Section II. Socrates

1. Socrates. There is little doubt that Socrates was the son of a statuary and a midwife. He was born in a little burgh of Attica. When he came to Athens we know not with any exactness; probably about the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, when Pericles was still living and Anaxagoras teaching. He frequented the school of the latter. His first teacher. Nor is it at all unlikely that he must have entered with considerable ardour into the studies of his master, and may have carried away from him many valuable hints.

2. Why he did not become a student of Nature. Anaxagoras, as we have seen, was at the furthest remove from the trading Sophists of his day. Political life was with them everything; with him it was nothing. He sought to dwell apart from the world of human beings, to find a home in the world of nature. It was surely a noble experiment. If young Pericles felt it to be so, though the desire of his life was political ascendancy, young Socrates, who never evinced that desire in any period of his life, would, one might have thought, have been carried away by it. But he could not find a country where Anaxagoras sought for one. As he listened to the sublime physical speculations of his master, he seems to have asked himself, “What are all these to me? Let atoms be connected by what law of affinity they will; let them whirl at random through space, or be guided by an intelligence; still the question remains, What am I? They do not help to answer this question. But in some way or other it must be answered. Any carpenter or shoemaker who can put me in the way of solving this problem would be my benefactor. The profoundest teacher whose thoughts are turned in another direction is not the man I want.” The school of Anaxagoras therefore was forsaken. There was something very inviting in its quietness; but if that quietness was to be obtained by the sacrifice of human feelings and interests, the gossip of the Agora, the bustle of the Pireus, was better.

3. Why he did not become a professor of wisdom. Socrates then was, like the Sophists, a man of business and action. His wisdom, if he had any, must, like theirs, be directed to that which was passing around him, not to that which was going on in some other sphere. But had he wisdom which was available for this purpose? Could he communicate knowledge about things on earth, or things in the skies? The more he considered, the more he found that he was not a possessor of wisdom; that it was the very thing which he needed. He could not put it into the hands of a set of disciples to use it and traffic with it. He must go in search of it. The distinction between the Sophist, or wise man, and the philosopher, had dawned upon Pythagoras, perhaps upon Thales; it became the cardinal distinction in the mind of Socrates. To possess wisdom, to profess it, would be for him at least the most utter falsehood. He did not find that he could lay down theories or maxims about the commonest things. What he needed was to understand them; and this, that he might understand himself, that he might find out what ground he had to stand upon; whether he had any, or was only floating in the air.

4. Who can assist him in this inquiry? It was one which concerned his own very self; that which no eye could see, that which lay beneath all utterance, all thought. The Dæmon of Socrates. There was near him (as Socrates believed) one who did take cognizance of the most secret movements of his mind and will, who reproved him, restrained him, warned him. A divine teacher was with him at all times. Though he did not possess wisdom, this teacher could put him in the road to seek for it, could preserve him from the delusions which might turn him out of that road, could keep his mind fixed upon the end for which he was to act and live. Xenophon asks with plain, soldier-like honesty, whether his accusers could believe that he told a lie about this matter, and hints that it would shake his faith in all reality, to suppose that the mind of a man so clear-sighted and free from superstition could be the victim of an utterly false impression, or that it could produce the wholesome effects which he himself had witnessed. We believe that Socrates told no lie about his Demon; that it was precisely this faith which kept him from lying; which was the cause of his clearness of sight and his freedom from superstition.

5. This guide or teacher Socrates connected with the mythology of his countrymen. He seems to have interpreted the one by the other. He was sure that there was such a teacher of himself; he could acknowledge, therefore, a teacher of wisdom to Greeks and men. The god at Delphi. Much that was said about the god of Delphi might seem to him profane; he turned from it with disgust. But on the whole he believed much more, not less, than his countrymen believed, and he shrunk from the scepticism and irreverence which they and their poets ventured to indulge in. He had no notion of substituting a Nous or Intelligence for Jupiter or Apollo. It would have been altogether strange if he had done so, since he was not accounting for the existence of the universe, but craving for a light to show him his own path through it. He was not, therefore, a Monotheist in the sense in which some have represented him as being so; he did not affirm that there were not various objects of worship. In many acts of his life he confessed them. But as he felt that there was one teacher, one source of light and wisdom, who was leading him out of the confusions and bewilderments of sense, he was practically more of a Monotheist than he could have been if he had tried to reduce the traditions of Greece into physical speculations, or had treated them as mere follies.

