the crude and incorrect notions with which it was largely filled, in the expectation of reaching that truth which the Platonic Socrates regards as innate, 2 the memory stored up in the soul of the visions of a former life. Here, indeed, we come upon debatable ground. On one side this process looks simply like a special appli- cation of the sifting method; on the other, it is inspired by convictions which more properly belong to Platonism, the doctrines of the ideas and the acquisition of knowledge by reminiscence. What remains credible is that the historic Socrates, absorbed with the awakening of reflection and the reference of moral conceptions to a standard that was subjective as opposed to all merely authoritative and conventional rules, though not merely individualistic, did use such a process as maieutic, in the belief, not in the mind's possession of a heritage of truth from a former life but, in its power to recognise and possess itself of truth by the persistent examination of its gains from experience. How that experience was reliable he never asked. He had no scientific epistemology. He did not begin his examination of what passed for knowledge by testing the initial possibility of knowledge at all. He did not raise the special questions emerging in such an inquiry. Nor did any essential doubt hamper him when he turned from the play of his reflection on convention and tradition to the enunciation of positive opinions. In the course of his teaching he makes use of in- ffctmit.inn in ninfvyYt'5vF. loose, ashion. JJLjhe^ point before the mind is. jay^ the 1 Thecei. 149 sq. * Meno, 81 sq. 144 SOCRATES quality of good citizenship, he begins by enumerating for consideration commonly received elements of that character. In the matter of expenditure, for example, the superiority of the good citizen will be shown " by his increasing the resources and lightening the expendi- ture of the State." The disputant agreeing, Socrates supposes that in the event of war this superiority will be still farther shown by his rendering his State superior to her antagonists*. This being clear, the case will be the same when he is sent on an embassy as a diplomatist, he will set himself to secure friends in place of enemies ; and in parliamentary debate he will serve his country by putting a stop to party strife and fostering civil concord. Thus through particulars, by disengaging their common element, Socrates works his way to some satisfying conception, by conformity with which, again, any case in dispute may be tested. What- ever particular instance emerges he leads the discussion of it back to the consideration of the essential nature of the quality in question. 1 This is not done on any elaborate logical theory. His induction is an ac^uinjilaJa^_QLlMtg'.Qgg s neither complete nor critically sifted. It is made on no clear scientific principles. It is, as Piat says, " sinuous and multiform as life." Notwithstanding his criticism of tradition and custom, he believes there is truth to be found in the commonest judgments and opinions of men. What is known and admitted by all constitutes the beginning of his reasoning. " He had a saying that Homer had conferred on Odysseus the title of a safe, unerring orator, because he had the gift to lead the discussion from one commonly accepted opinion 1 Xen., Mem. iv. vi. 1, 13 ; v. 12. INDUCTION 145 to another." l Observation is, indeed, indirect and in- complete, and his treatment of the notions it yields is obliged to be level to the comprehension of his audience. It is not facts themselves so much that are put on the rack to yield their secret, as the con- ventional notions of them. But by examination ancT~1 comparison these notions are widened or narrowed, modified or abandoned, until some sense is gained of J their approximate adequacy to the truth of things. We have seen his method illustrated in dealing with the common notions of justice and generalship. And this method with more or less of thoroughness was applied to every type of question. He holds the idea up to the light, compares it with its opposite^ suggests complementary considerations, and seeks thtis^ to approach closer and closer to the heart of the matter. If the question is one of art, the current conception he finds not so much erroneous as defective, and proceeds to supplement it by considerations of soulfu^ress a little foreign to the placidity of Greek art in its more characteristic forms. He first describes the purpose of painting as being to represent colour and contour realistically ; then its method of idealisation ; then he passes to consider the possibility of representing emotion, "the characteristic moods of the' soul, its captivating charm and sweetness, with its deep wells of love, its intensity of yearning, its burning point of passion." Parrhasius admits that faces show feelings, and that in their expressions they can be rendered. Art, in a word, to be worthy must enlarge its ideal ; it is to hold up the mirror to the man, soul and all. Sculpture must imitate not simply the gesture and 1 Xen,, Mem. iv. vi. 15. 10 146 SOCRATES poise of the wrestler or warrior, the tightening and slackening of his limbs, it must show the threatening of conflict and the radiance of victory. 1 Or, is the question one of fitness for a political life and moral right to aspire to rule, then the aspirant to honour must be a benefactor to the State. But where to begin ? One way is to increase its wealth. Does Glaucon know the sources and amounts of the State's revenues ? If this point has been omitted, as it has, he probably can run through the items of expenditure and dock off some extravagances. Ignorance here render- ing farther progress impossible, along the line of financial reform, it is suggested that war is a method of national enrichment. But this involves knowledge of the relative weight of forces ; does Glaucon know this ? But Glaucon is unfurnished here also. But defensive war and fortifications are other matters ; of course, he knows all about these ? He is no expert in these matters either. Then the State's property in mines ; he knows about them, and why they are less pro- ductive than before ? This also is among the things the would-be politician has yet to learn. Does he then know about the city's food supplies ? It is a vital matter. By this time Glaucon is convinced of the greatness of the task he essays : " It is a colossal business this, if I