Section II. Socrates

1. There is little doubt that Socrates was the son of a statuary and a midwife, and that he was born in a small township of Attica. We do not know exactly when he came to Athens. It was probably about the start of the Peloponnesian war, when Pericles was still alive and Anaxagoras was teaching. Socrates attended Anaxagoras’s school. He very likely took up his master’s studies with real ardour and carried away many valuable hints.

2. Anaxagoras, as we have seen, stood at the furthest remove from the trading Sophists. For them political life was everything; for him it was nothing. He sought a home in the world of nature, apart from human beings. It was a noble experiment. Young Pericles felt it to be so, though his life’s desire was political ascendancy. One might have thought young Socrates, who never showed that desire, would be carried away by it even more. But he could not find a country where Anaxagoras sought one. As he listened to his master’s sublime physical speculations, he seems to have asked himself: “What are all these to me? Let atoms be linked by whatever law of affinity, let them whirl at random or be guided by an intelligence; the question still remains, What am I? These speculations do not answer it, yet it must be answered somehow. Any carpenter or shoemaker who could help me solve it would be my benefactor. The profoundest teacher whose thoughts run another way is not the man I want.” So he left the school of Anaxagoras. Its quietness was inviting, but if that quietness cost the sacrifice of human feelings and interests, the gossip of the Agora and the bustle of the Piraeus were better.

3. Like the Sophists, then, Socrates was a man of business and action. His wisdom, if he had any, must be directed to what was passing around him, not to some other sphere. But did he have wisdom he could use for this? Could he teach about things on earth or in the skies? The more he considered, the more he found that he did not possess wisdom; it was exactly what he needed. He could not hand it to disciples to use and traffic with. He had to go in search of it. The distinction between the Sophist, or wise man, and the philosopher had dawned on Pythagoras, perhaps on Thales; for Socrates it became the cardinal distinction. For him to possess or profess wisdom would be utter falsehood. He found he could not lay down theories or maxims even about the commonest things. What he needed was to understand them, and to understand them so that he might understand himself and find out whether he had any ground to stand on or was only floating in the air.

4. Who could help him in this inquiry? It concerned his very self, which no eye could see and which lay beneath all utterance and thought. Socrates believed there was one near him who took notice of the most secret movements of his mind and will, who reproved, restrained, and warned him. A divine teacher was with him at all times. Though he did not possess wisdom, this teacher could set him on the road to seek it, preserve him from delusions that might turn him off it, and keep his mind fixed on the end for which he was to live and act. Xenophon asks, with plain soldierly honesty, whether the accusers could believe Socrates lied about this. He hints that it would shake his faith in all reality to suppose that so clear-sighted a man, so free from superstition, could be the victim of a wholly false impression, or that such an impression could produce the wholesome effects Xenophon himself had witnessed. We believe that Socrates told no lie about his Demon, and that it was precisely this faith that kept him from lying and made him clear-sighted and free from superstition.

5. Socrates connected this guide with the mythology of his countrymen, and seems to have interpreted each by the other. He was sure he had such a teacher, so he could acknowledge a teacher of wisdom to Greeks and to men generally. Much that was said about the god of Delphi seemed profane to him, and he turned from it with disgust. But on the whole he believed more, not less, than his countrymen, and shrank from the scepticism and irreverence in which they and their poets indulged. He had no notion of replacing Jupiter or Apollo with a Nous or Intelligence. That would have been strange, since he was not accounting for the existence of the universe but craving a light to show him his own path through it. So he was not a Monotheist in the sense some have claimed; he did not deny that there were various objects of worship, and in many acts of his life he acknowledged them. But he felt there was one teacher, one source of light and wisdom, leading him out of the confusions of sense. He was therefore practically more of a Monotheist than he could have been had he tried to reduce Greek traditions to physical speculations or treated them as mere follies.

6. Socrates spoke of his Demon as reproving and restraining himself. But because he connected the Demon with his country’s gods, he felt that other men also had a director to obey, who could lead them to what he sought. So instead of being a solitary thinker, he had the most intense sense of a vocation to help and instruct others. He could not give them wisdom, but he might put them on the same way of seeking it that he was walking himself.