6. His calling. Socrates spoke of his Demon as reproving and restraining himself; but since he connected this Demon with the gods of his country, he felt of course that other men had also a director whom they were to obey, and who could lead them to the object which he sought. Instead of being a solitary thinker, he had the most intense sense of a vocation to help and instruct others. Though he could not give them wisdom, he might put them into the same way of seeking it, in which he was striving to walk himself.

7. His character and influence. What charms he used to draw a circle about him may seem at first inexplicable. Most of the Sophists were men advanced in age and reputation when he first appeared in Athens. They promised to fit men for being politicians, orators, generals, and offered very plausible evidence to prove that they could do what they promised. He promised nothing. He was come, he said, to exercise his mother’s profession on behalf of those who had thoughts of which they wished to be delivered. You could not understand 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 definitively or constantly. Personal gracefulness and beauty were great recommendations among the Athenians: he had large projecting eyes, like those of a bull, a flattened and upturned nose, a protuberant stomach; he wore a tattered cloak, and was seldom seen with sandals. Nevertheless, the youth of Athens began to flock about him; they thought that he had something to teach them; perhaps that by some means or other he would be able to impart to them the art of governing better than the more regular doctors. It is impossible to say that some of the causes which we have mentioned as likely to alienate his countrymen may not themselves have contributed to this result. The Athenians liked a humorist, and a humorist Socrates, by his outward negligences, as well as by the whole tone of his discourse, showed himself to be. Moreover, he had a most hearty, genial way of interesting himself in whatever interested those with whom he was mixing; as little of solemn quackery as was ever found in the composition of any man. Add to this that he was a thorough, genuine Greek; Greek in all the habits of his mind, Greek in his taste for society, Greek in wit and argument, Greek in a brave unflinching love for his own land, Greek in making freedom (to a much greater degree than is usually observed or acknowledged) the passion and end of his life. But all these circumstances together could not have availed to counteract the many disadvantages under which he laboured, if he had not possessed the real magnet which must draw the hearts of young men after it, be they never so reluctant—a knowledge of the thing which they are really wanting, and which they have been toiling in vain to find.

8. His dialogues. Political power was, as we have seen, the one prize which the Sophists proposed to themselves and held out to their pupils as the reward of all the trouble which they bestowed upon abstract speculations. Now, though there were different roads to this end, and though each teacher believed himself, and induced his disciples to believe, that his was the shortest, yet one method was common to them all; all sought to acquire power by means of words. The mastery over words was the great art which the Athenian youth was to cultivate; his own feelings, and an observation of what was passing every day in his city, told him that there was a charm and fascination in these which the physical force of an Oriental tyrant might vainly try to compete with. How Socrates used them. It seems to have been the first observation of Socrates when he began earnestly to meditate on the condition of his countrymen, that in this case, as in most others, the tyrants were slaves; that those who wished to rule the world by the help of words were themselves in the most ignominious bondage to words. The wish to break this spell seems to have taken strong possession of his mind. But the wish would have been ineffectual, and would only have interfered with the main feeling of his life, if he had not been able to connect the study of words with that deep question respecting his own being of which we spoke just now. As he reflected, he began more and more clearly to perceive that words, besides being the instruments by which we govern others, are means by which we may become acquainted with ourselves. In trying really to understand a word, to ascertain what was the bonâ fide meaning which he himself gave it, he found that he gained more insight into his own ignorance, and at the same time that he acquired more real knowledge, than by all other studies together. In this work he knew that he was really honest; he was feeling for a ground; he was breaking through a thousand trickeries and self-deceptions. If, then, he was to deliver his countrymen from that miserable shallowness into which they had been betrayed by the ambition of wisdom and depth,—if he was to lead them out of the multitude of systems above morality into any firm feeling that there was a morality,—above all, if he was to rescue them from the worship of power,—this must be his means. He must not stop to canvass the wisdom of this proposition or that. He must not denounce with great moral indignation some that struck him as very mischievous or outrageous. He must not candidly and generously concede the truth and wisdom of those which seemed to him plausible or reasonable. But in every case he must lead his disciples to inquire what they actually meant by the words of the propositions which they were using, and must consider no time wasted which they honestly spent in this labour; no perplexities or contradictions dangerous which started out of their own minds in the course of it.