am to be obliged to give attention to all these details." Socrates suggests to him- to begin with studying how to augment the resources of one household before attempting to manage the ten thousand homes of the city. " If, therefore, what you thirst for is repute and admiration as a statesman, try to make sure of one accomplishment ; in other words, 1 Xen., Mem. in. x. 7. DEDUCTION 147 the knowledge, as far as in you lies, of what you wish to do." l The corrected idea of any thing or quality thus becomes the test of attributes and actions. The general idea being reached by examination of par- ticulars, a new particular must show its conformity with the reasoned conception or the reverse. By deduction the conception is shown to enclose the instance in question. Lamprocles, who professes him- self unable to endure his mother's sharpness of speech, is asked for a definition of ingratitude. He supplies one : " When any has been kindly treated, and has it in his power to requite the kindness but neglects to do so, men call him ungrateful." 2 He is then led on successively to the admission that ingratitude is com- parable to enslaving friends, that it is pure evil ; that its degree of heinousness is directly as the benefits received ; that children are, conspicuously, recipients of benefits, until his own conduct is plainly brought under the definition he has himself furnished of in- gratitude. In the talk with Hipparchus 3 (in which it may be perhaps permissible, as Dakyns suggests, 4 to see a reminiscence of Xenophon's own) we find Socrates first eliciting the character of a cavalry officer's work in its pure generality as that which " concerns horses and riders," and then showing successively its elements as preserving and improving the condition of the horses, the discipline of the men, and the officer's own capacity of inspiring them by example and speech. In these and similar cases we can see the practical working of the Socratic conceptions as criteria of acts and attributes. Behind the conception thus used lies the patient, if 1 Xen., Mem. in. vi. 2 Ib. n. ii. 1. 3 Ib. in. iii. 4 The Works of Xenophon, i. p. Ixxx. 148 SOCRATES unsystematic, labour of reflection, whose results are in that conception conserved for dialectical uses. But neither in the process towards nor from conception is there a rigid system. The movement is fluid, con- versational, often apparently casual. It is something like the famous definition of criticism, " a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches." In the discourses that we have, two things are often separated, the search for conceptions and the use made of them when found, so that it seems that the search is futile ; for in many discussions no positive conclusion is reached, or, on the other hand, that the principle under which the particular instance is to be classed is taken without examination. Sometimes Socrates appears content with analogical suggestions, as in his com- parison of the ruler's task to that of the herdsman, 1 or the work of the unseen gods in the world to the action of the soul in man. 2 Nevertheless, under what appears sometimes as the mere sketch of a method, and accompanying the Spontaneous dexterity of all his agumentative excursions, there is manifest the aim of attaining real knowledge, i.e. to gain true conceptions of the object of the thought ; the plan of accumula- tion and comparison by means of which the elements of such conceptions become detached from particulars and unified, or conversely the application of the criterion to instances adduced, and the moral condition of successful inquiry. And it is no unanswerable criticism of this easy and flexible mode of search for truth, that it does not anticipate the rigour of the processes of modern science. For the examination of the motives and principles, emotions and beliefs which 1 Xen., Mem. i. ii. 32. 8 Ib. iv. iii. 14. THE LIGHT OF REFLECTION 149 make the moral raw material of life, it is not easy to see what other plan was open at the time than to turn the light of reflection on them, as Socrates did. As for natural science, as then understood, he humorously disclaimed capacity for its pursuit; and if it is true that from time to time he cast glances in its direction, still the passionate pursuit of his life was ethics. His plan was often to start from a germinal conception, from a fragmentary idea, the element of truth in the common view, to seek a full conception ; and it was in the light of an idea of knowledge that he criticised so many of the notions current about him and evolved in debate. The student of natural science deals with facts. It is of no consequence to him what past or current accepted explanations are. He applies himself to the facts ; he looks and listens to what occurs, not what under some preconceived theory ought to occur. But then to the isolated instances accumulated by observation he applies the interpretative key of pro- visional supposition, from which, being admitted, he deduces that certain results can be anticipated ; and resorting again to observation to see if these results are actually to be found in nature, he arrives at length, after tests and trials of many kinds, and under varying conditions, at the confirmation of his principle of explanation ; his facts are bound together in a theory verified in all imaginable ways. Nothing like this was ever attempted by Socrates. Natural phenomena possess interest for him, which shows itself in quaintly observant remarks. But he felt no ambition to rival the natural philosophers on their own ground. Nor did any such systematic induction reveal itself to them ; and the discoveries or anticipations of discoveries made 150 SOCRATES by them were mostly fortuitously happy. Whatever truths of natural fact they gained, they never got beyond the stage of supposing that things could be known by talking about them rather than by watching them. And even Socrates' observation of the facts of moral life never stripped itself entirely of the lumber of common notions and language, so as to come into contact with these facts in the austere and rigorous fashion of natural science. Nevertheless, he was able to do much. Turning away from pursuits which he felt to be largely fruitless, and which he regarded in their more extreme developments as even impious, he bent himself to the work of establishing a reflective morality. He brought the subject into view in the