7. What charms he used to draw a circle around him may at first seem inexplicable. Most of the Sophists were advanced in age and reputation when he first appeared in Athens. They promised to fit men to be politicians, orators, and generals, and offered plausible proof that they could do it. He promised nothing. He had come, he said, to practise his mother’s profession on behalf of those who had thoughts they wished to be delivered of. You could not tell what line he took, whether he was a philologer like Prodicus or a professor of statesmanship like Protagoras; he seemed to be all things by turns and nothing for good. Personal beauty was a great recommendation among the Athenians, yet he had large projecting eyes like a bull’s, a flat upturned nose, a protruding stomach, a tattered cloak, and was seldom seen with sandals. Nevertheless the youth of Athens began to flock to him, thinking he had something to teach them, perhaps that he could somehow impart the art of governing better than the regular doctors. Some of the causes we have mentioned as likely to alienate his countrymen may even have contributed to this result. The Athenians liked a humorist, and Socrates showed himself one by his outward carelessness and the whole tone of his talk. He also had a hearty, genial way of interesting himself in whatever interested those he was with, and as little solemn quackery as was ever found in any man. Add that he was thoroughly Greek: in his habits of mind, his taste for society, his wit and argument, his brave unflinching love of his land, and in making freedom (far more than is usually acknowledged) the passion and end of his life. But all this together could not have outweighed his many disadvantages had he not had the real magnet that draws young men’s hearts, however reluctant: knowledge of the very thing they want and have been toiling in vain to find.

8. Political power, as we have seen, was the one prize the Sophists set before themselves and held out to pupils as the reward for their labour on abstract speculations. The roads to it differed, and each teacher believed, and persuaded his disciples, that his was the shortest. But all shared one method: they sought power by means of words. Mastery of words was the great art the Athenian youth must cultivate; his own feelings and what he saw daily in his city told him there was a fascination in words that the physical force of an Oriental tyrant could not match. Socrates, when he began earnestly to meditate on his countrymen’s condition, seems first to have observed that here, as usually, the tyrants were slaves: those who wished to rule the world by words were in ignominious bondage to words. The wish to break this spell took strong hold of him. But it would have been ineffectual, and would have interfered with the main feeling of his life, had he not been able to connect the study of words with that deep question about his own being. As he reflected, he saw more and more clearly that words are not only the instruments by which we govern others but the means by which we may become acquainted with ourselves. In trying really to understand a word, to find the bona fide meaning he himself gave it, he gained more insight into his own ignorance and more real knowledge than by all other studies together. In this work he knew he was honest; he was feeling for a ground and breaking through a thousand tricks and self-deceptions. If he was to deliver his countrymen from the miserable shallowness into which the ambition of wisdom and depth had betrayed them, to lead them out of the multitude of systems above morality into a firm sense that there was a morality, and above all to rescue them from the worship of power, this must be his means. He must not stop to weigh the wisdom of this proposition or that. He must not denounce with moral indignation those that struck him as mischievous or outrageous, nor generously concede those that seemed plausible. In every case he must lead his disciples to ask what they actually meant by the words of the propositions they used. He must count no time wasted that they honestly spent on this, and no perplexities or contradictions dangerous that arose from their own minds in the course of it.

9. This was certainly an irritating, vexatious way to proceed. An opponent who had adopted a proposition and had plenty of arguments for it would be tortured to find himself not fairly met on those arguments, but led back to a question he had taken for granted. He would be forced to account for a word he supposed everyone agreed on, and not allowed to bring any of his own resources into play. It was equally perplexing for a disciple who had come expecting a doctrine to be established or refuted, and the ingenious arguments on both sides to be useful in a popular assembly. He got no decision either way, and learned that he had been talking all his life in a language he did not understand, using words like algebraic characters. Yet somehow the Sophist was taught that he was in the presence of one stronger than himself. He might chafe, fret, and complain of unfair treatment. He could not say his opponent had not beaten him at his own word-fighting, or that all the scepticism he had turned against the common thoughts and feelings of mankind had not come back tenfold on himself. He could not help owning that the man in conflict with him had some other end than the exercise or display of power, and yet had a power before which his own quailed. The disciple, for his part, amid all his bewilderment, went away feeling that he had, perhaps for the first time, actually learned something. He was convinced that if there is nothing better than dominion over other men’s minds, there is at least an important and indispensable preliminary to it, unless our own minds are to be the sport of every deceiver.