9. His elenchus. No doubt this would be a most irritating, vexatious course of proceeding. No doubt an opponent who had adopted a certain proposition, and was provided with abundance of arguments in defence of it, would be tortured beyond measure by finding himself not fairly encountered upon those arguments, but led back into a question which he had assumed, forced to give an account of a word which he fancied every one was agreed upon, and not permitted, after all, to bring any of his own resources into play. It was most perplexing for a disciple who had come expecting that a certain doctrine would be either established or refuted, and, perhaps, that the ingenious arguments on both sides of the question might serve his purpose in a popular assembly, to find that he got no decision either way, and, moreover, that he himself had been talking all his life in a language which he did not understand, and using words as if they were algebraic characters. Yet in some way or other the Sophist was taught that he was in the presence of one stronger than himself. He might chafe and fret, and complain that he had been treated with great unfairness. He could not say that his opponent had not got the better of him in his own word-fighting; he could not say that all the scepticism which he had brought into play against the common thoughts and feelings of his countrymen and of mankind had not been made to tell with tenfold force upon himself; he could not help owning and feeling that there was one in conflict with him who had some other end than the mere exercise or display of power, and yet who did possess a power before which his own quailed. On the other hand, the disciple, amidst all his bewilderment, will have gone away with a feeling that he (perhaps for the first time in his life) had actually learned something, and with a conviction that if there be not something better than the attainment of dominion over other men’s minds, there is at least a most important and indispensable preliminary to it, unless we would have our own the sport of every deceiver.

10. His irony. The infinite humour and vivacity of Socrates must of course have been of the greatest service in such dialogues as these. But oftentimes his opponents will have fancied that he was merely indulging his humour when he was, in fact, following out his principle. The practice of confessing his uncertainty or his ignorance upon any subject that was presented to him, which formed in their eyes the chief element of his “irony,” was not always or generally affected. We make no doubt that he often entered upon a discussion without knowing whither it would lead; actually, as he professed, hoping to be a learner by the result of it. He was certain, not of a particular conclusion, but that his method was a sound one, and that it would conduct each person who followed it to clearness and truth. It is probable that his discoveries respecting himself and his fellow-creatures were the practical fruits of this method. Recollection For instance, it was by repeated experiments that he convinced himself of the immense importance of the habit of recollection; how the mind that wants it is at the mercy of all accidents; how the mind that possesses it is continually realising its own possessions, receiving them as if they were then for the first time bestowed. Upon this principle the greatest part of his moral discipline depended. The necessity of removing the impediments to recollection, of leading the mind away from mere sensible images and impressions into an examination of its own treasures, was the purpose and ground of it. But this principle was redeemed from any Brahminical tendency by his habitual use of words and sensible images as the means whereby a man feels his way into the principles and grounds of his being. It is in trying to understand all common things—what the carpenter does with his wood, the shoemaker with his leather, the mason with his stones,—it is by really getting to know what we intend when we talk of all these things, that a man learns to understand himself. It was not therefore to an escape from common life, from daily business, that the withdrawment or recollection of Socrates pointed. It formed the habit of seeking out in everything that which it really is, and not merely its shapes, and appearances, and accidents, which the man is to cultivate, and which is ultimately to fit him for perceiving that which is deepest and truest. Now, it is the faith attained by repeated proofs and trials, that man has that in him which does desire to find out the truth of things; and again, that he has an inclination to be constantly conversing with the mere images of things, and that just so far as the first of these tendencies is kept uppermost, and subordinates the other to it, he is in his honest sound position; and that just so far as the lower tendency is uppermost, he becomes a mere shadow-pursuer and shadow-fighter, which is the soul of Socrates’s doctrine. A moral foundation. It was not adopted as a scheme to supplant another scheme; he stumbled upon it as a fact which he could no more gainsay than any one for which he had the evidence of his senses—a fact which was, let it be explained as it would, and must be recognised in all our dealings with ourselves or with other men.