field of moral action, and it remains his greatest praise that through him more than through any other Greek thinker, the individual came into his moral kingdom. CHAPTER VI THE TEACHING continued SOCRATES' INTERESTS ABSORBINGLY ETHICAL VALUE PLACED ON KNOWLEDGE AS BASIS OF ACTION STANDPOINT VIRTUE is KNOWLEDGE THE interests of Socrates were absorbingly ethical. No doubt it is possible to regard him as a speculator whose mind was more fascinated by the intellectual light of conduct than its issues. As to these he has been described as " terribly at ease in Zion." The intellectual framework of any creed or ethical system can occupy the mind as a mental satisfaction distinct from concern with the outworking of its precepts or evangel. Any thinker, e.g., can approach Christianity as a scheme of the universe, and be occupied with it as such, without thereby knowing the zeal of an evan- gelist. But no such attitude of intellectual detach- ment characterised Socrates. His spirit was one of moral earnestness disguised under bonhomie. There was an evangelic ardour under the mask of the man of the world. He believed that he could further no moral interest of his countrymen save through an enlightenment and enlargement of their minds; and hence the peculiarly intellectual form of his mission. 151 152 SOCRATES He regarded righteousness, the realisation of the moral ideal, as the goal of all his speculations and inquiries, and this accounts for the prevailing limit of their range. A moral reformer who travelled to his end by way of freeing and widening the minds of men, not by restrict- ing them, may be his not unfitting description. He was essentially Greek in his conception of how ethical eleva- tion was to be secured. Arnold quotes words which Goethe used about himself which might with little change apply to Socrates : " After all, there are honest people up and down the world who have got light from me ; and whoever gives himself the trouble to under- stand me will acknowledge that he has acquired thence a certain inward freedom." This " inward freedom " came to many through the discussions of Socrates. It is, of course, possible to gather from his discourses many allusions to other matters than those of conduct. Some of these have been already cited. No one had a more alert or responsive intellect. He is ready to discourse upon anything and everything, and often to advance theoretic explanations and positive opinions with a readiness that seems quite at issue with his normal attitude of learner. If the Economist may be cited, consider his discussion with Critobulus on household management; it begins with the usual sword-play about definitions, establishing that wealth is the possession of beneficial things by him who understands their use, 1 reminding us of Ruskin's definition of wealth "the valuable in the hands of the valiant"; he then goes on to assert that wealth comes to those who keep their wits upon the stretch and pay attention to their businesses ; 2 whose houses 3 r OEcon. i. 8 et seq. 2 Ib. ii. 18. 3 Ib. iii. A KEEN OBSERVATION 153 are fitting rather than grand, well ordered rather than crowded with furniture, possessing attached domestics in contrast to badly governed ones; whose farming is marked by wise expenditure of capital as against starving of its real needs; whose horse-dealing is a source of profit, not a short cut to poverty; whose marriages are the discovery of helpers in economy, instead of being, as with many, means of disaster. He deals with husbandry and war. 1 He passes a severe verdict on the mechanic arts as physically and morally enfeebling. He illustrates from Persia the case of economy based on science and displayed in husbandry (if we have not here Xenophontic historic fiction giving itself play in a congenial field), showing that there the king interests himself mainly in the work of the farmer and the soldier. He sounds the praises of agriculture as at once nourishing men, making them hardy, generously requiting their toil, and preparing them equally for the stress of war or for mutual peaceful service. By a process of obser- vation and selection through rewards, congenial dis- positions are discovered among the farm slaves, attached by kindness to the employer and put in possession of his craft and mystery of agriculture ; 2 which is no such difficult matter to grasp in its main principles, but that Socrates himself can display a knowledge of them, rather evoked than acquired, the whole pursuit being indeed but a special application of common sense and observation. Or take the picture of him in the Symposium 3 of Xenophon, the great 1 (Econ. iv. v. vi. 2 Ib. xii. et seq. 3 Murray regards this work as an imaginative production, Aiic. Ok. Lit. p. 321. 154 SOCRATES man painted in his lighter moments, as Boswell gives us his Johnson at the Literary Club, or with Wilkes in the tavern. Even in these hours his intellectual curiosity fastens on the possibility or need of a rational explanation of the commonest things. He moralises on scents, 1 on woman's capacity and train- ing, 2 humorously describes and justifies his own dancing performances, 3 discovers the rationale of moderate drinking, 4 starts the conversation in which each member of the party describes what he is proud- est of, and undertakes to defend its value, 6 has his famous beauty contest with Critobulus, 6 exchanges chaff with the Syracusan showman, 7 criticises entertain- ments that are dangerous or merely extraordinary, 8 wants to know the scientific explanation of candlelight, 9 and winds up his contribution to the evening's enter- tainment and profit with the praise of spiritual love. 10 Here and elsewhere, beside the ever-recurring moral questions, are found, indeed, tokens of widely alert intellectual interests, the attitude of mind that wants to grasp the explanation of things. The necessity of getting to the rational core of every fact is imperious with him. Every amusement and spectacle becomes the object of incessant play of mind. He cannot simply enjoy anything, but, like the famous mathematician, wants to know of a poem "what it proves." It comes over one in reading of this mania for " improving the occasion " in his lighter moments even, that the Greeks must have been a good-natured 1 Conv. ii. 3, 4. 2 Ib. ii. 9. 3 Ib. ii. 16-19. 4 Ib. ii. 24-26. 5 Ib. iii. 2 sq. 6 Ib. v. 7 Ib. vi. 6-8. 8 Ib. vii. 2, 3. 9 Ib. vii. 4. 