10. The infinite humour and vivacity of Socrates must have served him greatly in such dialogues. But his opponents often fancied he was merely indulging his humour when he was in fact following out his principle. His habit of confessing uncertainty or ignorance on any subject, which in their eyes was the chief element of his “irony,” was not usually put on. We make no doubt that he often began a discussion without knowing where it would lead, actually hoping, as he said, to learn from the result. He was certain not of a particular conclusion but that his method was sound and would lead each person who followed it to clearness and truth. His discoveries about himself and his fellow-creatures were probably the practical fruits of this method. For instance, by repeated experiments he convinced himself of the immense importance of recollection: the mind without it is at the mercy of accidents, and the mind with it is continually realising its own possessions, receiving them as if bestowed for the first time. Most of his moral discipline rested on this principle. Its purpose and ground was to remove the impediments to recollection and lead the mind from mere sensible images and impressions to an examination of its own treasures. But the principle was saved from any Brahminical tendency by his habitual use of words and sensible images as the means by which a man feels his way into the principles and grounds of his being. A man learns to understand himself by trying to understand common things, what the carpenter does with his wood, the shoemaker with his leather, the mason with his stones, and by really finding out what we mean when we talk of them. So Socrates’s withdrawment or recollection did not point to an escape from common life or daily business. It formed the habit a man is to cultivate of seeking out what each thing really is, not merely its shapes, appearances, and accidents, and this is ultimately to fit him to perceive what is deepest and truest. The soul of the doctrine is a faith won by repeated proofs and trials. Man has in him a desire to find out the truth of things, and also an inclination to keep company with mere images of things. As far as the first keeps uppermost and rules the other, he is in his honest, sound position; as far as the lower is uppermost, he becomes a mere shadow-pursuer and shadow-fighter. Socrates did not adopt this as a scheme to supplant another scheme. He stumbled on it as a fact he could no more deny than what his senses showed him, a fact which was, however explained, and must be recognised in all our dealings with ourselves or others.

11. There was one young man in Athens whom Socrates loved intensely. In him the Greek qualities were seen at their highest: creative power, skill with words, personal beauty, fascination of manner. The love Socrates bore him shows how thoroughly he sympathised with the very feelings he feared most and in which he saw all possibilities of evil. If Alcibiades could have learned that there was a right and a wrong, and that man’s business is to walk in a line, not devise one, to perceive, not to create, the whole history of Athens might have been different. There must have been critical moments when he confessed to himself that something was more worth seeking than dominion. There must have been moments when the feeling that he too had a guide and monitor within him was stronger than the sense of power and the inclination to wrong that went with it. But Ahriman prevailed over Ormuzd. Alcibiades yielded to the darker power within, which kept tempting him to glorify his own intellect and use his mighty gifts to destroy his country and himself. Then all the skill in word-fighting he had seen in his master became his curse, an instrument of mighty mischief. Once he had parted with the moral purpose Socrates was aiming at, what he received from him became sophistry of the worst kind. It taught him to act more effectively on the maxim that all order and society had been invented by the strongest or cunningest, who could pull down what they had invented.

12. This, says our recent historian of Greece, was not the sophistical teaching. The Sophists merely meant to fit Athenian young men for civil life; their aim was not so high as that of Socrates, but far from bad. We believe Socrates would have answered: “Either it is this aim that I set before myself, or it is a bad aim. All my teaching and influence, if it lacks this aim, is bad teaching and bad influence. My elenchus is in itself nothing better than the logic or rhetoric of any other professor. If it is taken up merely as a more skilful or ingenious art, it will be worse, for its purpose is to lead men to apprehend that which is, by sifting it from its shapes and counterfeits, from that which is not. The Sophists are destroying the heart and soul of my countrymen, because they keep leading them to think that what they want is an art to do or to make. What they actually want is a science, a means of seeing what they did not make, what lies beneath all our doings and is at the root of ourselves.”