11. Alcibiades the type of the Athenian character. There was one young man in Athens whom Socrates regarded with an intense affection. In him the qualities of the Greek were exhibited in their highest perfection. Creative power, skill in the management of words, personal beauty, fascination of manner, were all united in him. The love which Socrates bore him shows how thoroughly he sympathised with the feelings which he regarded with most fear, and in which he saw all possibilities of evil. If Alcibiades could have learnt to see that there was a right and a wrong—that to walk in a line, not to devise one—to perceive, not to create—is man’s business, the whole history of Athens might have been different. No doubt there must have been critical moments in the life of this youth, when he confessed to himself that there was something that was more worth seeking than dominion. No doubt there were moments when the feeling that he too had a guide and monitor within him whom he might obey, was stronger than the sense of power and the inclination to wrong-doing which accompanied it. But Ahriman prevailed over Ormuzd: Alcibiades yielded to the darker power within, which was tempting him continually to glorify his own intellect—to use the mighty gifts which had been entrusted to him, for the destruction of his country and of himself. Then all the skill which he had seen his master exercising in word-fighting became his curse. It was an instrument of mighty mischief in his hands. Having once parted with the moral purpose at which Socrates was aiming, that which he received from him became indeed sophistry of the worst kind. It taught him to act more effectually upon the maxim, that all order and society had been invented some time or other by the strongest or the cunningest, and that what they invented they could pull down.

12. The mere art of Socrates might prove mischievous This, says our recent historian of Greece, was not the sophistical teaching. The Sophists merely intended to fit Athenian young men for the purposes of civil life. Their aim was not so high a one as that of Socrates, but it was far from a bad aim. We believe that Socrates would have answered, “Either it is this aim that I am setting before myself, or it must be a bad aim. All my own teaching, my own influence, if it has not this aim, is bad teaching, bad influence. My elenchus is nothing better in itself than the logic or rhetoric of any other professor. If it is merely taken up as a more skilful or ingenious art, it will be worse; for its purpose is to lead men into the apprehension of that which is—to sift and separate that which is from its shapes and counterfeits, from that which is not. The Sophists are destroying the heart and soul of my countrymen, because they are continually leading them to think that what they want is an art which shall enable them to do or to make, when what they actually want is a science, a means of seeing that which they did not make, that which lies beneath all our doings, which is at the root of our ownselves.”

13. Knowledge: in what sense the basis of virtue. From this statement it will be seen in what sense knowledge seemed to Socrates the basis of morality. Those who suppose that he meant to exalt the human faculties and to make them the grounds of virtue and of truth, do not merely mistake, but invert his meaning. To destroy the worship of power, and especially of intellectual power, may be said to have been the purpose of his life. And in nothing did he show this more than in his doctrine respecting 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. It is the whole blessing of the man to behold them; as he beholds them he is like them, but 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 strive to expound it.

14. Socrates the specimen of a philosopher. Socrates then was, we conceive, as he said himself, a philosopher, a philosopher and nothing else—a philosopher in the most strict sense of the word—a philosopher who helps us better than any one else 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 to say, because he brings nothing with him, but acknowledges or recognises that which presents itself to him. When he speaks of the dignity of the philosopher, he means us to understand the dignity of a man who does not exalt himself, who does not put himself in the way of the thing which he is examining, who has the simplest, most open eye for receiving light, whencesoever it shall come. That there is a source of light from whence it does come, and that this light is connected with man, is a principle assumed, if it is ever so imperfectly developed, in all his words and acts.