10 Ib. viii. 9 sq. POSSIBILITY OF MORAL SCIENCE 155 people, or that from some inborn defect we are unable to project ourselves sympathetically into what for them meant social enjoyment. We feel that the report only partly accounts for the impression ; that the edge and sparkle have disappeared from the conversa- tion, through Xenophon's prosaic handling. So that we can understand how the wonder came to be expressed, "how it was possible that Socrates had not depopulated Athens through fear of his presence." But the extreme to which this pertinacity in pursuit of an intellectual satisfaction runs, still tends to con- firm the supreme value which he placed on knowledge as a basis of action, even trivial or sportive action. In all things art, sport, business, social amusement the soul is knowledge. Yet it is not in these miscellaneous argumentations that the deepest interest of Socrates manifests itself, but in the region of moral conduct. What is the rational basis of action? What makes the possibility of a moral science ? Can anything but science be taught ? And if virtue can be taught, must it not itself be science ? It was in the region of such questions that the Socratic philosophy lived. Practically, Socrates was a ffraafthftr of righf.ftrmanAsts ) Tint, nothing could be farther from the fact than to regard his activity as analogous to those utterances of poets and soothsayers, produced under the pressure of gusts of feeling of which he complained he could get no rational account. He held a rational creed; a inan's goodness is directly as fris wisdom. Nicias has often heard him say that " Every man is good in that in which he is wise, and bad in that in which he is unwise. 1 " He said that 1 Laches, 194 D. 156 SOCRATES justice, moreover, and all other virtue is wisdom. That is to say, things just and all things else that are done with virtue, are ' beautiful and good ' ; and neither will those who know these things deliberately choose aught else in their stead ; nor will he who lacks the special knowledge of them be able to do them, but even if he ; makes the attempt he will miss the mark and fail. So the wise alone can perform the things which are ' beau- timl and good ' ; they that are unwise cannot, but even if they try they fail. Therefore, since all things just, and generally all things ' beautiful and good,' are wrought with virtue, it is clear that justice and all other virtue is wisdom." l In the Protagoras we are told that "men err in their choice of pleasures and pains; that is, in their choice of good and evil, from defect of knowledge." 2 We have to ask further questions about this know- ledge. It is not any knowledge specialised within a narrow field, as the frequent use of analogies drawn from special arts and crafts might imply (though special virtues are called sciences) ; it is not tradi- tional knowledge nor the knowledge of ordinary unsifted opinion. It is implied rather than stated that it is knowledge of a good that is universal in which the personal aim becomes realised. 3 The individual good must accord itself with the supreme good, the good of the whole, that which is always and everywhere good. This knowledge alone can beget and guide rational action. 4 Short of this there 1 Xen., Mem. in. ix. 4, 5. 2 Protag. 357 D. 3 Mem. IV. v. 2 sq. ; in. ix. 14 ; I. vi. 10, 14 ; Crito, 47 E, 48 A, B, etc. 4 Euthyd. 281 E, 282 C, D. RELATIVE GOOD 157 is no virtue as there is in reality no knowledge. These statements must be examined. Sometimes it seems as if Socrates forswore the knowledge of or interest in anything but relative good. In his conversation with Aristippus he cer- tainly appears, at first sight, to disclaim any other conception. Aristippus 1 wished to know " ' if he knew of anything good/ " intending, in case he assented and named any particular good thing, like food, or drink, or wealth, or health, or strength, or courage, to point out that the thing named was sometimes bad." Socrates asked in return : " ' Do I understand you to ask me whether I know . anything good for fever ? ' "'No,' Aristippus answered, 'that is not my question.' " ' Then for inflammation of the eyes ? ' " ' No, nor yet that.' "'Well, then, for hunger?' " ' No, nor yet for hunger.' " ' Well, but,' answered Socrates, ' if you ask me whether I know of any good thing which is good for nothing, I neither know of it nor want to know.' " Here he appears to give up what, in other places, he zealously contends for the idea of the absolute good ; and in the immediate sequel identifies goodness with utility and utility with beauty. It is on such evi- dence that Grote relies for his assertion that the " historical Socrates, as reported by Xenophon, enun- ciated very distinctly the relative or subjective view, 2 that is, as to the nature of the good. It is, however, by no means certain that this surface view of the 1 Mem. in. viii. 2 sq. 3 Plato, ii. 585. 158 SOCRATES passage is correct; notwithstanding the fact that Zeller 1 also reads it in this sense. What Aristippus inquires about is, it may be contended, as Fouillee contends, 2 not the supreme good. He asked Socrates " if he knew of anything good " (&7 n elds!?) ayaMv). And it is legitimate to say that ayaQov n is not synonymous with TO dyaOov; and that what Aristippus is seeking is not a universal definition, but a mere opportunity of controversial retaliation by criticising any Socratic selection of things as good; just as Socrates himself had done to Euthydemus in the first days of their intercourse. To such an inquiry the response is apposite, that he neither knows of any good thing which is good for nothing, nor wants to know. Never- theless, the discovery of relativism in Socrates' teaching is obviously easy. To Euthydemus he shows (while setting out to inquire about "the good") that that which is useful in certain relations may be inter- changeable with that which is good in the same relations ; 3 nothing more is reached than the de- finition of a particular good as a particular utility. So of beauty; he asks: "'Can we speak of a thing as beautiful in any other way than relatively ? ' " and presumes that to "turn a thing to its proper use is to apply it beautifully " ; concluding that " the useful is beautiful relatively to that for which it is of use." 4 There is in such passages no assertion of belief in absolute good. He moves in the region of relativism. He is using the positive side of the principle by 1 Socrates (Eng. trans. Reichel, pp. 149 (note 4) ct sey.