That the professional
teachers called sophists, in Greece, were intellectual and moral
corruptors, and that much corruption grew up under their teaching in
the Athenian mind, are common statements, which I have endeavored to
show to be erroneous. Corresponding to these statements is another,
which represents
Sokratês as one whose special merit it was to have rescued the
Athenian mind from such demoralizing influences; a reputation
which he neither deserves nor requires. In general, the favorable
interpretation of evidence, as exhibited towards Sokratês, has been
scarcely less marked than the harshness of presumption against the
sophists. Of late, however, some authors have treated his history
in an altered spirit, and have manifested a disposition to lower
him down to that which they regard as the sophistical level. M.
Forchhammer’s treatise: “The Athenians and Sokratês, or Lawful
Dealing against Revolution,” goes even further, and maintains
confidently that Sokratês was most justly condemned as an heretic,
a traitor, and a corrupter of youth. His book, the conclusions of
which I altogether reject, is a sort of retribution to the sophists,
as extending to their alleged opponent the same bitter and unfair
spirit of construction with that under which they have so long
unjustly suffered. But when we impartially consider the evidence, it
will appear that Sokratês deserves our admiration and esteem; not,
indeed, as an anti-sophist, but as combining with the qualities of a
good man, a force of character and an originality of speculation as
well as of method, and a power of intellectually working on others,
generically different from that of any professional teacher, without
parallel either among contemporaries or successors.
The life of Sokratês comprises seventy years, from 469 to 399
B.C. His father, Sophroniskus, being a
sculptor, the son began by following the same profession, in which
he attained sufficient proficiency to have executed various works;
especially a draped group of the Charites, or Graces, preserved in
the acropolis, and shown as his work down to the time of Pausanias.[629]
His mother, Phænaretê, was a midwife, and he had a brother
by the mother’s side named Patroklês.[630] Respecting his wife
Xanthippê, and his three sons, all that has passed into history is
the violent temper of the former, and the patience of her husband
in enduring it. The position and family of Sokratês, without
being absolutely poor, were humble and unimportant but he was of genuine Attic
breed, belonging to the ancient gens Dædalidæ, which took its name
from Dædalus, the mythical artist as progenitor.
The personal qualities of Sokratês, on the other hand, were
marked and distinguishing, not less in body than in mind. His
physical constitution was healthy, robust, and enduring, to an
extraordinary degree. He was not merely strong and active as an
hoplite on military service, but capable of bearing fatigue or
hardship, and indifferent to heat or cold, in a measure which
astonished all his companions. He went barefoot in all seasons of
the year, even during the winter campaign at Potidæa, under the
severe frosts of Thrace; and the same homely clothing sufficed to
him for winter as well as for summer. Though his diet was habitually
simple as well as abstemious, yet there were occasions, of religious
festival or friendly congratulation, on which every Greek considered
joviality and indulgence to be becoming. On such occasions, Sokratês
could drink more wine than any guest present, yet without being
overcome or intoxicated.[631] He abstained, on principle, from
all extreme gymnastic training, which required, as necessary
condition, extraordinary abundance of food.[632] It was his professed
purpose to limit, as much as possible, the number of his wants, as a
distant approach to the perfection of the gods, who wanted nothing,
to control such as were natural, and prevent the multiplication of
any that were artificial.[633] Nor can there be any doubt that his
admirable bodily
temperament contributed materially to facilitate such a purpose,
and assist him in the maintenance of that self-mastery, contented
self-sufficiency, and independence of the favor[634] as well as of the
enmity of others, which were essential to his plan of intellectual
life. His friends, who communicate to us his great bodily strength
and endurance, are at the same time full of jests upon his ugly
physiognomy; his flat nose, thick lips, and prominent eyes, like
a satyr, or silenus.[635] Nor can we implicitly trust the evidence
of such very admiring witnesses, as to the philosopher’s exemption
from infirmities of temper; for there seems good proof that he was by
natural temperament violently irascible; a defect which he generally
kept under severe control, but which occasionally betrayed him into
great improprieties of language and demeanor.[636]
Of those friends, the best known to us are Xenophon and Plato,
though there existed in antiquity various dialogues composed, and memoranda put
together, by other hearers of Sokratês, respecting his conversations
and teaching, which are all now lost.[637] The “Memorabilia” of
Xenophon profess to record actual conversations held by Sokratês, and
are prepared with the announced purpose of vindicating him against
the accusations of Melêtus and his other accusers on the trial, as
well as against unfavorable opinions, seemingly much circulated
respecting his character and purposes. We thus have in it a sort of
partial biography, subject to such deductions from its evidentiary
value as may be requisite for imperfection of memory, intentional
decoration, and partiality. On the other hand, the purpose of Plato,
in the numerous dialogues wherein he introduces Sokratês, is not so
clear, and is explained very differently by different commentators.
Plato was a great speculative genius, who came to form opinions of
his own distinct from those of Sokratês, and employed the name of
the latter as spokesman for these opinions in various dialogues. How
much, in the Platonic Sokratês, can be safely accepted either as a
picture of the man or as a record of his opinions,—how much, on the
other hand, is to be treated as Platonism; or in what proportions the
two are intermingled,—is a point not to be decided with certainty or
rigor. The “Apology of Sokratês,” the “Kriton,” and the “Phædon,”—in
so far as it is a moral picture, and apart from the doctrines
advocated in it,—appear to belong to the first category; while the
political and social views of the “Republic” and of the treatise “De
Legibus,” the cosmic theories in the “Timæus,” and the hypothesis of
Ideas, as substantive existences apart from the phenomenal world,
in the various dialogues wherever it is stated, certainly belong to
the second. Of the ethical dialogues, much may be probably taken to represent
Sokratês, more or less Platonized.
But though the opinions put by Plato into the mouth of Sokratês
are liable to thus much of uncertainty, we find, to our great
satisfaction, that the pictures given by Plato and Xenophon of
their common master are in the main accordant; differing only as
drawn from the same original by two authors radically different
in spirit and character. Xenophon, the man of action, brings out
at length those conversations of Sokratês which had a bearing on
practical conduct, and were calculated to correct vice or infirmity
in particular individuals; such being the matter which served
his purpose as an apologist, at the same time that it suited his
intellectual taste. But he intimates, nevertheless, very plainly,
that the conversation of Sokratês was often, indeed usually,
of a more negative, analytical, and generalizing tendency;[638] not
destined for the reproof of positive or special defect, but to awaken
the inquisitive faculties and lead to the rational comprehension of
vice and virtue as referable to determinate general principles. Now
this latter side of the master’s physiognomy, which Xenophon records
distinctly, though without emphasis or development, acquires almost
exclusive prominence in the Platonic picture. Plato leaves out the
practical, and consecrates himself to the theoretical, Sokratês;
whom he divests in part of his identity, in order to enrol him as
chief speaker in certain larger theoretical views of his own. The
two pictures, therefore, do not contradict each other, but mutually
supply each other’s defects, and admit of being blended into one
consistent whole. And respecting the method of Sokratês, a point more
characteristic than either his precepts or his theory,—as well as
respecting the effect of that method on the minds of hearers,—both
Xenophon and Plato are witnesses substantially in unison: though,
here again, the latter has made the method his own, worked it out on a
scale of enlargement and perfection, and given to it a permanence
which it could never have derived from its original author, who only
talked and never wrote. It is fortunate that our two main witnesses
about him, both speaking from personal knowledge, agree to so great
an extent.
Both describe in the same manner his private life and habits; his
contented poverty, justice, temperance in the largest sense of the
word, and self-sufficing independence of character. On most of these
points too, Aristophanês and the other comic writers, so far as their
testimony counts for anything, appear as confirmatory witnesses;
for they abound in jests on the coarse fare, shabby and scanty
clothing, bare feet, pale face, poor and joyless life, of Sokratês.[639]
Of the circumstances of his life we are almost wholly ignorant: he
served as an hoplite at Potidæa, at Delium, and at Amphipolis; with
credit apparently in all, though exaggerated encomiums on the part of
his friends provoked an equally exaggerated skepticism on the part
of Athenæus and others. He seems never to have filled any political
office until the year (B.C. 406) in which
the battle of Arginusæ occurred, in which year he was member of the
senate of Five Hundred, and one of the prytanes on that memorable
day when the proposition of Kallixenus against the six generals was
submitted to the public assembly: his determined refusal, in spite
of all personal hazard, to put an unconstitutional question to the
vote, has been already recounted. That during his long life he
strictly obeyed the laws,[640] is proved by the fact that none of his
numerous enemies ever arraigned him before a court of justice:
that he discharged all the duties of an upright man and a brave
as well as pious citizen, may also be confidently asserted. His
friends lay especial stress upon his piety; that is, upon his exact
discharge of all
the religious duties considered as incumbent upon an Athenian.[641]
Though these points are requisite to be established, in order
that we may rightly interpret the character of Sokratês, it is
not from them that he has derived his eminent place in history.
Three peculiarities distinguish the man. 1. His long life passed
in contented poverty, and in public, apostolic dialectics. 2. His
strong religious persuasion, or belief, of acting under a mission and
signs from the gods; especially his dæmon, or genius; the special
religious warning of which he believed himself to be frequently the
subject. 3. His great intellectual originality, both of subject and
of method, and his power of stirring and forcing the germ of inquiry
and ratiocination in others. Though these three characteristics
were so blended in Sokratês that it is not easy to consider them
separately; yet, in each respect, he stood distinguished from all
Greek philosophers before or after him.
At what time Sokratês relinquished his profession as a statuary we
do not know; but it is certain that all the middle and later part of
his life, at least, was devoted exclusively to the self-imposed task
of teaching; excluding all other business, public or private, and to
the neglect of all means of fortune. We can hardly avoid speaking of
him as a teacher, though he himself disclaimed the appellation:[642]
his practice was to talk or converse, or to prattle without end,[643] if
we translate the derisory word by which the enemies of philosophy
described dialectic conversation. Early in the morning he frequented
the public walks, the gymnasia for bodily training, and the schools
where youths were receiving instruction: he was to be seen in
the market-place at the hour when it was most crowded, among the
booths and tables where goods were exposed for sale: his whole day
was usually spent in this public manner.[644] He talked with any one, young or old,
rich or poor, who sought to address him, and in the hearing of all
who chose to stand by: not only he never either asked or received
any reward, but he made no distinction of persons, never withheld
his conversation from any one, and talked upon the same general
topics to all. He conversed with politicians, sophists, military
men, artisans, ambitious or studious youths, etc. He visited all
persons of interest in the city, male or female: his friendship with
Aspasia is well known, and one of the most interesting chapters[645]
of Xenophon’s Memorabilia recounts his visit to and dialogue with
Theodotê, a beautiful hetæra, or female companion. Nothing could be
more public, perpetual, and indiscriminate as to persons than his
conversation. But as it was engaging, curious, and instructive to
hear, certain persons made it their habit to attend him in public
as companions and listeners. These men, a fluctuating body, were
commonly known as his disciples, or scholars; though neither he
nor his personal friends ever employed the terms teacher and
disciple to describe the relation between them.[646] Many of them came,
attracted by his reputation, during the later years of his life, from other Grecian
cities; Megara, Thebes, Elis, Kyrênê, etc.