15. The condemnation of Socrates natural. How can such a man, it has often been asked, have been compelled to drink hemlock? Must not the restored democracy of Athens have been worse, and more intolerant, than any power which ever existed on the earth? Mr. Grote answers, we think, most reasonably, that the wonder is how such a man should have been suffered to go on teaching for so long. No state, he adds, ever showed so much tolerance for differences of opinion as Athens. We would make an addition to this statement. If it had been possible to regard Socrates merely as an utterer of peculiar opinions, as one of the Greek Sophists or professors, he might still have taught with impunity. Anytus and Meletus might have had their own special causes of dislike to him; his connexion with Critias or Alcibiades might have awakened suspicion in different minds; the ridicule of comedians might have kept up an habitual prejudice against him; but the tolerance of the Athenian people would have triumphed. He would have been acquitted on the count of corrupting the minds of the youth, as well as on that of introducing new demons. But there always has been, and always will be, a limit to the indulgence of those who regard all opinions as equally possible. If a man positively denies that he is proclaiming an opinion, if he speaks of the possibility of knowing, of the duty of distinguishing, of a truth which men do not create, and which does not change with the changes of our intellect—he comes under quite a different category from the promulger of opinions; he is not entitled to the same mercy. The Athenians tolerant of all opinions, not of a seeker of truth. Tolerant people, on the very ground of their tolerance, feel bound to silence or to crush him. What business has he to insult the opinions of other men; to tell them that there is something which it is dangerous for them not to see; that there are falsehoods clinging to their lives which they ought to cast off? It is long indeed before a thoroughly good-natured man can persuade himself that any one has reached this height of criminality. All pity will be shown to his fanaticism as long as it is possible. He will be treated in spite of himself as a sectarian teacher propounding a particular opinion. But if he continues with incurable pertinacity, as Socrates did, to assert that he is not a Sophist, not the putter forth of a certain theory, it is evident that tolerant men must—experience shows that they will—resort, though reluctantly, to the same racks, dungeons, and poison-cups, which bigots are wont to employ. For it comes to this: if the teacher is right in what he says, he must be regarded as a public benefactor; the city must honour him above all its citizens. When the judges had condemned Socrates to death, they asked him, according to Athenian custom, what milder sentence he would propose for himself. He answered, “A public support in the Prytaneum.” Though they might be offended at his audacity, their consciences told them that this was the real alternative. Not being prepared to take it, they allowed the sentence to be executed; so assuredly choosing a course immeasurably more honourable to Socrates, and more instructive to after ages.

16. The discourse of Socrates on immortality We must be careful of separating the discourse of Socrates after his condemnation from the course of his life which preceded it. His faith in a future state is often put forward as a characteristic which distinguished him from the rest of his countrymen and of the pagan world. Now, no one refers more frequently than Socrates himself to the old stories which express this faith; to Æacus and Rhadamanthus, the functions that were attributed to them, the souls upon which they passed judgment. Evidently he believed that the essence of these stories was true; that they did set forth the fact of a correspondence between the condition of men hereafter and their condition here. As in other cases, he received the teaching of those who had gone before him; but he asked himself what that teaching meant, and how it concerned him? His countrymen believed that, somehow or other, they should be judged hereafter by what they had done here; 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, in having his soul engaged in the pursuit of this knowledge; that his misery consists in being without it, in being given up to dreams and unrealities. He hoped that what he had desired to know here he should know; he sought for arguments to convince himself that, however the accidents which surrounded him might change, he himself should continue, and being more disengaged and purified from the corruptions and restraints of which he had been conscious here, should be able to converse with the perfect Wisdom and Goodness. Socrates did not tell his disciples that his future life was to be separate from his life here; it was the continuation and unfolding of that life which he looked for. He felt that his eyes had been partially opened, that they would be opened more perfectly, that he should still, and always, be a seeker after wisdom; but that wisdom would meet him and embrace him, and ever reveal to him new treasures, which would awaken in him ever fresh longings, and would 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 Socrates of the Clouds. The hints which we have thrown out may, we think, enable our readers to reconcile the three documents which we possess concerning the life of Socrates. If we look first at the Aristophanic portrait, we shall find that it is indeed a broad and extravagant caricature, but drawn by a consummate artist, who, even in distorting the expression of his original, shows that he has studied it. We could not consistently bestow this praise upon him if he had, as some of his commentators pretend, represented Socrates as a natural philosopher. But the name of the play of which he is the hero is almost the only excuse for such a notion. And who that knows anything of the genius of Aristophanes, or of the delicacy of the Athenian taste, will suspect him of perpetrating, or his audience of tolerating, the wretched conceit that a man worships the clouds, because he is fond of gazing at the stars? Far rather the airy nymphs whom the philosopher is said to have substituted for the gods of his country, are the patronesses of those attempts to catch the thin, delicate, evanescent meanings and shadows of the meanings of words which might so plausibly be imputed to one who estimated philology highly for its own sake, and found it so indispensable a weapon in his warfare with the Sophists. Socrates not represented by Aristophanes as a teacher of Physics. The basket, too, in which the philosopher is found hanging between heaven and earth, because he wishes to mingle his thoughts with the congenial air, indicates no sort of apprehension on the part of the poet that Socrates looked upon himself as a mere particle of the general life of the world, and desired to be reunited with his native element; but, on the contrary, points to that doctrine of the withdrawment of the spirit from the phantasms of the world, which we have spoken of as forming so capital an article in the moral creed of Socrates, and of which his idea respecting the condition of the soul after death is only the expansion and fulfilment. The maps and geometrical instruments which the old Athenian found in the phrontisterium partly prove that illustrations from subjects with which the education of the Athenian youth made them familiar, were frequently in the philosopher’s mouth, and partly seem intended as a joke at the Socratic attempt to reduce morality to a science. The dialogue respecting the cause of thunder is evidently intended far more as a caricature of the philosopher’s method of discourse than as an exposition of any of his particular opinions; the chief object being to leave an impression on the hearer’s mind, that Socrates substituted some special demon of his own (which the poet, to keep his metaphors consistent, and to strike an oblique blow at the really physical speculators, calls Δῖνος) for Jupiter. It is necessary to make these remarks in justification of Aristophanes, for if in these parts of his play he has wished to represent Socrates as a naturalist, the whole plot of it is absurd and inappropriate. Why should Strepsiades go to a natural philosopher that he may learn how to cheat his creditors? or how should such a teacher give Pheidippides lessons in beating his father? But the most remarkable feature in the whole play—the contest between the just and the unjust principle—is at once decisive as to the meaning of Aristophanes. The ingenious satirist, with the quick, intuitive discernment which might be expected from an Athenian, and such an Athenian, has perceived the conflict between an uplooking and a downlooking mind to be the most characteristic and important peculiarity of the system he was ridiculing.