}. 2 La Philosophic de Socrate, i. 131 sg. 3 Xen., Mem. iv. vi. 8. 4 Ib. iv. vi. 9. HAPPINESS, THE END OF ACTION 159 whose negative application he shattered the successive attempts of Euthydemus to define justice, and which served to shatter many similar tentative efforts. In such conversations he seems to know nothing of absolute good. He knows various specific utilities ; that is all. Generally it is true, also, that he assumes the ordinary Greek view to be correct which makes happiness the end of human action. Yet it is certain that the inter- pretation he put upon happiness, his identification of it now with virtue, now with knowledge, separated him from current Greek ethics. He cannot, in an unmodified way, be summed up in a term like " Eudaemonist " without misconception. For him, the good, utility, and happiness are not distinguishable as ends; they are parts of one end, aspects of an indivisible ideal, after which, blindly or intelligently, all men strive. 1 Some special difficulties attend on efforts at precise settlement of Socrates' position. If what used to be regarded as the prosaic and plodding report of Xeno- phon be followed, as has been sometimes done without a critical selection of materials, it would be tolerably easy to establish a fair case for the utilitarian view of Socrates ; although even then some passages would remain intractable, e.g. the passage that speaks of the unwritten laws, 2 notwithstanding the strange utilitarian reasons advanced for obeying them, or that which postulates freedom 3 as the first condition of the virtuous life. But going beyond the Memorabilia, even in the Symposium we are haunted by doubts. 4 The 1 Cf. S&iilles, Histoire dc la Philosophic, p. 267. 3 Xen., Mem. iv. iv. 19 sq. 3 Ib. iv. v. 2-5. 4 Ante, p. 153. 1 60 SOCRATES Economist, too, the whole drift of which favours the utilitarian view, while containing historic matter, does, w feel, take us on to somewhat uncertain ground, he thoughts and illustrations are often more Xeno- phontic than Socratic, and the Apology of Xenophon (which Murray accepts l ) does not advance our know- ledge much. And passing to Plato, we are faced by the whole question of elimination of non- historic elements from the number of dialogues out of which the true philosophy of his master is to be gathered. Beyond the unquestioned Socratic dialogues (as Apologia, Euthyphro, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, and Protagoras 2 ) there are various others from which, according often to the philosophic predilection of the interpreter, Socratic teaching is to be gleaned. Leaving out for the moment the Euthydemus as in some sense a " sport," in the Meno there is non-Socratic doctrine, and in the great dialogues Gorgias, Cratylus, Sym- posium, Phcedo, and Republic ; while the doctrines of ideas and reminiscences can be set aside as Platonic, it is a delicate and difficult thing to say always what is a fair reading of Socratic meanings only half developed in Xenophon and in the early dialogues, and what is a real departure from his position. Even the unques- tioned early dialogues present problems. If we fasten, for instance, on the Protagoras, a dialogue so entirely after the heart of Grote, who seemed determined to find utilitarianism and philosophic radicalism in the thought and life of Greece, the position is not free from difficulty ; for where we gather such unequivocal evidence of the eudaernonism of Socrates we find also . 1 Anc. Gk. Lit. p. 321. 2 Of. Ritchie's Plato, Appendix II. p. 224. SELF-CONTROL 161 the dramatic contradiction of those views which with most certainty are attributed to him, in, e.g., his denial of the teachableness of virtue, the evidence for which is not rebutted by his later inconsistent argument in the same dialogue; that is to say, that on ground, apparently most sure, we are not rid of an element of uncertainty. And if it is admissible to discard the Gorgias as evidence for idealism in Socrates, because it so flatly contradicts the understood Socratic belief in the identity of pleasure and good, it is not illegiti- mate to suggest that the unmodified Hedonism, e.g. of the Protagoras, be not accepted with mere uncritical readiness as more than a sort of provisional theory of morals as opposed to conventional ethics, when admittedly even here elements of doubt present them- selves. Certain it is that whatever matter is in question, Sgcrates can generally bring forward utilitarian arguments for the course he himself adopts. He is quite prepared to show Antiphon 1 that poverty and hard fare possess advantages of a practical and pleasurable order over a life of softness. He is free of constraint in teaching; he need not discourse to the uncongenial, as he takes no fees: his food is \ wholesome if plain, and hunger sharpens his appe- tite. His scanty clothing promotes his hardiness ; weather does not affect him. Momentary pleasures do not favour health ; 2 they create insatiable de- mands, and bring wretchedness in after years ; 3 . self-control is the condition even of the lowest order of happiness; 4 and hard training fits for efficient 1 Xen., Mem. i. vi. - Ib. n. i. 20. 3 Ib., The Choice of Heracles, n. i. 31. 4 2b. n. i. 28 sq. II 1 62 SOCRATES services joJL many...kinda > -from that .oi.the soldier Uai that, of the thinker. It is the same in the cultivation of other virtues besides abstinence. If it were possible to put one out of conceit with the advice of this moralist, it would be very often done by the reasons subjoined to his counsels. Virtue is good practical policy, according to Socrates. This is the teaching of the composition of Prodicus on the Choice of Heracles, which he repro- duces to Aristippus. There is no fastidiousness in enunciating the doctrine of rewards. "It is by acts of service and of kindness," he tells Aristodemus, in counselling similar action towards the gods, " that you discover which of your fellows are willing to requite you in kind." 2 The great reason for brotherly affec- tion being preserved unbroken is the practical incon- venience and loss caused by the breach ; 3 and the value of friendship is rated mainly by capacity of service. 4 The law of consequences judges the doings of men, and shows that the worst thing that can happen to anyone is to succeed in false pretensions; 5 that caprice and tyranny are punished in this life, 6 and obedience to laws written and unwritten rewarded. 