Now no other person in Athens, or in any other Grecian city,
appears ever to have manifested himself in this perpetual and
indiscriminate manner as a public talker for instruction. All
teachers either took money for their lessons, or at least gave them
apart from the multitude in a private house or garden, to special
pupils, with admissions and rejections at their own pleasure. By
the peculiar mode of life which Sokratês pursued, not only his
conversation reached the minds of a much wider circle, but he
became more abundantly known as a person. While acquiring a few
attached friends and admirers, and raising a certain intellectual
interest in others, he at the same time provoked a large number of
personal enemies. This was probably the reason why he was selected
by Aristophanês and the other comic writers, to be attacked as a
general representative of philosophical and rhetorical teaching; the
more so, as his marked and repulsive physiognomy admitted so well
of being imitated in the mask which the actor wore. The audience at
the theatre would more readily recognize the peculiar figure which
they were accustomed to see every day in the market-place, than if
Prodikus or Protagoras, whom most of them did not know by sight, had
been brought on the stage; nor was it of much importance, either to
them or to Aristophanês, whether Sokratês was represented as teaching
what he did really teach, or something utterly different.
This extreme publicity of life and conversation was one among the
characteristics of Sokratês, distinguishing him from all teachers
either before or after him. Next, was his persuasion of a special
religious mission, restraints, impulses, and communications, sent to
him by the gods. Taking the belief in such supernatural intervention
generally, it was indeed noway peculiar to Sokratês: it was the
ordinary faith of the ancient world; insomuch that the attempts to
resolve phenomena into general laws were looked upon with a certain
disapprobation, as indirectly setting it aside. And Xenophon[647]
accordingly avails himself of this general fact, in replying to the
indictment for religious innovation, of which his master was found guilty, to affirm
that the latter pretended to nothing beyond what was included in
the creed of every pious man. But this is not an exact statement of
the matter in debate; for it slurs over at least, if it does not
deny, that speciality of inspiration from the gods, which those
who talked with Sokratês—as we learn even from Xenophon—believed,
and which Sokratês himself believed also.[648] Very different is his
own representation, as put forth in the defence before the dikastery.
He had been accustomed constantly to hear, even from his childhood,
a divine voice, interfering, at moments when he was about to act,
in the way of restraint, but never in the way of instigation. Such
prohibitory warning was wont to come upon him very frequently, not
merely on great, but even on small occasions, intercepting what he
was about to do or to say.[649] Though later writers speak of this as the dæmon
or genius of Sokratês, he himself does not personify it, but treats
it merely as a “divine sign, a prophetic or supernatural voice.”[650] He
was accustomed not only to obey it implicitly, but to speak of it
publicly and familiarly to others, so that the fact was well known
both to his friends and to his enemies. It had always forbidden him
to enter on public life; it forbade him, when the indictment was
hanging over him, to take any thought for a prepared defence;[651]
and so completely did he march with a consciousness of this bridle
in his mouth, that when he felt no check, he assumed that the
turning which he was about to take was the right one. Though his
persuasion on the subject was unquestionably sincere, and his
obedience constant, yet he never dwelt upon it himself as anything
grand, or awful, or entitling him to peculiar deference; but spoke
of it often in his usual strain of familiar playfulness. To his
friends generally, it seems to have constituted one of his titles to
reverence, though neither Plato nor Xenophon scruple to talk of it
in that jesting
way which doubtless they caught from himself.[652] But to his enemies
and to the Athenian public, it appeared in the light of an offensive
heresy; an impious innovation on the orthodox creed, and a desertion
of the recognized gods of Athens.
Such was the dæmon or genius of Sokratês, as described by himself
and as conceived in the genuine Platonic dialogues; a voice always
prohibitory, and bearing exclusively upon his own personal conduct.[653]
That which Plutarch and other admirers of Sokratês conceived as a
dæmon, or intermediate being between gods and men, was looked upon
by the fathers of the Christian church as a devil; by LeClerc,
as one of the fallen angels; by some other modern commentators,
as mere ironical phraseology on the part of Sokratês himself.[654]
Without presuming to determine the question raised in the former
hypotheses, I believe the last to be untrue, and that the conviction
of Sokratês on the point was quite sincere. A circumstance little
attended to, but deserving peculiar notice, and stated by himself,
is, that the restraining voice began when he was a child, and
continued even down to the end of his life: it had thus become an
established persuasion, long before his philosophical habits began.
But though this peculiar form of inspiration belonged exclusively to
him, there were
also other ways in which he believed himself to have received the
special mandates of the gods, not simply checking him when he was
about to take a wrong turn, but spurring him on, directing, and
peremptorily exacting from him, a positive course of proceeding.
Such distinct mission had been imposed upon him by dreams, by
oracular intimations, and by every other means which the gods
employed for signifying their special will.[655]
Of these intimations from the oracle, he specifies
particularly one, in reply to a question put at Delphi, by his
intimate friend, and enthusiastic admirer, Chærephon. The question
put was, whether any other man was wiser than Sokratês; to which
the Pythian priestess replied, that no other man was wiser.[656]
Sokratês affirms that he was greatly perplexed on hearing this
declaration from so infallible an authority, being conscious to
himself that he possessed no wisdom on any subject, great or small.
At length, after much meditation and a distressing mental struggle,
he resolved to test the accuracy of the infallible priestess, by
taking measure of the wisdom of others as compared with his own.
Selecting a leading politician, accounted wise both by others and
by himself, he proceeded to converse with him and put scrutinizing
questions; the answers to which satisfied him that this man’s
supposed wisdom was really no wisdom at all. Having made such a
discovery, Sokratês next tried to demonstrate to the politician
himself how much he wanted of being wise; but this was impossible;
the latter still remained as fully persuaded of his own wisdom as
before. “The result which I acquired (says Sokratês) was, that I
was a wiser man than he, for neither he nor I knew anything of what
was truly good and honorable; but the difference between us was,
that he fancied he knew them, while I was fully conscious of my own
ignorance; I was thus wiser than he, inasmuch as I was exempt from
that capital error.” So far, therefore, the oracle was proved to be
right. Sokratês
repeated the same experiment successively upon a great number of
different persons, especially those in reputation for distinguished
abilities; first, upon political men and rhetors, next upon poets of
every variety, and upon artists as well as artisans. The result of
his trial was substantially the same in all cases. The poets, indeed,
composed splendid verses, but when questioned even about the words,
the topics, and the purpose, of their own compositions, they could
give no consistent or satisfactory explanations; so that it became
evident that they spoke or wrote, like prophets, as unconscious
subjects under the promptings of inspiration. Moreover, their success
as poets filled them with a lofty opinion of their own wisdom on
other points also. The case was similar with artists and artisans;
who, while highly instructed, and giving satisfactory answers, each
in his own particular employment, were for that reason only the more
convinced that they also knew well other great and noble subjects.
This great general mistake more than countervailed their special
capacities, and left them, on the whole, less wise than Sokratês.[657]
“In this research and scrutiny (said Sokratês, on his defence)
I have been long engaged, and am still engaged. I interrogate
every man of reputation; I prove him to be defective in wisdom;
but I cannot prove it so as to make him sensible of the defect.
Fulfilling the mission imposed upon me, I have thus established
the veracity of the god, who meant to pronounce that human wisdom
was of little reach or worth; and that he who, like Sokratês,
felt most convinced of his own worthlessness, as to wisdom, was
really the wisest of men.[658] My service to the god has not only
constrained me to live in constant poverty[659] and neglect
of political estimation, but has brought upon me a host of bitter enemies in
those whom I have examined and exposed while the bystanders talk of
me as a wise man, because they give me credit for wisdom respecting
all the points on which my exposure of others turns.”—“Whatever be
the danger and obloquy which I may incur, it would be monstrous
indeed, if, having maintained my place in the ranks as an hoplite
under your generals at Delium and Potidæa, I were now, from fear of
death or anything else, to disobey the oracle and desert the post
which the god has assigned to me, the duty of living for philosophy
and cross-questioning both myself and others.[660] And should you even
now offer to acquit me, on condition of my renouncing this duty,
I should tell you, with all respect and affection, that I will
obey the god rather than you, and that I will persist, until my
dying day, in cross-questioning you, exposing your want of wisdom
and virtue, and reproaching you until the defect be remedied.[661]
My mission as your monitor is a mark of the special favor of the
god to you; and if you condemn me, it will be your loss; for you
will find none other such.[662] Perhaps you will ask me, Why cannot you
go away, Sokratês, and live among us in peace and silence? This is
the hardest of all questions for me to answer to your satisfaction.
If I tell you that silence on my part would be disobedience to the
god, you will think me in jest, and not believe me. You will believe
me still less, if I tell you that the greatest blessing which can
happen to man is, to carry on discussions every day about virtue and
those other matters which you hear me canvassing when I cross-examine
myself as well as others; and that life, without such examination,
is no life at all. Nevertheless, so stands the fact, incredible
as it may seem to you.”[663]
I have given rather ample extracts from the Platonic Apology,
because no one can conceive fairly the character of Sokratês who
does not enter into the spirit of that impressive discourse. We see
in it plain evidence of the marked supernatural mission which he
believed himself to be executing, and which would not allow him to
rest or employ himself in other ways. The oracular answer brought
by Chærephon from Delphi, was a fact of far more importance in his
history than his so-called dæmon, about which so much more has
been said. That answer, together with the dreams and other divine
mandates concurrent to the same end, came upon him in the middle
of his life, when the intellectual man was formed, and when he
had already acquired a reputation for wisdom among those who knew
him. It supplied a stimulus which brought into the most pronounced
action a pre-existing train of generalizing dialectics and Zenonian
negation, an intellectual vein with which the religious impulse
rarely comes into confluence. Without such a motive, to which his
mind was peculiarly susceptible, his conversation would probably
have taken the same general turn, but would assuredly have been
restricted within much narrower and more cautious limits. For nothing
could well be more unpopular and obnoxious than the task which he
undertook of cross-examining, and convicting of ignorance, every
distinguished man whom he could approach. So violent, indeed, was the
enmity which he occasionally provoked, that there were instances, we
are told, in which he was struck or maltreated,[664] and very frequently
laughed to scorn. Though he acquired much admiration from auditors,
especially youthful auditors, and from a few devoted adherents, yet
the philosophical motive alone would not have sufficed to prompt him
to that systematic, and even obtrusive, cross-examination which he
adopted as the business of his life.
This, then, is the second peculiarity which distinguishes
Sokratês, in addition to his extreme publicity of life and
indiscriminate conversation. He was not simply a philosopher, but a
religious missionary doing the work of philosophy; “an elenchtic,—or cross-examining
god,—to use an expression which Plato puts into his mouth respecting
an Eleatic philosopher going about to examine and convict the
infirm in reason.”[665] Nothing of this character belonged either
to Parmenidês and Anaxagoras before him, or to Plato and Aristotle
after him. Both Pythagoras and Empedoklês did, indeed, lay claim
to supernatural communications, mingled with their philosophical
teaching. But though there be thus far a general analogy between them
and Sokratês, the modes of manifestation were so utterly different,
that no fair comparison can be instituted.
The third and most important characteristic of Sokratês—that,
through which the first and second became operative—was his
intellectual peculiarity. His influence on the speculative mind of
his age was marked and important; as to subject, as to method, and as
to doctrine.