18. The Socrates of the Memorabilia. The one point in the life of Socrates of which Aristophanes shows himself to have been utterly ignorant, is the object of it; and this is the one point upon which Xenophon is anxious to give us information. This worthy disciple is too anxious to show us Socrates in his dignity, and therefore we miss the hearty humorist who may be seen, though disguised, in the comedian’s picture. It was natural that a soldier should be more struck with the positive conclusions at which Socrates arrived upon direct practical matters, than with his method of arriving at them. It was equally natural that the professed apologist should be eager to exhibit his master in the way that would be most intelligible to plain persons, who had been puzzled with reports of his strange argumentations, and who had fancied that some great mischief must lurk in them. But if we bear these facts in mind, and look upon Xenophon as rather the expounder of the Socratic discipline than of the man himself, or of his principles, we shall probably be much more struck with the agreements than with 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 that which gravitates to the earth, the recognition of restraints upon the animal nature as means for the enfranchisement of the true man, we shall find in every page of the Memorabilia. Standing alone, Xenophon would be unsatisfactory—nay, 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 which we derive from other, and, on the whole, better sources. We see clearly in him that Socrates did from first to last keep a moral end before him. We see that he was, to all intents and purposes, a practical man. And this discovery, instead of making it more difficult to interpret the accounts of him which some think inconsistent with it, renders those accounts more intelligible and more consistent with themselves than we should otherwise have thought them.