7 There are inevitable results, painful and humiliating, which follow from wrong conduct ; and a wise man will avoid actions which have such a recoil upon the doer. This type of utterance does not, however, exhaust the ethical teaching of Socrates. Sometimes he speaks as if only one kind of consequence was to be con- sidered, the effect of conduct on the soul. To range un- 1 Xen., Mem. in. xii. 2 76. i. iv. 18. 3 Ib. n. iii. 19. 4 Mem. ii. iv. 5 ; u. vi. 5 76. i. vii. 3. 6 76. m. ix. 12. 7 76. iv. iv. 16, 21. MORAL FREEDOM 163 critically through Plato's later dialogues, in the fashion of Fouillee, and Lasaulx, and others, and to gather together sentences contradicting the apparently crude utilitarianism of the earlier dialogues and of Xenophon, as usually understood, is a comparatively easy but futile proceeding. We are not at liberty to draw our testimonies from so wide a field. But is it the case that, in Xenophon even, Socrates is eudaemonist only ? The good is successful conduct (euw/>a/'a). "When someone asked him : ' What he regarded as the best pursuit or business for a man ? ' he answered, ' Success- ful conduct ' ; and to a second question : ' Did he then regard good fortune as an end to be pursued ? ' 'On the contrary,' he answered, 'for myself, I consider fortune and conduct to be diametrically opposed. For instance, to succeed in some desirable course of action without seeking to do so, I hold to be good fortune ; but to do a thing well by dint of learning and practice, fTtaf, according fo my creed, is successful con- duct, and those who make this the serious business of their life seem to me to do well.' " l That is to say, ac- cording to this statement, success is not the measure of well-doing, but well-doing is accompanied by success. Happiness is not grasped directly, but springs out of the wisdom that teaches the uses of things. 2 " What do possessions profit a man if he have neither good sense nor wisdom ? " He accepts the statement of Euthydemus as to freedom, meaning by the term moral freedom, when he says he cannot conceive a nobler or more magnificent acquisition. 3 Self-control he regards \* as the best thing a man can have. 4 He regards " any 1 Xen., Mem. in. ix. 14. 2 Plato, EutTiyd. 281, 282. 3 Mem. IV. v. 2. 4 76. iv. v. 8. 1 64 SOCRATES pleasure worth remembering" as mediated by self- control. 1 Happiness is not in the multiplication of satisfied wants, but in divine independence. 2 The toil of a high quest is comparable to the pleasure of the hunter. 3 Justice and uprightness are the conditions of successful statesmanship. 4 And there are divine laws, unwritten and self-avenging, which men must obey. 5 His ideal of virtue wears the face of wisdom, of free- dom, of sobriety, of carefulness, and rests on self -con- quest. Travelling by this path men reach the summit of virtue and find it the height of happiness. 6 His pupil Antisthenes considers that wealth and poverty lie not in a man's estate, but in men's souls, 7 and his own spiritual wealth he gained from Socrates. 8 The only true education is to train men ; 9 and the philosopher loves noble-natured souls, alert and emulous in pursuit of virtue. 10 If the system of Socrates be eudsemonism, it is certainly not rigid and consistent. If it were permiss- ible to cite a dialogue like the Gorgias, nothing could be further away from the conclusions of, e.g., the Pro- tagoras, where the doctrine is virtually pure hedonism. But we cannot accept the idealistic views put into the mouth of Socrates in the Gorgias and the Republic as historical. Virtue is, in the Gorgias, harmony of soul, analogous to bodily health. The health of the soul is righteousness or temperance, 11 and its controlling principle order and law. And the Republic develops more fully the same idea. In the Gorgias there is no 1 Mem. iv. v. 9. 2 Ib. i. vi. 10. 3 Ib. n. i. 18-20. 4 Ib. iv. ii. 11. B Ib. iv. iv. 19, 21. 6 Ib. iv. v. 7 Sympos. iv. 34. 8 Ib. iv. 43. 9 Ib. viii. 23. 10 Ib. viii. 41. Plato, Gorgias, 504. UTILITARIAN REASONS 165 qualifying of a thing as good because it is pleasant. "The pleasant is to be pursued for the sake of the good." 1 But is this after all very far from the spirit even of some of the Xenophontic discourses 2 and of some portions of those dialogues which are unquestion- ably Socratic ? 3 The curious pleasure Socrates took in a kind of self -depreciation and in finding utilitarian reasons for ideal actions, such as when at the end he points out the service death is doing him in 4 relieving him from the burden of the body, or when he points out to Crito the ludicrous figure an escaping philosopher 5 would cut, must be remembered in considering the full force of his teachings. By whatever name he chose to designate the supreme good, he cannot be without more ado characterised as a happiness-philosopher unless the happiness he speaks of be understood in some large sense of self-realisation. It would not, of course, in the least alter his eudaemon- isui that he found happiness in freedom or in know- ledge, or in denial of false or conventional wants, for many others did ; so and while pure hedonists in theory and practice might marvel, as Antiphon and Aristippus did, at his discovery of happiness along the paths he chose, his singularity in preferences would not alter the fact that he made happiness the end of human attain- ment. The essential character of a theory is not altered by a man saying, " I find my pleasure in the intellectual life," or " I find my pleasure in the culture of my soul," if the end is pleasure. The objection to 1 Plato, Gorgias, 506. 2 Kg. iv. ii. 31, 32, 35, 36 ; iv. v. 2sq. 3 Crito, 47 E ; Eiithyd. 288 sq. 4 Phccdo, 66 B, 67 C ; Xen., Apol. Soc. 6. 8 Crito, 53. 1 66 SOCRATES such distinctions has been put, once for all, in the Philebus by Protarchus. 