He was the first who turned his thoughts and discussions
distinctly to the subject of ethics. With the philosophers
who preceded him, the subject of examination had been Nature,
or the Kosmos,[666] as one undistinguishable whole,
blending together cosmogony, astronomy, geometry, physics,
metaphysics, etc. The Ionic as well as the Eleatic philosophers,
Pythagoras as well as Empedoklês, all set before themselves this
vast and undefined problem; each framing some system suited to
his own vein of imagination; religious, poetical, scientific,
or skeptical. According to that honorable ambition for enlarged
knowledge, however, which marked the century following 480 B.C., and of which the professional men
called sophists were at once the products and the instruments,
arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, as much as was then known,
were becoming so far detached sciences as to be taught separately to youth.
Such appears to have been the state of science when Sokratês
received his education. He received at least the ordinary amount
of instruction in all:[667] he devoted himself as a young man to
the society and lessons of the physical philosopher Archelaus,[668] the
disciple of Anaxagoras, whom he accompanied from Athens to Samos;
and there is even reason to believe that, during the earlier part
of his life, he was much devoted to what was then understood as the
general study of Nature.[669] A man of his earnest and active intellect
was likely first to manifest his curiosity as a learner: “to run
after and track the various discourses of others, like a Laconian
hound,” if I may borrow an expression applied to him by Plato,[670]
before he
struck out any novelties of his own. And in Plato’s dialogue called
“Parmenidês,” Sokratês appears as a young man full of ardor for the
discussion of the Parmenidean theory, looking up with reverence
to Parmenidês and Zeno, and receiving from them instructions in
the process of dialectical investigation. I have already, in
the preceding chapter,[671] noted the tenor of that dialogue, as
illustrating the way in which Grecian philosophy presents itself,
even at the first dawn of dialectics, as at once negative and
positive, recognizing the former branch of method no less than
the latter as essential to the attainment of truth. I construe it
as an indication respecting the early mind of Sokratês, imbibing
this conviction from the ancient Parmenidês and the mature and
practised Zeno, and imposing upon himself, as a condition of assent
to any hypothesis or doctrine, the obligation of setting forth
conscientiously all that could be said against it, not less than
all that could be said in its favor: however laborious such a
process might be, and however little appreciated by the multitude.[672]
Little as we know the circumstances which went to form the remarkable
mind of Sokratês, we may infer from this dialogue that he owes in
part his powerful negative vein of dialectics to “the double-tongued
and all-objecting Zeno.”[673]
To a mind at all exigent on the score of proof, physical
science as handled in that day was indeed likely to appear not
only unsatisfactory, but hopeless; and Sokratês, in the maturity
of his life, deserted it altogether. The contradictory hypotheses
which he heard, with the impenetrable confusion which overhung the
subject, brought him even to the conviction, that the gods intended
the machinery by which they brought about astronomical and physical
results to remain unknown, and that it was impious, as well as useless, to
pry into their secrets.[674] His master Archelaus, though mainly
occupied with physics, also speculated more or less concerning moral
subjects; concerning justice and injustice, the laws, etc.; and
is said to have maintained the tenet, that justice and injustice
were determined by law or convention, not by nature. From him,
perhaps, Sokratês may have been partly led to turn his mind in this
direction. But to a man disappointed with physics, and having in
his bosom a dialectical impulse powerful, unemployed, and restless,
the mere realities of Athenian life, even without Archelaus, would
suggest human relations, duties, action and suffering, as the most
interesting materials for contemplation and discourse. Sokratês
could not go into the public assembly, the dikastery, or even the
theatre, without hearing discussions about what was just or unjust,
honorable or base, expedient or hurtful, etc., nor without having his
mind conducted to the inquiry, what was the meaning of these large
words which opposing disputants often invoked with equal reverential
confidence. Along with the dialectic and generalizing power of
Sokratês, which formed his bond of connection with such minds as
Plato, there was at the same time a vigorous practicality, a large
stock of positive Athenian experience, with which Xenophon chiefly
sympathized, and which he has brought out in his “Memorabilia.” Of
these two intellectual tendencies, combined with a strong religious
sentiment, the character of Sokratês is composed; and all of them
were gratified at once, when he devoted himself to admonitory
interrogation on the rules and purposes of human life; from which
there was the less to divert him, as he had neither talents nor taste
for public speaking.
That “the proper study of mankind is man,”[675] Sokratês was the
first to proclaim: he recognized the security and happiness of man
both as the single end of study, and as the limiting principle whereby it ought to be
circumscribed. In the present state to which science has attained,
nothing is more curious than to look back at the rules which this
eminent man laid down. Astronomy—now exhibiting the maximum of
perfection, with the largest and most exact power of predicting
future phenomena which human science has ever attained—was pronounced
by him to be among the divine mysteries which it was impossible to
understand, and madness to investigate, as Anaxagoras had foolishly
pretended to do. He admitted, indeed, that there was advantage in
knowing enough of the movements of the heavenly bodies to serve as an
index to the change of seasons, and as guides for voyages, journeys
by land, or night-watches: but thus much, he said, might easily be
obtained from pilots and watchmen, while all beyond was nothing but
waste of valuable time, exhausting that mental effort which ought
to be employed in profitable acquisitions. He reduced geometry to
its literal meaning of land-measuring, necessary so far as to enable
any one to proceed correctly in the purchase, sale, or division of
land, which any man of common attention might do almost without a
teacher; but silly and worthless, if carried beyond, to the study
of complicated diagrams.[676] Respecting arithmetic, he gave the same
qualified permission of study; but as to general physics, or the
study of Nature, he discarded it altogether: “Do these inquirers (he
asked) think that they already know human affairs well enough, that
they thus begin to meddle with divine? Do they think that they
shall be able to excite or calm the winds and the rain at pleasure,
or have they no other view than to gratify an idle curiosity? Surely,
they must see that such matters are beyond human investigation. Let
them only recollect how much the greatest men, who have attempted the
investigation, differ in their pretended results, holding opinions
extreme and opposite to each other, like those of madmen!” Such was
the view which Sokratês took of physical science and its prospects.[677] It
is the very same
skepticism in substance, and carried farther in degree, though here
invested with a religious coloring, for which Ritter and others so
severely denounce Gorgias. But looking at matters as they stood in
440-430 B.C., it ought not to be accounted
even surprising, much less blamable. To an acute man of that day,
physical science as then studied may well be conceived to have
promised no result; and even to have seemed worse than barren, if,
like Sokratês, he had an acute perception how much of human happiness
was forfeited by immorality, and by corrigible ignorance; how much
might be gained by devoting the same amount of earnest study to this
latter object. Nor ought we to omit remarking, that the objection
of Sokratês: “You may judge how unprofitable are these studies, by
observing how widely the students differ among themselves,” remains
in high favor down to the present day, and may constantly be seen
employed against theoretical men, or theoretical arguments, in every
department.
Sokratês desired to confine the studies of his hearers to human
matters as distinguished from divine, the latter comprehending
astronomy and physics. He looked at all knowledge from the point of
view of human practice, which had been assigned by the gods to man
as his proper subject for study and learning, and with reference
to which, therefore, they managed all the current phenomena upon
principles of constant and intelligible sequence, so that every
one who chose to learn, might learn, while those who took no such
pains suffered for their neglect. Even in these, however, the most
careful study was not by itself completely sufficient; for the
gods did not condescend to submit all the phenomena to constant
antecedence and consequence, but reserved to themselves the capital
turns and junctures for special sentence.[678] Yet here again, if
a man had been diligent in learning all that the gods permitted to be learned;
and if, besides, he was assiduous in pious court to them, and in
soliciting special information by way of prophecy, they would
be gracious to him, and signify beforehand how they intended to
act in putting the final hand and in settling the undecipherable
portions of the problem.[679] The kindness of the gods in replying
through their oracles, or sending information by sacrificial
signs or prodigies, in cases of grave difficulty, was, in the
view of Sokratês, one of the most signal evidences of their care
for the human race.[680] To seek access to these prophecies,
or indications of special divine intervention to come, was the
proper supplementary business of any one who had done as much for
himself as could be done by patient study.[681] But as it was madness
in a man to solicit special information from the gods on matters
which they allowed him to learn by his own diligence, so it was not
less madness in him to investigate as a learner that which they chose
to keep back for their own specialty of will.[682]
Such was the capital innovation made by Sokratês in regard to
the subject of Athenian study, bringing down philosophy, to use
the expression of Cicero,[683] from the heavens to the earth; and
such his attempt to draw the line between that which was, and was
not, scientifically discoverable; an attempt remarkable, inasmuch
as it shows his conviction that the scientific and the religious
point of view mutually excluded one another, so that where the
latter began, the former ended. It was an innovation, inestimable,
in respect to the new matter which it let in; of little import,
as regards that which it professed to exclude. For in point of
fact, physical science, though partially discouraged, was never
absolutely excluded, through any prevalence of that systematic
disapproval which he, in common with the multitude of his day, entertained: if it
became comparatively neglected, this arose rather from the greater
popularity, and the more abundant and accessible matter, of that
which he introduced. Physical or astronomical science was narrow in
amount, known only to few, and even with those few it did not admit
of being expanded, enlivened, or turned to much profitable account in
discussion. But the moral and political phenomena on which Sokratês
turned the light of speculation were abundant, varied, familiar,
and interesting to every one; comprising—to translate a Greek line
which he was fond of quoting—“all the good and evil which has
befallen you in your home;”[684] connected too, not merely with the
realities of the present, but also with the literature of the past,
through the gnomic and other poets.
The motives which determined this important innovation, as to
the subject of study, exhibits Sokratês chiefly as a religious man
and a practical, philanthropic preceptor, the Xenophontic hero. His
innovations, not less important, as to method and doctrine, place
before us the philosopher and dialectician; the other side of his
character, or the Platonic hero; faintly traced, indeed, yet still
recognized and identified by Xenophon.
“Sokratês,” says the latter,[685] “continued
incessantly discussing human affairs (the sense of this word will
be understood by what has been said above, page
420); investigating: What is piety? What is impiety? What is the
honorable and the base? What is the just and the unjust? What is
temperance or unsound mind? What is courage or cowardice? What is a
city? What is the character fit for a citizen? What is authority over
men? What is the character befitting the exercise of such authority?
and other similar questions. Men who knew these matters he accounted
good and honorable; men who were ignorant of them he assimilated to
slaves.”
Sokratês, says Xenophon again, in another passage, considered
that the dialectic process consisted in coming together and taking
common counsel, to distinguish and distribute things into genera,
or families, so as to learn what each separate thing really was. To
go through this process carefully was indispensable, as the only way of enabling a
man to regulate his own conduct, aiming at good objects and avoiding
bad. To be so practised as to be able to do it readily, was essential
to make a man a good leader or adviser of others. Every man who had
gone through the process, and come to know what each thing was,
could also of course define it and explain it to others; but if
he did not know, it was no wonder that he went wrong himself, and
put others wrong besides.[686] Moreover, Aristotle says: “To Sokratês
we may unquestionably assign two novelties; inductive discourses,
and the definitions of general terms.”[687]
I borrow here intentionally from Xenophon in preference to Plato;
since the former, tamely describing a process which he imperfectly
appreciated, identifies it so much the more completely with the real
Sokratês, and is thus a better witness than Plato, whose genius
not only conceived but greatly enlarged it, for didactic purposes
of his own. In our present state of knowledge, some mental effort
is required to see anything important in the words of Xenophon; so
familiar has every student been rendered with the ordinary terms and
gradations of logic and classification,—such as genus, definition,
individual things as comprehended in a genus; what each thing is,
and to what genus it belongs, etc. But familiar as these words have
now become, they denote a mental process, of which, in 440-430
B.C., few men besides Sokratês had any
conscious perception. Of course, men conceived and described things
in classes, as is implied in the very form of language, and in the
habitual junction of predicates with subjects in common speech.