19. The Platonic Socrates. In the Socrates of Plato we find both 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 the brilliant imagination of this philosopher created a hero between whom and the actual Socrates there were, perhaps, very few points of resemblance. Certainly it would be a hopeless task to vindicate Plato from the charge of a brilliant, and more than a brilliant, imagination. But two meanings may be given to this word. If it signifies a contempt of reason and probability, the gift, we apprehend, must belong in a much lower degree to Plato than to those who conceive it possible for a person living in the very city wherein Socrates had been for years walking and talking, to have palmed upon his countrymen a false or fantastic image of him. If, on the contrary, by imagination we understand the power of giving to that which would be otherwise a mere shadow, substance and life, it must surely be a most serviceable ally to him who would collect and harmonise the remembrances of an actual character, no less than to him who would call into being one that never existed. Strong affection may supersede the necessity of such a faculty in a mere biographer; or rather, perhaps, may awaken it. But one who has not only to describe the thoughts, words, and acts of a friend, but to show how they bore upon the state of his country, and how they will bear upon men’s speculations and lives for ages to come, has need that no ordinary measure of this faculty should be imparted to him. This is the work of Plato. It was Socrates, as the guide into a particular line and course of thought, whom he proposed to exhibit. But in order to do this, it was absolutely necessary that he should be brought livingly before us; that we should see, not his opinions, but himself; that we should be able to trace the workings of his mind, to see how he acted upon others and they upon him. By any other means Plato would have been unable to give us the true Socrates; and without presenting us the true Socrates he could never have brought out with any clearness and distinctness the different sides of his own philosophy.

Section III. The Socratics

1. The Cyrenaic school: Aristippus, Theodorus, Hegesias, Anniceris. The immediate outgrowths of the Socratic philosophy and discipline were three schools, ordinarily distinguished as the Cyrenaic, Cynic, and Megaric. These may be said to be the parents of the most conspicuous theories with which later Greece was occupied. The Cyrenaic doctrine, having mingled with a tributary stream flowing from the physics of Democritus, terminated in Epicurism. The Cynic combined with the Megarian to constitute Stoicism. The Megarian, moreover, contributed one element to the important speculations which had their home at a much later period at Alexandria. It is interesting, therefore, to trace the leading thoughts of each, and to show how they originated with Socrates.

2. Aristippus, flourished B.C. 366. Aristippus of Cyrene seems to have been a man of a singularly easy, happy temperament. Pleasures excited him not, pains passed lightly over him. Few men, one would have thought, would have had less sympathy with Socrates, who was a hard fighter, all his life long, with himself and with the world. Nevertheless this earnest thinker had charms even for Aristippus. Socrates said that we are not to yield to circumstances, but are the masters of them; and the light spirit which no circumstance affected or oppressed found an interpretation for the maxim in his own experience. The perturbations and restlessness of the thoughtless, unrecollected man were frequent topics for the pity and warnings of Socrates; could there be a more natural inference than that freedom from annoyance, a dismissal of all careful and turbulent anxieties, is the great end of philosophy? In addition to these, the well-known commonplaces of his master’s discourse, Aristippus could no doubt quote authentic fragments of his conversations, in which he had seemed to assume pleasure as the end of life, and to adjust his other maxims to this conclusion. He could tell, we may be sure, of cases in which Socrates, addressing himself to his own lazy, voluptuous habits of mind, and reprehending them, had yet seemed to make it his object to prove, not that they were leading to a wrong end, but that they were ill-chosen means for accomplishing that end. Aristippus, therefore, easily persuaded himself that he had a good title to call himself a Socratic—nay, that he was the best and most complete interpreter of the Socratic views—when he announced the great discovery that pleasure and pain are the ultimate principles of human life; that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other is and must be the business of every man. His excuse for calling himself a disciple of Socrates. Whatever honour belongs to the first formal promulgator of a doctrine which has occupied so prominent a place in the philosophy of all ages as this, must in all justice be given to Aristippus. That in which he is distinguished from later and less practical reasoners of the same class is in the distinct and honest assertion that the momentary, concrete gratification, and not the complex notion of happiness, is and must be the object of men’s desires and labours. It was easy for Aristippus to adjust some other portions of the Socratic creed to this doctrine. If the choice of what is agreeable, and the rejection of what is disagreeable, be the great virtue of the human soul, how conveniently might the language of Socrates respecting the connection of virtue with reason and knowledge be pressed into the service of the new sect! Of course it is the intellectual faculty which prefers and discards; and why should not these acts of judgment be the same with those acts of reason, that perception of what is and what is not, to which the master had so constantly referred? And as for the apparent self-restraint and bodily privations of Socrates, these were in no real contradiction to the Cyrenaic theory, which admits, of course, all varieties of taste, and may well permit one man to seek mental pleasure at the expense of corporeal,—another, corporeal at the loss of mental. This school underwent several changes. In the hands of Theodorus pleasure and pain ceased to be real outward objects, and self-seeking and self-glorification became the defined, acknowledged ends of the wise man. In Hegesias the hope of attaining pleasure is exchanged for a mere invention of contrivances to avoid pain. Anniceris seems to have taken off the rough edges of the doctrine, and to have prepared the way for its merging in the more general notions about happiness which were matured by Epicurus.