1 " Do you think that anyone who asserts pleasure to be the good will tolerate the notion that some pleasures are good and others bad ? " It is the argument of Socrates in the Protagoras, that pleasurable things so far forth as pleasurable are to that extent good. 2 Protarchus cannot understand plea- sure being made the principle by which the quality of actions or causes of , action must be tested ; and then a further principle being introduced to test the foundation principle. It pleases Socrates continually to say that for him there is more delight in pursuing wisdom and virtue than in enjoying the pleasures of sense ; but on this ground he has no philosophic case against the man who may say that he is differently built, or that he prefers life to be on more accessible levels than those trodden by the philosopher. If the standard be indi- vidual, this conclusion is manifest; if it be general consent, again it is plain that the mass of mankind have always chosen the less ideal delights. In fact, on the principle of happiness, as such, being the end of action, the wonder of Euthydemus at the rejection of it by Socrates is justified when he says : " If I am not even right in praising happiness, I must confess I know not for what one ought to supplicate the gods in prayer/' 3 Nor does there seem much relevancy in the citation by Socrates of the mischiefs into which, in his view, the pursuit of happiness has led men; the obvious criticism from the popular viewpoint being, that it is not because happiness has been seen as the end pursued that these troubles have come, but 1 Plato, Philelus, 13 B. 2 Protag. 351 C. 3 Xen., Mem. iv. ii. 36. PLEASURE 167 because it has not been pursued with sufficient appre- hension of the essential methods of success, the element of calculation, the measuring of pleasure in the Prota- goras l has been absent. It does not appear that in his consideration of the question of pleasure Socrates felt constrained strictly to define whose pleasure he meant, the actor's or the community's ; to say whether the action he spoke of, when he described men as seeking pleasure, was purely self -regarding, or action such as added to the general sum of happiness. Sometimes, as we have seen, he is open to an interpretation purely individual ; he appears to preach egoistic hedonism. Doubtless he trusted to the nature of the happiness which he set himself to expound to guide men rightly. His happiness was in virtue. Usually when he speaks of good he seems to consider the harmonious good of all ; he is an eudse- monist. Those natures that he regarded as fitted for philosophy were marked by a " passionate predilection for those studies in particular which serve to good administration of a house or of a State, and in general to the proper handling of man and human affairs. Such beings, he maintained, needed only to be educated to become not only happy themselves and happy administrators of their private households, but to be capable of rendering other human beings as States or individuals happy also" 2 The work of the good leader, king or general, is to see that those who choose him " may attain to happiness through him." 3 Because he believes that happiness to be found in participation in the common life, he opposes himself 4 to interpreta- 1 Plato, Protag. 356, 357. 2 Xen., Mem. iv. i. 2. 3 Ib. in. ii. 3. < Ib. i. vi. 9, 14 ; n. i. 19, 28. 1 68 SOCRATES tions of the happiness theory, according to which an in- dividual is to rid himself of all public obligations and follow solely his own comfort. It is not to be thought that happiness can be found in a sectional or parochial view of life, seeking only momentary pleasures ; it is the fruit of noble toil for one's country and one's fellows. It is taken for granted that it is service of this sort which sound men should strive after, 1 service that gains the glory of a good name. The first business-joi- a public man is to " bftP Afif ikA-My*** And the city remands as sound component parts virtuous men. 3 It is lack of devotion to the common cause that is ruining Athens. 4 And the noblest kind of life is spent in the common pursuit of moral beauty, a search in which the love of friends becomes spiritualised. 5 In view of such passages, to say that the theory of Socrates is that of a self-regarding principle throughout, is not in accordance with fact ; it is not consistent with his express statements. There is all through the reasonings, in which he appears to adopt the current standard, a certain pressure of intellectualism which is transforming it into some- thing different and higher. However logically the Cyrenaics came to ground themselves on expressions of his in which pleasure was set forth as the end, it is certain that their forerunners in opinion, who were contemporary with Socrates, found difficulty in recognising in him a fellow-believer. To them he seemed a professor of the " art of misery," 6 and Anti- phon was not astonished that he should charge no fees 1 Xen., Mem. in. xii. 5. 2 Ib. in. vi. 3. 8 Plato, Prolog. 323 A ; Protag. Zoq. 4 Xen., Mem. in. v. 16. 5 Xen., Symp. viii. 9 ct scq. 6 Mem. i. vi. 3. PLEASURE A PRODUCT OF VIRTUE 169 for imparting a craft and mystery of that kind. 1 But they had not laid their account with the depth of the Socratic reflection. In that reflection there is an ideal sketched in which clear consciousness of aim decides and directs action. Haphazard success counts for nothing morally, and happiness that is not the bloom of a consciously wrought act is at best meaningless good fortune. If an act has issued in happiness, then if the moral quality of the act is decided by its results, it ought to be counted to a man for righteousness; but it is not so estimated with Socrates. It lacks the intellectual element. The act expressed no true grasp of the aim of life. Such things neither exhibit nor mould character ; they are not, properly speaking, moral events at all. The pleasure which bulks so largely in the reasoning of Socrates is not pleasure of any sort and at any price. It appears often, indeed, as the aim, but its true position is not easy to fix. It seems to be sometimes a by - product of the staple virtue with which man is to occupy himself in life ; and often it stands for self-fulfilment, not in the hedonist's sense, but in the sense of one who, confining himself, indeed, to the only world he knew, the Hellenic world, and to the free citizens mainly of that world, yet, within that restricted area, felt that we are members one of another. It was his view of the nature of man that fixed the shaping of his ideal. There is at the basis of Socrates' reasoning on the aim of action a certain anthropological view of a strongly marked, if narrow and defective type. In consistency with his belief in the identity of virtue and know- ledge, he holds certain views as to the nature of the 1 Mem. i. vi. 11, 12. 