They explained their meaning clearly and forcibly in particular
cases: they laid down maxims, argued questions, stated premises,
and drew conclusions, on trials in the dikastery, or debates in the
assembly: they had an abundant poetical literature, which appealed to
every variety of emotion: they were beginning to compile historical
narrative, intermixed with reflection and criticism. But though
all this was done, and often admirably well done, it was wanting
in that analytical consciousness which would have enabled any one
to describe, explain, or vindicate what he was doing. The ideas of
men—speakers as well as hearers, the productive minds as well as the
recipient multitude—were associated together in groups favorable
rather to emotional results, or to poetical, rhetorical narrative and
descriptive effect, than to methodical generalization, to scientific
conception, or to proof either inductive or deductive. That
reflex act of attention which enables men to understand, compare,
and rectify their own mental process, was only just beginning.
It was a recent novelty on the part of the rhetorical teachers,
to analyze
the component parts of a public harangue, and to propound some
precepts for making men tolerable speakers. Protagoras was just
setting forth various grammatical distinctions, while Prodikus
discriminated the significations of words nearly equivalent and
liable to be confounded. All these proceedings appeared then so new[688] as
to incur the ridicule even of Plato: yet they were branches of that
same analytical tendency which Sokratês now carried into scientific
inquiry. It may be doubted whether any one before him ever used the
words genus and species, originally meaning family and form, in
the philosophical sense now exclusively appropriated to them. Not
one of those many names—called by logicians names of the second
intention—which imply distinct attention to various parts of the
logical process, and enable us to consider and criticize it in
detail, then existed. All of them grew out of the schools of Plato,
Aristotle, and the subsequent philosophers, so that we can thus trace
them in their beginning to the common root and father, Sokratês.
To comprehend the full value of the improvements struck out by
Sokratês, we have only to examine the intellectual paths pursued
by his predecessors or contemporaries. He set to himself distinct
and specific problems: “What is justice? What is piety, courage,
political government? What is it which is really denoted by such
great and important names, bearing upon the conduct or happiness of
man?” Now it has been already remarked that Anaxagoras, Empedoklês,
Demokritus, the Pythagoreans, all had still present to their minds
those vast and undivided problems which had been transmitted
down from the old poets; bending their minds to the invention of
some system which would explain them all at once, or assist the
imagination in conceiving both how the Kosmos first began, and how
it continued to move on.[689] Ethics and physics, man and nature,
were all
blended together; and the Pythagoreans, who explained all nature
by numbers and numerical relations, applied the same explanation
to moral attributes, considering justice to be symbolized by a
perfect equation, or by four, the first of all square numbers.[690]
These early philosophers endeavored to find out the beginnings,
the component elements, the moving cause or causes, of
things in the mass;[691] but the logical distribution into genus,
species, and individuals, does not seem to have suggested itself to
them, or to have been made a subject of distinct attention by any one
before Sokratês. To study ethics, or human dispositions and ends,
apart from the physical world, and according to a theory of their
own, referring to human good and happiness as the sovereign and comprehensive end;[692]
to treat each of the great and familiar words designating moral
attributes, as logical aggregates comprehending many judgments in
particular cases, and connoting a certain harmony or consistency of
purpose among the separate judgments, to bring many of these latter
into comparison, by a scrutinizing dialectical process, so as to test
the consistency and completeness of the logical aggregate or general
notion, as it stood in every man’s mind: all these were parts of the
same forward movement which Sokratês originated.
It was at that time a great progress to break down the
unwieldy mass conceived by former philosophers as science; and
to study ethics apart, with a reference, more or less distinct,
to their own appropriate end. Nay, we see, if we may trust the
“Phædon” of Plato,[693] that Sokratês, before he resolved on such
pronounced severance, had tried to construct, or had at least yearned
after, an undivided and reformed system, including physics also under
the ethical end; a scheme of optimistic physics, applying the general
idea, “What was best,” as the commanding principle, from whence
physical explanations were to be deduced; which he hoped to find, but did not find,
in Anaxagoras. But it was a still greater advance to seize, and push
out in conscious application, the essential features of that logical
process, upon the correct performance of which all our security
for general truth depends. The notions of genus, subordinate
genera, and individuals as comprehended under them,—we need not
here notice the points on which Plato and Aristotle differed from
each other and from the modern conceptions on that subject,—were
at that time newly brought into clear consciousness in the human
mind. The profusion of logical distribution employed in some of
the dialogues of Plato, such as the Sophistês and the Politicus,
seems partly traceable to his wish to familiarize hearers with that
which was then a novelty, as well as to enlarge its development,
and diversify its mode of application. He takes numerous indirect
opportunities of bringing it out into broad light, by putting into
the mouths of his dialogists answers implying complete inattention to
it, exposed afterwards in the course of the dialogue by Sokratês.[694]
What was now begun by Sokratês, and improved by Plato, was embodied
as part in a comprehensive system of formal logic by the genius
of Aristotle; a system which was not only of extraordinary value
in reference to the processes and controversies of its time, but
which also, having become insensibly worked into the minds of
instructed men, has contributed much to form what is correct in the
habits of modern
thinking. Though it has been now enlarged and recast, by some modern
authors—especially by Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his admirable System
of Logic—into a structure commensurate with the vast increase of
knowledge and extension of positive method belonging to the present
day, we must recollect that the distance, between the best modern
logic and that of Aristotle, is hardly so great as that between
Aristotle and those who preceded him by a century, Empedoklês,
Anaxagoras, and the Pythagoreans; and that the movement in advance of
these latter commences with Sokratês.
By Xenophon, by Plato, and by Aristotle, the growth as well as the
habitual use of logical classification is represented as concurrent
with and dependent upon dialectics. In this methodized discussion, so
much in harmony with the marked sociability of the Greek character,
the quick recurrence of short question and answer was needful as
a stimulus to the attention, at a time when the habit of close
and accurate reflection on abstract subjects had been so little
cultivated. But the dialectics of Sokratês had far greater and more
important peculiarities than this. We must always consider his method
in conjunction with the subjects to which he applied it. As those
subjects were not recondite or special, but bore on the practical
life of the house, the market-place, the city, the dikastery, the
gymnasium, or the temple, with which every one was familiar, so
Sokratês never presented himself as a teacher, nor as a man having
new knowledge to communicate. On the contrary, he disclaimed such
pretensions, uniformly and even ostentatiously. But the subjects on
which he talked were just those which every one professed to know
perfectly and thoroughly, and on which every one believed himself in
a condition to instruct others, rather than to require instruction
for himself. On such questions as these: What is justice? What is
piety? What is a democracy? What is a law? every man fancied that
he could give a confident opinion, and even wondered that any other
person should feel a difficulty. When Sokratês, professing ignorance,
put any such question, he found no difficulty in obtaining an answer,
given off-hand, and with very little reflection. The answer purported
to be the explanation or definition of a term—familiar, indeed, but
of wide and comprehensive import—given by one who had never before
tried to render
to himself an account of what it meant. Having got this answer,
Sokratês put fresh questions, applying it to specific cases, to
which the respondent was compelled to give answers inconsistent
with the first; thus showing that the definition was either too
narrow, or too wide, or defective in some essential condition. The
respondent then amended his answer; but this was a prelude to other
questions, which could only be answered in ways inconsistent with the
amendment; and the respondent, after many attempts to disentangle
himself, was obliged to plead guilty to the inconsistencies, with an
admission that he could make no satisfactory answer to the original
query, which had at first appeared so easy and familiar. Or, if he
did not himself admit this, the hearers at least felt it forcibly.
The dialogue, as given to us, commonly ends with a result purely
negative, proving that the respondent was incompetent to answer the
question proposed to him, in a manner consistent and satisfactory
even to himself. Sokratês, as he professed from the beginning to have
no positive theory to support, so he maintains to the end the same
air of a learner, who would be glad to solve the difficulty if he
could, but regrets to find himself disappointed of that instruction
which the respondent had promised.
We see by this description of the cross-examining path of this
remarkable man, how intimate was the bond of connection between the
dialectic method and the logical distribution of particulars into
species and genera. The discussion first raised by Sokratês turns
upon the meaning of some large generic term, the queries whereby he
follows it up, bring the answer given into collision with various
particulars which it ought not to comprehend, yet does; or with
others, which it ought to comprehend, but does not. It is in this
manner that the latent and undefined cluster of association, which
has grown up round a familiar term, is as it were penetrated by a
fermenting leaven, forcing it to expand into discernible portions,
and bringing the appropriate function which the term ought to fulfil,
to become a subject of distinct consciousness. The inconsistencies
into which the hearer is betrayed in his various answers, proclaim
to him the fact that he has not yet acquired anything like a
clear and full conception of the common attribute which binds
together the various particulars embraced under some term which is
ever upon his lips; or perhaps enable him to detect a different
fact, not less important, that there is no such common attribute, and that
the generalization is merely nominal and fallacious. In either case,
he is put upon the train of thought which leads to a correction
of the generalization, and lights him on to that which Plato[695]
calls, seeing the one in the many, and the many in the one. Without
any predecessor to copy, Sokratês, fell as it were instinctively
into that which Aristotle[696] describes as the double track of the
dialectic process; breaking up the one into many, and recombining
the many into one; the former duty, at once the first and the most
essential, Sokratês performed directly by his analytical string of
questions; the latter, or synthetical process, was one which he did
not often directly undertake, but strove so to arm and stimulate
the hearer’s mind, as to enable him to do it for himself. This
one and many denote the logical distribution of a multifarious
subject-matter under generic terms, with clear understanding of the
attributes implied or connoted by each term, so as to discriminate
those particulars to which it really applies. At a moment when such
logical distribution was as yet novel as a subject of consciousness,
it could hardly have been probed and laid out in the mind by any less
stringent process than the cross-examining dialectics of Sokratês,
applied to the analysis of some attempts at definition hastily given
by respondents; that “inductive discourse and search for (clear
general notions or) definitions of general terms,” which Aristotle so
justly points out as his peculiar innovation.
I have already adverted to the persuasion of religious
mission under which Sokratês acted in pursuing this system
of conversation and interrogation. He probably began it in
a tentative way,[697] upon a modest scale, and under the pressure of logical
embarrassment weighing on his own mind. But as he proceeded, and
found himself successful, as well as acquiring reputation among a
certain circle of friends, his earnest soul became more and more
penetrated with devotion to that which he regarded as a duty. It was
at this time probably, that his friend Chærephon came back with the
oracular answer from Delphi, noticed a few pages
above, to which Sokratês himself alludes as having prompted him
to extend the range of his conversation, and to question a class
of persons whom he had not before ventured to approach, the noted
politicians, poets, and artisans. He found them more confident than
humbler individuals in their own wisdom, but quite as unable to reply
to his queries without being driven to contradictory answers.