13. From this it will be seen in what sense knowledge seemed to Socrates the basis of morality. Those who suppose he meant to exalt the human faculties and make them the grounds of virtue and truth do not merely mistake but invert his meaning. To destroy the worship of power, especially intellectual power, was the purpose of his life, and he showed this above all in his doctrine of the relation of knowledge to morality. As the outward eye sees certain objects and is good for nothing except as it sees them, so the inward eye perceives certain objects and is good for nothing except as it sees them. The objects are there, and the whole blessing of the man is to behold them. As he beholds them he becomes like them, but they are; they are not the variable functions of his mind but the eternal, unchangeable principles and grounds of it. A notice of Socrates is only an occasion for indicating this faith; in speaking of his great disciple we must try to expound it.

14. Socrates, then, was, as he said himself, a philosopher and nothing else, a philosopher in the strictest sense, who helps us better than anyone to know what philosophy is. He never imagines that his philosophy contains or provides its own object. He is the wisest of men, as the oracle said, because he knows nothing; that is, because he brings nothing with him but acknowledges what presents itself to him. When he speaks of the dignity of the philosopher, he means the dignity of a man who does not exalt himself or put himself in the way of the thing he examines, and who has the simplest, most open eye for receiving light from wherever it comes. That there is a source from which the light comes, and that this light is connected with man, is a principle assumed, however imperfectly developed, in all his words and acts.

15. How could such a man, it has often been asked, be compelled to drink hemlock? Must not the restored democracy of Athens have been worse and more intolerant than any power ever on earth? Mr. Grote answers, most reasonably I think, that the wonder is how such a man was allowed to go on teaching so long, since no state ever showed so much tolerance for differences of opinion as Athens. I would add this. Had it been possible to regard Socrates merely as an utterer of peculiar opinions, one of the Greek Sophists or professors, he might still have taught with impunity. Anytus and Meletus might have had their own reasons for disliking him, his connexion with Critias or Alcibiades might have roused suspicion, and the comedians’ ridicule might have kept up a habitual prejudice, but the tolerance of the Athenian people would have triumphed. He would have been acquitted on the charge of corrupting the youth and on that of introducing new demons. But there has always been, and always will be, a limit to the indulgence of those who regard all opinions as equally possible. A man who positively denies that he is proclaiming an opinion, who speaks of the possibility of knowing, the duty of distinguishing, and a truth that men do not create and that does not change with our intellect, belongs to a different category from the promulger of opinions, and is not entitled to the same mercy. Tolerant people, on the very ground of their tolerance, feel bound to silence or crush him. What business has he to insult other men’s opinions, to tell them there is something it is dangerous not to see, that falsehoods cling to their lives which they ought to cast off? It takes a long time before a thoroughly good-natured man can persuade himself that anyone has reached this height of criminality. All pity will be shown to the man’s fanaticism while possible, and he will be treated, in spite of himself, as a sectarian teacher propounding a particular opinion. But if he persists, as Socrates did, in asserting that he is not a Sophist and not the putter-forth of a theory, tolerant men must, and experience shows they will, reluctantly resort to the same racks, dungeons, and poison-cups that bigots use. For it comes to this: if the teacher is right, he must be regarded as a public benefactor, and the city must honour him above all its citizens. When the judges condemned Socrates to death, they asked him, by Athenian custom, what milder sentence he would propose for himself. He answered, “A public support in the Prytaneum.” They might be offended at his audacity, but their consciences told them this was the real alternative. Not being prepared to take it, they let the sentence be carried out, and so chose a course far more honourable to Socrates and more instructive to later ages.