1 70 SOCRATES soul, of the will, and of moral action, in process and end, of greater originality and depth than have been always accredited to him. To him, as we have seen, self-knowledge was the absolutely indispensable pre- liminary to any true search after right thinking and right living. And to know oneself meant really to know oneself as essentially intelligence. The maxim, " On earth there is nothing great but man, in man there is nothing great but mind," would have met with his cordial acceptance. For him the intellect overshadowed all else. This is the prime discovery, and near this lies, too, the prime defect of his anthropology. If the real man can be evoked he is intelligence, and in the successful use of his understanding is the secret of self-direction, the path of moral life. Mind in us is, he holds, a spark of the Divine wisdom. He apparently argues with Aristodemus for this participation on our part, in Divine intelligence, as he presses on him the analogy of the participation of his body in the elements of the matter of the world. " Mind, alone it would seem, which is nowhere to be found, you had the lucky chance to snatch up and make off with, you cannot tell how." l This soul is the invisible dominatrix 2 of the body ($ roD cu/j,aro$ xvpfa ear/v). The Godhead " im- planted in man the noblest and most excellent type of soul. For what other creature, to begin with, has a soul to appreciate the existence of the gods who have arranged this grand and beauteous universe ? What other tribe of animals save man can render service to the gods ? How apt is the spirit of man to take pre- cautions against hunger and thirst, cold and heat, to alleviate disease and foster strength ! how suited to 1 Mem. i. iv. 8. 2 /&. i. iv. 9. MAN'S CHIEF END 171 labour with a view to learning ! how capable of garner- ing in the storehouse of his memory all that he has heard or seen or understood ! Is it not most evident to you that by the side of other animals men live and move a race of gods by nature excellent, in beauty of body and soul supreme ? " l " Man's chief end " is decided by his natuje. If his course is to be normal, self-realisation can only mean knowledge. He is not called upon to determine, "not to Live but Know " : for him knowledge is life r ethical and practical as well as mental life. What knowledge is this which can' effect so much? For it must be clearly understood that the statements of Socrates cannot be watered down into declarations of the indis- pensability of clear light for right action, and so forth. He holds quite positively that there is a science such that it carries with it happiness and perfection, secures the accomplishment of an ideal that is at once mental, ethical, and "emotional. This science is the science of the good. It is the science of the basic principle of the world and life. In the passage from the Phcedo, quoted in an earlier chapter, the earnest desire of Socrates to find this principle established as the prin- ciple of nature is alluded to, and his failure to find it consistently followed is given as the cause of his dis- appointment with the method and results of the researches of Anaxagoras. 2 He was delighted with the theory which affirmed that mind ordered and caused all things, and argued that if this was so, then mind would order and arrange each thing in the best possible way ; and to get at the cause of generation, destruc- tion, or existence, the best mode of existence, action, 1 Mem. I. iv. 13, 14. 2 Pluedo, 97 B sq. SOCRATES or suffering must be found. For man it was necessary to find what was best and most fitting for himself or for other things, and he would know the bad by contrast. His disappointment arose when this grand principle of the Anaxagorean philosophy came, as he felt, to lose itself in the consideration of physical causes. His firm conviction was that the world was the best of all possible worlds, and that man's nature was determined in accordance with the principle that external nature arranged all things for the best. He would not only deduce the true principles of physics from the divine perfections, but those of man's spiritual life also. His governing principle in all things was the good, in harmony with which all things were made ; the knowledge of which was at once true science and moral life. Self - realisation is thus, fundamentally, illumination. It is a complex doubtless, a vision out of which practice grows and pleasure comes, yet the basal thing is knowledge. If he is allowed to put his own interpretation on happiness, then happiness is the end of life ; but for him happiness is virtue and virtue is knowledge: thus we travel round again to the supremacy of knowledge. The self-knowledge on which Socrates insisted with such emphasis was really, in the first place, an effort to get at the common mental inheritance, the stock of convictions which were at once elements of universal truth and the wealth of the individual. It is not the method of a rudimentary scientific psychology so much as introspection with direct reference to practice, which so often appears in his discourses. 1 1 Mem. IV. ii. 24 sqq. SELF-KNOWLEDGE 173 " ' Tell me/ he said to Euthydemus, c have you ever been to Delphi ? ' " ' Yes, certainly ; twice/ said he. " ' And did you notice an inscription somewhere on the temple : yvudi atavrov (know thyself) ' ? " ' I did/ " ' Did you possibly pay no regard to the inscrip- tion ? or did you give it heed, and try to discover who and what you were ? ' " ' I can safely say I did not/ he answered. ' That much I made quite sure I knew, at anyrate ; since if I did not know even myself, what in the world did I know ? ' " But this is precisely the easy supposition that is proving the ruin of men like Euthydemus. A man who knows himself is one who has taken at least as much trouble to find out his own requirements and capacities as the purchaser of a horse to know its points. 1 In this self-knowledge is the secret of bless- ing and success in the handling of human affairs, and of right relationships with others. Its true starting- point is to test one's capacity, to distinguish bad and good. This is a matter requiring true insight ; neither health, nor wealth, nor even wisdom 2 of a sort is the absolute good, and the man who identifies any of these with the end of life has not true knowledge of himself. The beginnings of this knowledge coincide with the nf nn^g own ignorant. Distrust of the COm- ' l Mem. iv. ii. 25. 2 Ib. iv. ii. 30-33. In the view of Socrates, true wisdom carries moral achievement with it ; it = po