Such scrutiny of the noted men in Athens is made to stand
prominent in the “Platonic Apology,” because it was the principal
cause of that unpopularity which Sokratês at once laments and
accounts for before the dikasts. Nor can we doubt that it was the
most impressive portion of his proceedings, in the eyes both of
enemies and admirers, as well as the most flattering to his own
natural temper. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to present this
part of the general purpose of Sokratês—or of his divine mission, if
we adopt his own language—as if it were the whole; and to describe
him as one standing forward merely to unmask select leading men,
politicians, sophists, poets, or others, who had acquired unmerited
reputation, and were puffed up with foolish conceit of their own
abilities, being in reality shallow and incompetent. Such an idea of
Sokratês is at once inadequate and erroneous. His conversation, as I
have before remarked, was absolutely universal and indiscriminate;
while the mental defect which he strove to rectify was one not at
all peculiar to leading men, but common to them with the mass of
mankind, though seeming to be exaggerated in them, partly because
more is expected from them, partly because the general feeling of
self-estimation stands at a higher level, naturally and reasonably,
in their bosoms, than in those of ordinary persons. That defect
was, the “seeming and conceit of knowledge without the reality,” on
human life with its duties, purposes, and conditions; the knowledge of which Sokratês
called emphatically “human wisdom,” and regarded as essential to the
dignity of a freeman; while he treated other branches of science as
above the level of man,[698] and as a stretch of curiosity, not merely
superfluous, but reprehensible. His warfare against such false
persuasion of knowledge, in one man as well as another, upon those
subjects—for with him, I repeat, we must never disconnect the method
from the subjects—clearly marked even in Xenophon, is abundantly
and strikingly illustrated by the fertile genius of Plato, and
constituted the true missionary scheme which pervaded the last half
of his long life; a scheme far more comprehensive, as well as more
generous, than those anti-sophistic polemics which are assigned to
him by so many authors as his prominent object.[699]
In pursuing the thread of his examination, there was no topic upon
which Sokratês more frequently insisted, than the contrast between the state of
men’s knowledge on the general topics of man and society, and that
which artists or professional men possessed in their respective
special crafts. So perpetually did he reproduce this comparison, that
his enemies accused him of wearing it threadbare.[700] Take a man of special
vocation—a carpenter, a brazier, a pilot, a musician, a surgeon—and
examine him on the state of his professional knowledge, you will find
him able to indicate the persons from whom and the steps by which
he first acquired it: he can describe to you his general aim, with
the particular means which he employs to realize the aim, as well
as the reason why such means must be employed and why precautions
must be taken to combat such and such particular obstructions: he
can teach his profession to others: in matters relating to his
profession, he counts as an authority, so that no extra-professional
person thinks of contesting the decision of a surgeon in case of
disease, or of a pilot at sea. But while such is the fact in regard
to every special art, how great is the contrast in reference to the
art of righteous, social, and useful living, which forms, or ought
to form, the common business alike important to each and to all!
On this subject, Sokratês[701] remarked that every one felt perfectly well-informed,
and confident in his own knowledge; yet no one knew from whom, or
by what steps, he had learned: no one had ever devoted any special
reflection either to ends, or means, or obstructions: no one could
explain or give a consistent account of the notions in his own
mind, when pertinent questions were put to him: no one could teach
another, as might be inferred, he thought, from the fact that there
were no professed teachers, and that the sons of the best men were
often destitute of merit: every one knew for himself, and laid
down general propositions confidently, without looking up to any
other man as knowing better; yet there was no end of dissension and
dispute on particular cases.[702]
Such was the general contrast which Sokratês sought to impress
upon his hearers by a variety of questions bearing on it, directly
or indirectly. One way of presenting it, which Plato devoted much
of his genius to expand in dialogue, was, to discuss, Whether
virtue be really teachable. How was it that superior men, like
Aristeidês and Periklês,[703] acquired the eminent qualities essential
for guiding and governing Athens, since they neither learned them
under any known master, as they had studied music and gymnastics,
nor could insure the same excellences to their sons, either through
their own agency or through that of any master? Was it not rather the
fact that virtue, as it was never expressly taught, so it was not
really teachable; but was vouchsafed or withheld according to the
special volition and grace of the gods? If a man has a young horse
to be broken, or trained, he finds without difficulty a professed
trainer, thoroughly conversant with the habits of the race,[704] to
communicate to the animal the excellence required; but whom can he
find to teach virtue to his sons, with the like preliminary knowledge
and assured result? Nay, how can any one either teach virtue, or
affirm virtue to be teachable, unless he be prepared to explain what
virtue is, and what are the points of analogy and difference between
its various branches; justice, temperance, fortitude, prudence,
etc.? In several of the Platonic dialogues, the discussion turns on
the analysis of
these last-mentioned words: the “Lachês” and “Protagoras” on courage,
the “Charmidês” on temperance, the “Euthyphrôn” on holiness.
By these and similar discussions did Sokratês, and Plato
amplifying upon his master, raise indirectly all the important
questions respecting society, human aspirations and duties, and
the principal moral qualities which were accounted virtuous in
individual men. As the general terms, on which his conversation
turned, were among the most current and familiar in the language,
so also the abundant instances of detail, whereby he tested the
hearer’s rational comprehension and consistent application of
such large terms, were selected from the best known phenomena
of daily life;[705] bringing home the inconsistency, if
inconsistency there was, in a manner obvious to every one. The
answers made to him,—not merely by ordinary citizens, but by men of
talent and genius, such as the poets or the rhetors, when called
upon for an explanation of the moral terms and ideas set forth in
their own compositions,[706]—revealed alike that state of mind against
which his crusade, enjoined and consecrated by the Delphian oracle,
was directed, the semblance and conceit of knowledge without real
knowledge. They proclaimed confident, unhesitating persuasion, on
the greatest and gravest questions concerning man and society, in
the bosoms of persons who had never bestowed upon them sufficient
reflection to be aware that they involved any difficulty. Such
persuasion had grown up gradually and unconsciously, partly by
authoritative communication, partly by insensible transfusion, from
others; the process beginning antecedent to reason as a capacity,
continuing itself with little aid and no control from reason, and
never being finally revised. With the great terms and current
propositions concerning human life and society, a complex body of
association had become accumulated from countless particulars,
each separately trivial and lost to the memory, knit together by
a powerful sentiment, and imbibed as it were by each man from the
atmosphere of authority and example around him. Upon this basis the fancied
knowledge really rested; and reason, when invoked at all, was
called in simply as an handmaid, expositor, or apologist of the
preëxisting sentiment; as an accessory after the fact, not as a test
or verification. Every man found these persuasions in his own mind,
without knowing how they became established there; and witnessed them
in others, as portions of a general fund of unexamined common-place
and credence. Because the words were at once of large meaning,
embodied in old and familiar mental processes, and surrounded by a
strong body of sentiment, the general assertions in which they were
embodied appeared self-evident and imposing to every one: so that,
in spite of continual dispute in particular cases, no one thought
himself obliged to analyze the general propositions themselves, or to
reflect whether he had verified their import, and could apply them
rationally and consistently.[707]
The phenomenon here adverted to is too obvious, even at the
present day, to need further elucidation as matter of fact. In
morals, in politics, in political economy, on all subjects relating
to man and society, the like confident persuasion of knowledge
without the reality is sufficiently prevalent: the like generation
and propagation, by authority and example, of unverified convictions,
resting upon strong sentiment, without consciousness of the steps
or conditions of their growth; the like enlistment of reason as
the one-sided advocate of a preëstablished sentiment; the like
illusion, because every man is familiar with the language, that
therefore every man is master of the complex facts, judgments,
and tendencies, involved in its signification, and competent both
to apply comprehensive words and to assume the truth or falsehood
of large propositions, without any special analysis or study.[708]
There
is one important difference, however, to note, between our time and
that of Sokratês. In his day, the impressions not only respecting
man and society, but also respecting the physical world, were of
this same self-sown, self-propagating, and unscientific character.
The popular astronomy of the Sokratic age was an aggregate of
primitive, superficial observations and imaginative inferences,
passing unexamined from elder men to younger, accepted with
unsuspecting faith, and consecrated by intense sentiment. Not only
men like Nikias, or Anytus and Melêtus, but even Sokratês himself,
protested against the impudence of Anaxagoras, when he degraded
the divine Helios and Selênê into a sun and moon of calculable
motions and magnitudes. But now, the development of the scientific
point of view, with the vast increase of methodized physical and
mathematical knowledge, has taught every one that such primitive
astronomical and physical convictions were nothing better than
“a fancy of knowledge without the reality.”[709] Every one renounces
them without hesitation, seeks his conclusions from the scientific
teacher, and looks to the proofs alone for his guarantee. A man who
has never bestowed special study on astronomy, knows that he is
ignorant of it: to fancy that he knows it, without such preparation,
would be held an absurdity. While the scientific point of view has
thus acquired complete predominance in reference to the physical
world, it has made little way comparatively on topics regarding
man and society, wherein “fancy of knowledge without the reality” continues to
reign, not without criticism and opposition, yet still as a paramount
force. And if a new Sokratês were now to put the same questions
in the market-place to men of all ranks and professions, he would
find the like confident persuasion and unsuspecting dogmatism as to
generalities; the like faltering, blindness, and contradiction, when
tested by cross-examining details.
In the time of Sokratês, this last comparison was not open;
since there did not exist, in any department, a body of doctrine
scientifically constituted: but the comparison which he actually
took, borrowed from the special trades and professions, brought
him to an important result. He was the first to see, and the idea
pervades all his speculations, that as in each art or profession
there is an end to be attained, a theory laying down the means and
conditions whereby it is attainable, and precepts deduced from that
theory, such precepts collectively taken directing and covering
nearly the entire field of practice, but each precept separately
taken liable to conflict with others, and therefore liable to
cases of exception; so all this is not less true, or admits not
less of being realized, respecting the general art of human living
and society. There is a grand and all-comprehensive End,—the
security and happiness, as far as practicable, of each and all
persons in the society:[710] there may be a theory, laying down those means and
conditions under which the nearest approach can be made to that end:
there may also be precepts, prescribing to every man the conduct and
character which best enables him to become an auxiliary towards its
attainment, and imperatively restraining him from acts which tend
to hinder it; precepts deduced from the theory, each one of them
separately taken
being subject to exceptions, but all of them taken collectively
governing practice, as in each particular art.[711] Sokratês and Plato
talk of “the art of dealing with human beings,” “the art of behaving
in society,” “that science which has for its object to make men
happy:” and they draw a marked distinction between art, or rules of
practice deduced from a theoretical survey of the subject-matter and
taught with precognition of the end, and mere artless, irrational
knack, or dexterity, acquired by simple copying, or assimilation,
through a process of which no one could render account.[712]
Plato, with that variety of indirect allusion which is his
characteristic, continually constrains the reader to look upon
human and social life as having its own ends and purposes no
less than each separate profession or craft; and impels him to
transfer to the former that conscious analysis as a science, and
intelligent practice as an art, which are known as conditions of
success in the latter.[713] It was in furtherance of these rational
conceptions, “Science and Art,” that Sokratês carried on his crusade
against “that
conceit of knowledge without reality,” which reigned undisturbed in
the moral world around him, and was only beginning to be slightly
disturbed even as to the physical world. To him the precept,
inscribed in the Delphian temple, “Know Thyself,” was the holiest
of all texts, which he constantly cited, and strenuously enforced
upon his hearers; interpreting it to mean, Know what sort of a man
thou art, and what are thy capacities, in reference to human use.[714]
His manner of enforcing it was alike original and effective, and
though he was dexterous in varying his topics[715] and queries according
to the individual person with whom he had to deal, it was his first
object to bring the hearer to take just measure of his own real
knowledge or real ignorance. To preach, to exhort, even to confute
particular errors, appeared to Sokratês useless, so long as the mind
lay wrapped up in its habitual mist or illusion of wisdom: such mist
must be dissipated before any new light could enter. Accordingly, the
hearer being usually forward in announcing positive declarations on
those general doctrines, and explanations of those terms, to which he
was most attached and in which he had the most implicit confidence,
Sokratês took them to pieces, and showed that they involved
contradiction and inconsistency; professing himself to be without any
positive opinion, nor ever advancing any until the hearer’s mind had
undergone the proper purifying cross-examination.[716]
It was this indirect and negative proceeding, which, though
only a part of the whole, stood out as his most original and most
conspicuous characteristic, and determined his reputation with a
large number of persons who took no trouble to know anything else
about him. It was an exposure no less painful than surprising to
the person questioned, and produced upon several of them an effect
of permanent alienation, so that they never came near him again,[717] but
reverted to their former state of mind without any permanent change.