16. We must be careful not to separate the discourse of Socrates after his condemnation from the course of his earlier life. His faith in a future state is often put forward as distinguishing him from his countrymen and the pagan world. But no one refers more often than Socrates himself to the old stories that express this faith: to Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, the functions attributed to them, and the souls they judged. He evidently believed the essence of these stories was true, that they set forth a correspondence between men’s condition hereafter and their condition here. As in other cases, he received what earlier men taught but asked himself what it meant and how it concerned him. His countrymen believed that somehow they would be judged hereafter by what they had done here, and that some particle of themselves would suffer a vague punishment or enjoy a vague happiness. He was fixed in the conviction that a man’s blessedness consists in knowing that which is, with his soul engaged in the pursuit of that knowledge, and that his misery consists in lacking it and being given up to dreams and unrealities. He hoped he would know hereafter what he had desired to know here. He sought arguments to convince himself that, however the accidents around him changed, he himself would continue, and, freed and purified from the corruptions and restraints he had felt here, would converse with perfect Wisdom and Goodness. Socrates did not tell his disciples that his future life would be separate from his life here; he looked for the continuation and unfolding of that life. He felt that his eyes had been partly opened and would be opened more perfectly, that he would still and always be a seeker after wisdom, but that wisdom would meet and embrace him and ever reveal new treasures, which would awaken ever fresh longings and continually satisfy them. The seeker of wisdom, who passed here for a pursuer of shadows, would grasp substance; the seeker of wealth and power, who passed here for a pursuer of substance, would grasp a shadow.

17. The hints I have thrown out may, I think, enable readers to reconcile the three documents we have on the life of Socrates. Take first the Aristophanic portrait. It is a broad, extravagant caricature, but drawn by a consummate artist who, even in distorting his original’s expression, shows that he studied it. I could not say this if, as some commentators pretend, he had represented Socrates as a natural philosopher. The name of the play is almost the only excuse for that notion. Who that knows the genius of Aristophanes, or the delicacy of Athenian taste, will suspect him of the wretched conceit that a man worships the clouds because he likes gazing at the stars, or his audience of tolerating it? Far more likely the airy nymphs the philosopher is said to have put in place of his country’s gods are the patronesses of attempts to catch the thin, evanescent meanings, and shadows of meanings, of words. Those attempts might plausibly be imputed to one who prized philology for its own sake and found it indispensable in his warfare with the Sophists. The basket in which the philosopher hangs between heaven and earth, to mingle his thoughts with the congenial air, does not show that the poet feared Socrates saw himself as a mere particle of the world’s general life, longing to be reunited with his native element. It points instead to the doctrine of the withdrawment of the spirit from the world’s phantasms, which I have called so capital an article of his moral creed, and of which his idea of the soul after death is only the expansion and fulfilment. The maps and geometrical instruments the old Athenian found in the phrontisterium partly prove that Socrates often used illustrations from subjects familiar to Athenian youth, and partly seem a joke at the attempt to reduce morality to a science. The dialogue about the cause of thunder is clearly meant far more as a caricature of his method of discourse than as an exposition of his opinions. Its chief object is to leave the impression that Socrates put some special demon of his own in place of Jupiter, which the poet, to keep his metaphors consistent and to strike an oblique blow at the really physical speculators, calls Dinos. These remarks are necessary in justification of Aristophanes, for if in these parts he meant to show Socrates as a naturalist, the whole plot is absurd. Why should Strepsiades go to a natural philosopher to learn to cheat his creditors? How could such a teacher give Pheidippides lessons in beating his father? The most remarkable feature of the play, the contest between the just and the unjust principle, is decisive as to his meaning. The satirist, with the quick intuition one would expect of such an Athenian, saw that the conflict between an uplooking and a downlooking mind was the most characteristic and important feature of the system he ridiculed.

18. The one point in the life of Socrates of which Aristophanes was utterly ignorant is its object, and this is just the point on which Xenophon is anxious to inform us. This worthy disciple is too anxious to show Socrates in his dignity, so we miss the hearty humorist who can be seen, though disguised, in the comedian’s picture. It was natural that a soldier should be more struck by the positive conclusions Socrates reached on practical matters than by his method of reaching them. It was equally natural that a professed apologist should want to show his master in the way most intelligible to plain persons, who had been puzzled by reports of his strange argumentation and fancied some great mischief lurked in it. But if we bear this in mind and treat Xenophon as the expounder of the Socratic discipline rather than of the man or his principles, we shall be more struck by the agreements than by the differences between him and the other biographers. Homage to an invisible guide and teacher, the distinction between the principle in man that looks upward and the one that gravitates to the earth, and the recognition of restraints on the animal nature as means of freeing the true man, we shall find on every page of the Memorabilia. Standing alone, Xenophon would be unsatisfactory, even misleading; his Socrates would be almost as much a mere bundle of fine qualities or true opinions as his Cyrus. But he is most useful in giving clearness and steadiness to the apprehensions we draw from other, and on the whole better, sources. In him we see clearly that Socrates kept a moral end before him from first to last, and was to all intents a practical man. This discovery, instead of making the other accounts harder to interpret, which some think inconsistent with it, makes them more intelligible and more consistent with themselves than we would otherwise have thought.