3. The Cynic school: Antisthenes and Diogenes. Antisthenes, about B.C. 426-371. The Cynic school—as it presents itself in the persons of Antisthenes, its founder, and Diogenes, its only very notorious disciple—is the formal opposite of the Cyrenaic. Diogenes, B.C. 412-323. Yet they added one to the numerous illustrations of the old maxim, which Mr. Coleridge has observed to be of all maxims the most pregnant for the philosopher and the philosophical historian,—“Extremes meet.” Both, in fact, started from the same Socratic maxim; both may probably have alleged the same discourses in vindication of their system. The wise man should not submit to circumstances, but rule them, said Aristippus; his whole business is to arrange his circumstances that they may produce the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. A man is to be superior to his circumstances, said Antisthenes, and therefore he is by all means to overcome his sensibility to pleasure or pain, and endeavour to live solely within himself, cultivating that nobler part of him which is not affected by outward impulses and impressions. If the first could allege passages from the discourses of Socrates in support of his theory, the latter could more confidently appeal to the whole course of his life, to his habitual endeavours after a victory over mere sensations. The Cynics were, in fact, more disciplinarians than doctrinists. They had a hard dogmatism of their own, but they were much more ambitious to show their own indifference to passing accidents than to discover principles and reasons for such an indifference. Of the two professors of the school, Antisthenes seems to have been the honester, Diogenes the more original. The first was hard and narrow, but apparently sincere; the second was an ostentatious coxcomb, from whose proud and insolent spirit were emitted now and then sparks of what might have been genius if it had been accompanied with simplicity of character and a true purpose.

4. The Megarian school: Euclides, Eubulides, Diodorus, Stilpo. Euclides of Megara was unquestionably a more sagacious and subtle man than any of those we have named. He was attracted to Socrates by no hope, either of obtaining a theory respecting life, or of discovering a scheme of self-culture, but by his unrivalled skill in disputation. Had Euclides lived thirty years earlier, he would have been an Eleatic, or else a Sophist. But in nothing is the effect of the Socratic teaching, and the change it had wrought upon the minds of his countrymen, more remarkable than in the moral tone which it imparted to the thoughts of those who would otherwise have been debaters merely. To argue was the taste and the vocation of the Megarian school, but their arguments were all irresistibly drawn to the question, “What is the Good?” In pursuing this inquiry, they were naturally led to those pregnant positions of Socrates respecting evil, as a departure from, and rebellion against, what is, which constituted, as we have seen, the ultimate, and, in one way, the most characteristic part of his philosophy. This principle, in fact, disjoined from all the living processes by which Socrates had arrived at it, and by which he sought to make other men conscious of it, and exhibited in naked opposition to all other ideas of virtue or goodness, constituted the Megarian doctrine. All their labours were employed in disproving the obvious and apparently irresistible opinion, that those things whereof the senses give us information are 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 adopted the same method. The difference lay in the characters of the respective periods; the purpose of Zeno was to support the metaphysical idea of Oneness,—of the Megarian, to support the moral idea of absolute, unchangeable Being.

5. Degeneracy of this school. The history of this school is melancholy and instructive. Euclides, though the bias of his mind was to disputation, felt the grandeur of the moral lessons which he had learned from Socrates. In Eubulides positive faith was superseded by delight in his own subtlety, and in the confutation of antagonist arguments. The mere forms of the understanding, apart from all vital principles or results, were the objects of admiration and reverence to Diodorus Cronos. Lastly, Stilpo seems to have lost the characteristic idea of the Megarian school altogether, while he carried its characteristic infirmity to its greatest height. Not to establish the existence of objective truth, but to show how an intellect may be formed which shall be most impassive to influences from without, and least disturbed by affections from within, was his problem. One of his pupils was Zeno of Cittium, the author of Stoicism.