But on the other hand, the ingenuity and novelty of the process was
highly interesting to hearers, especially youthful hearers, sons
of rich men, and enjoying leisure; who not only carried away with
them a lofty admiration of Sokratês, but were fond of trying to copy
his negative polemics.[718] Probably men like Alkibiadês and Kritias
frequented his society chiefly for the purpose of acquiring a quality
which they might turn to some account in their political career.
His constant habit of never suffering a general term to remain
undetermined, but applying it at once to particulars; the homely
and effective instances of which he made choice; the string of interrogatories each
advancing towards a result, yet a result not foreseen by any one;
the indirect and circuitous manner whereby the subject was turned
round, and at last approached and laid open by a totally different
face, all this constituted a sort of prerogative in Sokratês, which
no one else seems to have approached. Its effect was enhanced by a
voice and manner highly plausible and captivating, and to a certain
extent by the very eccentricity of his silenic physiognomy.[719]
What is termed “his irony,” or assumption of the character
of an ignorant learner, asking information from one who knew
better than himself, while it was essential[720] as an excuse for his
practice as a questioner, contributed also to add zest and novelty
to his conversation; and totally banished from it both didactic
pedantry and seeming bias as an advocate; which, to one who talked
so much, was of no small advantage. After he had acquired celebrity,
this uniform profession of ignorance in debate was usually construed
as mere affectation; and those who merely heard him occasionally,
without penetrating into his intimacy, often suspected that he
was amusing himself with ingenious paradox.[721] Timon the Satirist,
and Zeno the Epicurean, accordingly described him as a buffoon,
who turned every one into ridicule, especially men of eminence.[722]
It is by Plato that the negative and indirect vein of Sokratês has
been worked out and immortalized; while Xenophon, who sympathized
little in it, complains that others looked at his master too
exclusively on this side, and that they could not conceive him as
a guide to virtue, but only as a stirring and propulsive force.[723]
One of the principal objects of his “Memorabilia” is, to show
that Sokratês, after having worked upon novices sufficiently with
the negative line of questions, altered his tone, desisted from
embarrassing them, and addressed to them precepts not less plain
and simple than directly useful in practice.[724] I do not at all doubt
that this was often the fact, and that the various dialogues in which
Xenophon presents to us the philosopher inculcating self-control,
temperance, piety, duty to parents, brotherly love, fidelity in
friendship, diligence, benevolence, etc., on positive grounds, are
a faithful picture of one valuable side of his character, and an
essential part of the whole. Such direct admonitory influence was
common to Sokratês with Prodikus and the best of the sophists.
It is, however, neither from the virtue of his life, nor from
the goodness
of his precepts—though both were essential features in his
character—that he derives his peculiar title to fame, but from
his originality and prolific efficacy in the line of speculative
philosophy. Of that originality, the first portion, as has been
just stated, consisted in his having been the first to conceive
the idea of an ethical science with its appropriate end, and with
precepts capable of being tested and improved; but the second
point, and not the least important, was, his peculiar method, and
extraordinary power of exciting scientific impulse and capacity in
the minds of others. It was not by positive teaching that this effect
was produced. Both Sokratês and Plato thought that little mental
improvement could be produced by expositions directly communicated,
or by new written matter lodged in the memory.[725] It was necessary
that mind should work upon mind, by short question and answer, or
an expert employment of the dialectic process,[726] in order to generate
new thoughts and powers; a process which Plato, with his exuberant
fancy, compares to copulation and pregnancy, representing it as the
true way, and the only effectual way, of propagating the philosophic
spirit.
We should greatly misunderstand the negative and indirect vein of
Sokratês, if we suppose that it ended in nothing more than simple
negation. On busy or ungifted minds, among the indiscriminate public
who heard him, it probably left little permanent effect of any kind,
and ended in a mere feeling of admiration for ingenuity, or perhaps
dislike of paradox: on practical minds like Xenophon, its effect was
merged in that of the preceptorial exhortation: but where the seed
fell upon an intellect having the least predisposition or capacity
for systematic thought, the negation had only the effect of driving
the hearer back at first, giving him a new impetus for afterwards
springing forward. The Sokratic dialectics, clearing away from the
mind its mist of
fancied knowledge, and laying bare the real ignorance, produced an
immediate effect like the touch of the torpedo:[727] the newly-created
consciousness of ignorance was alike unexpected, painful, and
humiliating,—a season of doubt and discomfort; yet combined with an
internal working and yearning after truth, never before experienced.
Such intellectual quickening, which could never commence until the
mind had been disabused of its original illusion of false knowledge,
was considered by Sokratês not merely as the index and precursor, but
as the indispensable condition, of future progress. It was the middle
point in the ascending mental scale; the lowest point being ignorance
unconscious, self-satisfied, and mistaking itself for knowledge;
the next above, ignorance conscious, unmasked, ashamed of itself,
and thirsting after knowledge as yet unpossessed; while actual
knowledge, the third and highest stage, was only attainable after
passing through the second as a preliminary.[728] This second, was a
sort of pregnancy; and every mind either by nature incapable of it,
or in which, from want of the necessary conjunction, it had never
arisen, was barren for all purposes of original or self-appropriated
thought. Sokratês regarded it as his peculiar vocation and skill,
employing another Platonic metaphor, while he had himself no power
of reproduction, to deal with such pregnant and troubled minds in
the capacity of a midwife; to assist them in that mental parturition
whereby they were to be relieved, but at the same time to scrutinize
narrowly the offspring which they brought forth; and if it should
prove distorted or unpromising, to cast it away with the rigor of a
Lykurgean nurse, whatever might be the reluctance of the mother-mind
to part with its new-born.[729] There is nothing which Plato is more fertile in
illustrating, than this relation between the teacher and the scholar,
operating not by what it put into the latter, but by what it evolved
out of him; by creating an uneasy longing after truth, aiding in the
elaboration necessary for obtaining relief, and testing whether the
doctrine elaborated possessed the real lineaments, or merely the
delusive semblance, of truth.
There are few things more remarkable than the description given of
the colloquial magic of Sokratês and its vehement effects, by those
who had themselves heard it and felt its force. Its suggestive and
stimulating power was a gift so extraordinary, as well to justify
any abundance of imagery on the part of Plato to illustrate it.[730]
On the subjects to which he applied himself, man and society, his
hearers had done little but feel and affirm: Sokratês undertook to make them
think, weigh, and examine themselves and their own judgments,
until the latter were brought into consistency with each other,
as well as with a known and venerable end. The generalizations
embodied in their judgments had grown together and coalesced in a
manner at once so intimate, so familiar, yet so unverified, that
the particulars implied in them had passed out of notice: so that
Sokratês, when he recalled these particulars out of a forgotten
experience, presented to the hearer his own opinions under a totally
new point of view. His conversations—even as they appear in the
reproduction of Xenophon, which presents but a mere skeleton of the
reality—exhibit the main features of a genuine inductive method,
struggling against the deep-lying, but unheeded, errors of the early
intellect acting by itself, without conscious march or scientific
guidance,—of the intellectus sibi permissus,—upon which Bacon so
emphatically dwells. Amidst abundance of instantiæ negativæ, the
scientific value of which is dwelt upon in the “Novum Organon,”[731]
and negative
instances, too, so dexterously chosen as generally to show the way
to new truth, in place of that error which they set aside,—there is a close
pressure on the hearer’s mind, to keep it in the distinct tract
of particulars, as conditions of every just and consistent
generalization; and to divert it from becoming enslaved to unexamined
formulæ, or from delivering mere intensity of persuasion under the
authoritative phrase of reason. Instead of anxiety to plant in the
hearer a conclusion ready-made and accepted on trust, the questioner
keeps up a prolonged suspense with special emphasis laid upon the
particulars tending both affirmatively and negatively; nor is his
purpose answered, until that state of knowledge and apprehended
evidence is created, out of which the conclusion starts as a living
product, with its own root and self-sustaining power consciously
linked with its premises. If this conclusion so generated be not the
same as that which the questioner himself adopts, it will at least
be some other, worthy of a competent and examining mind taking its
own independent
view of the appropriate evidence. And amidst all the variety and
divergence of particulars which we find enforced in the language
of Sokratês, the end, towards which all of them point, is one and
the same, emphatically signified, the good and happiness of social
man.
It is not, then, to multiply proselytes, or to procure
authoritative assent, but to create earnest seekers, analytical
intellects, foreknowing and consistent agents, capable of forming
conclusions for themselves and of teaching others, as well as to
force them into that path of inductive generalization whereby alone
trustworthy conclusions can be formed, that the Sokratic method
aspires. In many of the Platonic dialogues, wherein Sokratês is
brought forward as the principal disputant, we read a series of
discussions and arguments, distinct, though having reference to the
same subject, but terminating either in a result purely negative, or
without any definite result at all. The commentators often attempt,
but in my judgment with little success, either by arranging the
dialogues in a supposed sequence or by various other hypotheses, to
assign some positive doctrinal conclusion as having been indirectly
contemplated by the author. But if Plato had aimed at any substantive
demonstration of this sort, we cannot well imagine that he would have
left his purpose thus in the dark, visible only by the microscope
of a critic. The didactic value of these dialogues—that wherein the
genuine Sokratic spirit stands most manifest—consists, not in the
positive conclusion proved, but in the argumentative process itself,
coupled with the general importance of the subject, upon which
evidence negative and affirmative is brought to bear.
This connects itself with that which I remarked in the preceding chapter, when mentioning Zeno and the
first manifestations of dialectics, respecting the large sweep, the
many-sided argumentation, and the strength as well as forwardness
of the negative arm, in Grecian speculative philosophy. Through
Sokratês, this amplitude of dialectic range was transmitted from
Zeno, first to Plato and next to Aristotle. It was a proceeding
natural to men who were not merely interested in establishing, or
refuting some given particular conclusion, but who also—like expert
mathematicians in their own science—loved, esteemed, and sought
to improve the dialectic process itself, with the means of verification which
it afforded; a feeling, of which abundant evidence is to be found
in the Platonic writings.[732] Such pleasure in the scientific
operation,—though not merely innocent, but valuable both as
a stimulant and as a guarantee against error, and though the
corresponding taste among mathematicians is always treated with
the sympathy which it deserves,—incurs much unmerited reprobation
from modern historians of philosophy, under the name of love of
disputation, cavilling, or skeptical subtlety.