19. In the Socrates of Plato we find the Aristophanic and the Xenophontic Socrates, the mere humorist and debater and the mere moralist, uniting to form the real man. It has often been said that Plato’s brilliant imagination created a hero with very few points of resemblance to the actual Socrates. It would certainly be hopeless to clear Plato of the charge of a brilliant, and more than brilliant, imagination. But the word has two meanings. If it means contempt of reason and probability, the gift must belong in a much lower degree to Plato than to those who think it possible that a man living in the very city where Socrates had walked and talked for years could palm off on his countrymen a false or fantastic image of him. If instead we mean the power of giving substance and life to what would otherwise be a mere shadow, it must be a most serviceable ally to one who would collect and harmonise the remembrances of an actual character, no less than to one who would create a character that never existed. Strong affection may make such a faculty unnecessary in a mere biographer, or perhaps awaken it. But one who has to describe a friend’s thoughts, words, and acts, and also to show how they bore on the state of his country and will bear on men’s speculations and lives for ages, needs no ordinary measure of this faculty. This is Plato’s work. He proposed to exhibit Socrates as the guide into a particular line and course of thought. To do it, he had to bring him livingly before us, so that we should see not his opinions but himself, trace the workings of his mind, and see how he acted on others and they on him. By no other means could Plato have given us the true Socrates, and without presenting the true Socrates he could never have brought out clearly the different sides of his own philosophy.

Section III. The Socratics

1. Three schools grew directly out of the philosophy and discipline of Socrates, usually called the Cyrenaic, the Cynic, and the Megaric. They may be called the parents of the most conspicuous theories that occupied later Greece. The Cyrenaic doctrine, mixed with a tributary stream from the physics of Democritus, ended in Epicurism. The Cynic joined with the Megarian to form Stoicism. The Megarian also contributed one element to the speculations that flourished much later at Alexandria. It is worth tracing the leading thoughts of each and showing how they began with Socrates.

2. Aristippus of Cyrene seems to have had a singularly easy, happy temperament. Pleasures did not excite him, and pains passed lightly over him. One would have thought few men could have had less sympathy with Socrates, who fought hard all his life with himself and the world. Yet this earnest thinker had charms even for Aristippus. Socrates said we are not to yield to circumstances but to master them, and Aristippus, whom no circumstance oppressed, found in his own experience an interpretation of that maxim. Socrates often pitied and warned the thoughtless man for his restlessness and perturbation. What more natural inference than that freedom from annoyance, a dismissal of all anxious and turbulent cares, is the great end of philosophy? Besides these well-known commonplaces of his master’s talk, Aristippus could no doubt cite authentic fragments of conversation in which Socrates seemed to assume pleasure as the end of life and to fit his other maxims to it. He could tell, we may be sure, of times when Socrates rebuked his own lazy, voluptuous habits of mind and yet seemed to aim at proving, not that they led to a wrong end, but that they were ill-chosen means to it. So Aristippus easily persuaded himself that he was a Socratic, indeed the best and most complete interpreter of Socrates, when he announced the great discovery that pleasure and pain are the ultimate principles of human life, and that pursuing the one and avoiding the other is, and must be, every man’s business. Whatever honour belongs to the first formal proclaimer of a doctrine that has held so prominent a place in the philosophy of every age must be given to Aristippus. What distinguishes him from later and less practical reasoners of this class is his plain and honest assertion that the momentary, concrete gratification, not the complex notion of happiness, is and must be the object of men’s desires and labours. It was easy for him to fit other parts of the Socratic creed to this. If choosing the agreeable and rejecting the disagreeable is the great virtue of the soul, how conveniently could Socrates’ language on the connection of virtue with reason and knowledge serve the new sect! It is the intellect that prefers and discards, and why should these acts of judgment not be the same as that perception of what is and what is not to which the master so constantly referred? As for the apparent self-restraint and bodily privations of Socrates, they were no real contradiction to the Cyrenaic theory, which allows all varieties of taste and may let one man seek mental pleasure at the cost of bodily, and another bodily at the cost of mental. The school went through several changes. With Theodorus, pleasure and pain ceased to be real outward objects, and self-seeking and self-glorification became the acknowledged ends of the wise man. In Hegesias the hope of attaining pleasure gave way to a mere devising of ways to avoid pain. Anniceris seems to have smoothed the rough edges of the doctrine and prepared the way for its merging in the more general notions of happiness matured by Epicurus.