But over and above any love of the process, the subjects to which
dialectics were applied, from Sokratês downwards,—man and society,
ethics, politics, metaphysics, etc., were such as particularly called
for this many-sided handling. On topics like these, relating to
sequences of fact which depend upon a multitude of coöperating or
conflicting causes, it is impossible to arrive, by any one thread
of positive reasoning or induction, at absolute doctrine, which
a man may reckon upon finding always true, whether he remembers
the proof or not; as is the case with mathematical, astronomical,
or physical truth. The utmost which science can ascertain, on
subjects thus complicated, is an aggregate, not of peremptory
theorems and predictions, but of tendencies;[733] by studying the
action of each separate cause, and combining them together as well as
our means admit. The knowledge of tendencies thus obtained, though
falling much short of certainty, is highly important for guidance:
but it is plain that conclusions of this nature, resulting from
multifarious threads of evidence, true only on a balance, and always
liable to limitation, can never be safely detached from the proofs
on which they rest, or taught as absolute and consecrated formulæ.[734]
They require to be kept in perpetual and conscious association with the
evidences, affirmative and negative, by the joint consideration of
which their truth is established; nor can this object be attained
by any other means than by ever-renovated discussion, instituted
from new and distinct points of view, and with free play to that
negative arm which is indispensable as stimulus not less than as
control. To ask for nothing but results, to decline the labor of
verification, to be satisfied with a ready-made stock of established
positive arguments as proof, and to decry the doubter or negative
reasoner, who starts new difficulties, as a common enemy, this is
a proceeding sufficiently common, in ancient as well as in modern
times. But it is, nevertheless, an abnegation of the dignity, and
even of the functions, of speculative philosophy. It is the direct
reverse of the method both of Sokratês and Plato, who, as inquirers,
felt that, for the great subjects which they treated, multiplied
threads of reasoning, coupled with the constant presence of the
cross-examining elenchus, were indispensable. Nor is it less at
variance with the views of Aristotle,—though a man very different
from either of them,—who goes round his subject on all sides, states
and considers all its difficulties, and insists emphatically on the
necessity of having all these difficulties brought out in full force,
as the incitement and guide to positive philosophy, as well as the
test of its sufficiency.[735]
Understanding thus the method of Sokratês, we shall be at no loss
to account for a certain variance on his part—and a still greater
variance on the part of Plato, who expanded the method in writing
so much more—with the sophists, without supposing the latter to be
corrupt teachers. As they aimed at qualifying young men for active
life, they accepted the current ethical and political sentiment, with
its unexamined commonplaces and inconsistencies, merely seeking to
shape it into what was accounted a meritorious character at Athens.
They were thus exposed, along with others—and more than others, in consequence of
their reputation—to the analytical cross-examination of Sokratês, and
were quite as little able to defend themselves against it.
Whatever may have been the success of Protagoras or any other
among these sophists, the mighty originality of Sokratês achieved
results not only equal at the time, but incomparably grander and more
lasting in reference to the future. Out of his intellectual school
sprang not merely Plato, himself a host, but all the other leaders
of Grecian speculation for the next half-century, and all those who
continued the great line of speculative philosophy down to later
times. Eukleidês and the Megaric school of philosophers,—Aristippus
and the Kyrenaic,—Antisthenês and Diogenês, the first of those
called the Cynics, all emanated more or less directly from the
stimulus imparted by Sokratês, though each followed a different
vein of thought.[736] Ethics continue to be what Sokratês had
first made them, a distinct branch of philosophy, alongside of which
politics, rhetoric, logic, and other speculations relating to man and
society, gradually arranged themselves; all of them more popular, as
well as more keenly controverted, than physics, which at that time
presented comparatively little charm, and still less of attainable
certainty. There can be no doubt that the individual influence of
Sokratês permanently enlarged the horizon, improved the method, and
multiplied the ascendent minds, of the Grecian speculative world, in
a manner never since paralleled. Subsequent philosophers may have
had a more elaborate doctrine, and a larger number of disciples who
imbibed their ideas; but none of them applied the same stimulating
method with the same efficacy; none of them struck out of other minds
that fire which sets light to original thought; none of them either
produced in others the pains of intellectual pregnancy, or extracted
from others the fresh and unborrowed offspring of a really parturient
mind.
Having thus touched upon Sokratês, both as first opener
of the field
of ethics to scientific study, and as author of a method, little
copied and never paralleled since his time, for stimulating in
other men’s minds earnest analytical inquiry, I speak last about
his theoretical doctrine. Considering the fanciful, far-fetched
ideas, upon which alone the Pythagoreans and other predecessors
had shaped their theories respecting virtues and vices, the wonder
is that Sokratês, who had no better guides to follow, should
have laid down an ethical doctrine which has the double merit of
being true, as far as it goes, legitimate, and of comprehensive
generality: though it errs, mainly by stating a part of the essential
conditions of virtue[737]—sometimes also a part of the ethical
end—as if it were the whole. Sokratês resolved all virtue into
knowledge or wisdom; all vice, into ignorance or folly. To do
right was the only way to impart happiness, or the least degree
of unhappiness compatible with any given situation: now this was
precisely what every one wished for and aimed at; only that many
persons, from ignorance, took the wrong road; and no man was wise
enough always to take the right. But as no man was willingly his
own enemy, so no man ever did wrong willingly; it was because
he was not fully or correctly informed of the consequences of
his own actions; so that the proper remedy to apply was enlarged
teaching of consequences and improved judgment.[738] To make him willing
to be taught, the only condition required was to make him conscious
of his own ignorance; the want of which consciousness was the real
cause both of indocility and of vice.
That this doctrine sets forth one portion of the essential
conditions of
virtue, is certain; and that too the most commanding portion, since
there can be no assured moral conduct except under the supremacy
of reason. But that it omits to notice, what is not less essential
to virtue, the proper condition of the emotions, desires, etc.,
taking account only of the intellect, is also certain; and has been
remarked by Aristotle[739] as well as by many others. It is
fruitless, in my judgment, to attempt by any refined explanation to
make out that Sokratês meant, by “knowledge,” something more than
what is directly implied in the word. He had present to his mind,
as the grand depravation of the human being, not so much vice, as
madness; that state in which a man does not know what he is doing.
Against the vicious man, securities both public and private may be
taken, with considerable effect; against the madman there is no
security except perpetual restraint. He is incapable of any of the
duties incumbent on social man, nor can he, even if he wishes, do
good either to himself or to others. The sentiment which we feel
towards such an unhappy being is, indeed, something totally different
from moral reprobation, such as we feel for the vicious man who does
wrong knowingly. But Sokratês took measure of both with reference
to the purposes of human life and society, and pronounced that the
latter was less completely spoiled for those purposes than the
former. Madness was ignorance at its extreme pitch, accompanied, too,
by the circumstance that the madman himself was unconscious of his
own ignorance, acting under a sincere persuasion that he knew what
he was doing. But short of this extremity, there were many varieties
and gradations in the scale of ignorance, which, if accompanied by
false conceit of knowledge, differed from madness only in degree, and
each of which disqualified a man from doing right, in proportion to
the ground which it covered. The worst of all ignorance—that which
stood nearest to madness—was when a man was ignorant of himself,
fancying that he knew what he did not really know, and that he
could do, or avoid, or endure, what was quite beyond his capacity;
when, for example, intending to speak the same truth, he sometimes
said one thing, sometimes another; or, casting up the same arithmetical figures,
made sometimes a greater sum, sometimes a less. A person who knows
his letters, or an arithmetician, may doubtless write bad orthography
or cast-up incorrectly, by design, but can also perform the
operations correctly, if he chooses; while one ignorant of writing
or of arithmetic, cannot do it correctly, even though he should be
anxious to do so. The former, therefore, comes nearer to the good
orthographer or arithmetician than the latter. So, if a man knows
what is just, honorable, and good, but commits acts of a contrary
character, he is juster, or comes nearer to being a just man, than
one who does not know what just acts are, and does not distinguish
them from unjust; for this latter cannot conduct himself
justly, even if he desires it ever so much.[740]
The opinion here maintained illustrates forcibly the general
doctrine of Sokratês. I have already observed that the fundamental
idea which governed his train of reasoning, was, the analogy of
each man’s social life and duty to a special profession or trade.
Now what is principally inquired after in regard to these special
men, is their professional capacity; without this, no person would
ever think of employing them, let their dispositions be ever so
good; with it, good dispositions and diligence are presumed, unless
there be positive grounds for suspecting the contrary. But why do
we indulge such presumption? Because their pecuniary interest,
their professional credit, and their place among competitors, are
staked upon success, so that we reckon upon their best efforts.
But in regard to that manifold and indefinite series of acts which
constitute the sum total of social duty, a man has no such special
interest to guide and impel him, nor can we presume in him those
dispositions which will insure his doing right, wherever he knows
what right is. Mankind are obliged to give premiums for these dispositions, and to
attach penalties to the contrary, by means of praise and censure;
moreover, the natural sympathies and antipathies of ordinary minds,
which determine so powerfully the application of moral terms, run
spontaneously in this direction, and even overshoot the limit which
reason would prescribe. The analogy between the paid special duty and
the general social duty, fails in this particular. Even if Sokratês
were correct as to the former,—and this would be noway true,—in
making the intellectual conditions of good conduct stand for the
whole, no such inference could safely be extended to the latter.
Sokratês affirmed that “well-doing” was the noblest pursuit of
man. “Well-doing” consisted in doing a thing well after having
learned it and practised it, by the rational and proper means; it was
altogether disparate from good fortune, or success without rational
scheme and preparation. “The best man (he said), and the most beloved
by the gods, is he who, as an husbandman, performs well the duties
of husbandry; as a surgeon, those of medical art; in political life,
his duty towards the commonwealth. But the man who does nothing well,
is neither useful, nor agreeable to the gods.”[741] This is the Sokratic
view of human life; to look at it as an assemblage of realities
and practical details; to translate the large words of the moral
vocabulary into those homely particulars to which at bottom they
refer; to take account of acts, not of dispositions apart from act
(in contradiction to the ordinary flow of the moral sympathies); to
enforce upon every one, that what he chiefly required was teaching
and practice, as preparations for act; and that therefore ignorance,
especially ignorance mistaking itself for knowledge, was his capital
deficiency. The religion of Sokratês, as well as his ethics, had
reference to practical human ends; nor had any man ever less of that
transcendentalism in his mind, which his scholar Plato exhibits in
such abundance.