3. The Cynic school, as it appears in its founder Antisthenes and in Diogenes, its only very notorious disciple, is the formal opposite of the Cyrenaic. Yet it adds one more illustration to the old maxim that Mr. Coleridge observed to be the most pregnant of all for the philosopher and the historian of philosophy: “Extremes meet.” Both started from the same Socratic maxim, and probably both cited the same discourses in defence of their systems. The wise man should not submit to circumstances but rule them, said Aristippus, and so his whole business is to arrange them for the most pleasure and least pain. A man should be superior to his circumstances, said Antisthenes, and therefore must overcome his sensitivity to pleasure and pain and try to live wholly within himself, cultivating the nobler part of him that outward impulses and impressions do not touch. If Aristippus could cite passages from the discourses of Socrates, Antisthenes could appeal more confidently to the whole course of his life, his habitual struggle for victory over mere sensations. The Cynics were really disciplinarians more than doctrinists. They had a hard dogmatism of their own, but they were far more eager to show their own indifference to passing accidents than to find principles and reasons for it. Of the two, Antisthenes seems to have been the more honest and Diogenes the more original. The first was hard and narrow but apparently sincere; the second was an ostentatious coxcomb, whose proud, insolent spirit now and then threw off sparks of what might have been genius had it come with simplicity of character and a true purpose.

4. Euclides of Megara was unquestionably more sagacious and subtle than any of those named. He was drawn to Socrates not by hope of a theory of life or a scheme of self-culture, but by Socrates’ unrivalled skill in disputation. Had he lived thirty years earlier, he would have been an Eleatic or a Sophist. But nothing shows the effect of Socratic teaching on the Greek mind more remarkably than the moral tone it gave to men who would otherwise have been mere debaters. To argue was the taste and vocation of the Megarian school, but their arguments were all drawn irresistibly to the question, “What is the Good?” Pursuing it, they were led naturally to the pregnant positions of Socrates about evil as a departure from, and rebellion against, what is, which, as we have seen, was the ultimate and in one way the most characteristic part of his philosophy. This principle, cut off from the living processes by which Socrates reached it and sought to make others conscious of it, and set in naked opposition to every other idea of virtue or goodness, made up the Megarian doctrine. All their labour went to disproving the obvious and apparently irresistible opinion that what the senses report is the most real and certain. We have heard how Zeno defended the doctrine of his friend and master Parmenides by showing the utter instability of sensible presumptions and conclusions. The Megarian school used the same method. The difference lay in the character of the periods: Zeno’s purpose was to support the metaphysical idea of Oneness, the Megarians’ to support the moral idea of absolute, unchangeable Being.

5. The history of this school is melancholy and instructive. Euclides, though his mind leaned to disputation, felt the grandeur of the moral lessons he had learned from Socrates. In Eubulides positive faith was displaced by delight in his own subtlety and in refuting opposing arguments. Diodorus Cronos admired and revered the mere forms of the understanding, apart from all vital principles or results. Finally Stilpo seems to have lost the characteristic idea of the Megarian school altogether while carrying its characteristic weakness to the highest point. His problem was not to establish the existence of objective truth but to show how an intellect might be formed that would be most impassive to influences from without and least disturbed by feelings from within. One of his pupils was Zeno of Cittium, the author of Stoicism.