It is indisputable, then, that Sokratês laid down a general
ethical theory which is too narrow, and which states a part of
the truth as if it were the whole. But, as it frequently happens
with philosophers who make the like mistake, we find that he did not confine
his deductive reasonings within the limits of the theory, but
escaped the erroneous consequences by a partial inconsistency. For
example; no man ever insisted more emphatically than he, on the
necessity of control over the passions and appetites, of enforcing
good habits, and on the value of that state of the sentiments and
emotions which such a course tended to form.[742] In truth, this is
one particular characteristic of his admonitions. He exhorted men
to limit their external wants, to be sparing in indulgence, and
to cultivate, even in preference to honors and advancement, those
pleasures which would surely arise from a performance of duty, as
well as from self-examination and the consciousness of internal
improvement. This earnest attention, in measuring the elements and
conditions of happiness, to the state of the internal associations as contrasted
with the effect of external causes, as well as the pains taken
to make it appear how much the latter depend upon the former for
their power of conferring happiness, and how sufficient is moderate
good fortune in respect to externals, provided the internal man
be properly disciplined, is a vein of thought which pervades both
Sokratês and Plato, and which passed from them, under various
modifications, to most of the subsequent schools of ethical
philosophy. It is probable that Protagoras or Prodikus, training rich
youth for active life, without altogether leaving out such internal
element of happiness, would yet dwell upon it less; a point of
decided superiority in Sokratês.
The political opinions of Sokratês were much akin to his ethical,
and deserve especial notice, as having in part contributed to his
condemnation by the dikastery. He thought that the functions of
government belonged legitimately to those who knew best how to
exercise them for the advantage of the governed. “The legitimate king
or governor was not the man who held the sceptre, nor the man elected
by some vulgar persons, nor he who had got the post by lot, nor he
who had thrust himself in by force or by fraud, but he alone who
knew how to govern well.”[743] Just as the pilot governed on shipboard,
the surgeon in a sick man’s house, the trainer in a palæstra;
every one else being eager to obey these professional superiors,
and even thanking and recompensing them for their directions,
simply because their greater knowledge was an admitted fact. It was
absurd, Sokratês used to contend, to choose public officers by lot,
when no one would trust himself on shipboard under the care of a
pilot selected by hazard,[744] nor would any one pick out a carpenter or
a musician in like manner.
We do not know what provision Sokratês suggested for applying his
principle to practice, for discovering who was the fittest man in
point of knowledge, or for superseding him in case of his becoming
unfit, or in case another fitter than he should arise. The analogies
of the pilot, the surgeon, and professional men generally, would
naturally conduct him to election by the people, renewable after
temporary periods; since no one of these professional persons, whatever may be his
positive knowledge, is ever trusted or obeyed except by the free
choice of those who confide in him, and who may at any time make
choice of another. But it does not appear that Sokratês followed out
this part of the analogy. His companions remarked to him that his
first-rate intellectual ruler would be a despot, who might, if he
pleased, either refuse to listen to good advice, or even put to death
those who gave it. “He will not act thus,” replied Sokratês, “for if
he does, he will himself be the greatest loser.”[745]
We may notice in this doctrine of Sokratês the same imperfection
as that which is involved in the ethical doctrine; a disposition
to make the intellectual conditions of political fitness stand for
the whole. His negative political doctrine is not to be mistaken:
he approved neither of democracy, nor of oligarchy. As he was not
attached, either by sentiment or by conviction, to the constitution
of Athens, so neither had he the least sympathy with oligarchical
usurpers, such as the Four Hundred and the Thirty. His positive ideal
state, as far as we can divine it, would have been something like
that which is worked out in the “Cyropædia” of Xenophon.
In describing the persevering activity of Sokratês, as a religious
and intellectual missionary, we have really described his life; for
he had no other occupation than this continual intercourse with the
Athenian public; his indiscriminate conversation, and invincible
dialectics. Discharging faithfully and bravely his duties as an
hoplite on military service,—but keeping aloof from official duty in
the dikastery, the public assembly, or the senate-house, except in
that one memorable year of the battle of Arginusæ,—he incurred none
of those party animosities which an active public life at Athens
often provoked. His life was legally blameless, nor had he ever been
brought up before the dikastery until his one final trial, when
he was seventy years of age. That he stood conspicuous before the
public eye in 423 B.C., at the time when
the “Clouds” of Aristophanês were brought on the stage, is certain:
he may have been, and probably was, conspicuous even earlier: so
that we can hardly allow him less than thirty years of public,
notorious, and efficacious discoursing, down to his trial in 399
B.C.
It was in that year that Melêtus, seconded by two auxiliaries,
Anytus and Lykon, presented against him, and hung up in the appointed
place, the portico before the office of the second or king-archon, an
indictment against him in the following terms: “Sokratês is guilty of
crime: first, for not worshipping the gods whom the city worships,
but introducing new divinities of his own; next, for corrupting the
youth. The penalty due is—death.”
It is certain that neither the conduct nor the conversation of
Sokratês had undergone any alteration for many years past; since the
sameness of his manner of talking is both derided by his enemies
and confessed by himself. Our first sentiment, therefore, apart
from the question of guilt or innocence, is one of astonishment,
that he should have been prosecuted, at seventy years of age, for
persevering in an occupation which he had publicly followed during
twenty-five or thirty years preceding. Xenophon, full of reverence
for his master, takes up the matter on much higher ground, and
expresses himself in a feeling of indignant amazement that the
Athenians could find anything to condemn in a man every way so
admirable. But whoever attentively considers the picture which
I have presented of the purpose, the working, and the extreme
publicity of Sokratês, will rather be inclined to wonder, not
that the indictment was presented at last, but that some such
indictment had not been presented long before. Such certainly is the
impression suggested by the language of Sokratês himself, in the
“Platonic Apology.” He there proclaims, emphatically, that though
his present accusers were men of consideration, it was neither
their enmity, nor their eloquence, which he had now principally
to fear; but the accumulated force of antipathy,—the numerous and
important personal enemies, each with sympathizing partisans,—the
long-standing and uncontradicted calumnies,[746] raised against him
throughout his cross-examining career.
In truth, the mission of
Sokratês, as he himself describes it, could not but prove eminently
unpopular and obnoxious. To convince a man that, of matters which he
felt confident of knowing, and had never thought of questioning or
even of studying, he is really profoundly ignorant, insomuch that he
cannot reply to a few pertinent queries without involving himself
in flagrant contradictions, is an operation highly salutary, often
necessary, to his future improvement; but an operation of painful
surgery, in which, indeed, the temporary pain experienced is one of
the conditions almost indispensable to the future beneficial results.
It is one which few men can endure without hating the operator at the
time; although doubtless such hatred would not only disappear, but
be exchanged for esteem and admiration, if they persevered until the
full ulterior consequences of the operation developed themselves.
But we know, from the express statement of Xenophon, that many, who
underwent this first pungent thrust of his dialectics, never came
near him again: he disregarded them as laggards,[747] but their voices did
not the less count in the hostile chorus. What made that chorus the
more formidable, was the high quality and position of its leaders.
For Sokratês himself tells us, that the men whom he chiefly and
expressly sought out to cross-examine, were the men of celebrity as
statesmen, rhetors, poets, or artisans; those at once most sensitive
to such humiliation, and most capable of making their enmity
effective.
When we reflect upon this great body of antipathy, so terrible
both from number and from constituent items, we shall wonder only
that Sokratês could have gone on so long standing in the market-place
to aggravate it, and that the indictment of Melêtus could have
been so long postponed; since it was just as applicable earlier
as later, and since the sensitive temper of the people, as to
charges of irreligion, was a well-known fact.[748] The truth is, that
as history presents to us only one man who ever devoted his life to
prosecute this duty of an elenchic, or cross-examining missionary, so
there was but one city, in the ancient world at least, wherein he would have been
allowed to prosecute it for twenty-five years with safety and
impunity; and that city was Athens. I have in a previous volume noted
the respect for individual dissent of opinion, taste, and behavior,
among one another, which characterized the Athenian population, and
which Periklês puts in emphatic relief as a part of his funeral
discourse. It was this established liberality of the democratical
sentiment at Athens which so long protected the noble eccentricity
of Sokratês from being disturbed by the numerous enemies which he
provoked: at Sparta, at Thebes, at Argos, Milêtus, or Syracuse,
his blameless life would have been insufficient as a shield, and
his irresistible dialectic power would have caused him to be only
the more speedily silenced. Intolerance is the natural weed of the
human bosom, though its growth or development may be counteracted
by liberalizing causes; of these, at Athens, the most powerful was,
the democratical constitution as there worked, in combination with
diffused intellectual and æsthetical sensibility, and keen relish
for discourse. Liberty of speech was consecrated, in every man’s
estimation, among the first of privileges; every man was accustomed
to hear opinions, opposite to his own, constantly expressed, and to
believe that others had a right to their opinions as well as himself.
And though men would not, as a general principle, have extended
such toleration to religious subjects, yet the established habit
in reference to other matters greatly influenced their practice,
and rendered them more averse to any positive severity against
avowed dissenters from the received religious belief. It is certain
that there was at Athens both a keener intellectual stimulus, and
greater freedom as well of thought as of speech, than in any other
city of Greece. The long toleration of Sokratês is one example of
this general fact, while his trial proves little, and his execution
nothing, against it, as will presently appear.
There must doubtless have been particular circumstances, of which
we are scarcely at all informed, which induced his accusers to prefer
their indictment at the actual moment, in spite of the advanced age
of Sokratês.
In the first place, Anytus, one of the accusers of Sokratês,
appears to have become incensed against him on private grounds. The
son of Anytus had manifested interest in his conversation, and Sokratês,
observing in the young man intellectual impulse and promise,
endeavored to dissuade his father from bringing him up to his own
trade of a leather-seller.[749] It was in this general way that a
great proportion of the antipathy against Sokratês was excited,
as he himself tells us in the “Platonic Apology.” The young men
were those to whom he chiefly addressed himself, and who, keenly
relishing his conversation, often carried home new ideas which
displeased their fathers;[750] hence the general charge against Sokratês,
of corrupting the youth. Now this circumstance had recently happened
in the peculiar case of Anytus, a rich tradesman, a leading man in
politics, and just now of peculiar influence in the city, because he
had been one of the leading fellow-laborers with Thrasybulus in the
expulsion of the Thirty, manifesting an energetic and meritorious
patriotism. He, like Thrasybulus and many others, had sustained
great loss of property[751] during the oligarchical dominion;
which perhaps made him the more strenuous in requiring that his
son should pursue trade with assiduity, in order to restore the
family fortunes. He seems, moreover, to have been an enemy of all
teaching which went beyond the narrowest practicality, hating alike
Sokratês and the sophists.[752]
While we can thus point out a recent occurrence, which had brought
one of the most ascendent politicians in the city into special
exasperation against Sokratês, another circumstance which weighed
him down was, his past connection with the deceased Kritias and
Alkibiadês. Of these two men, the latter, though he had some great
admirers, was on the whole odious; still more from his private
insolence and enormities than from his public treason as an exile.
But the name of Kritias was detested, and deservedly detested,
beyond that of any other man in Athenian history, as the chief
director of the unmeasured spoliation and atrocities committed by
the Thirty. That
Sokratês had educated both Kritias and Alkibiadês, was affirmed by
the accusers, and seemingly believed by the general public, both at
the time and afterwards.[753] That both of them had been among those who
conversed with him, when young men, is an unquestionable fact; to
what extent, or down to what period, the conversation was carried,
we cannot distinctly ascertain. Xenophon affirms that both of them
frequented his society when young, to catch from him an argumentative
facility which might be serviceable to their political ambition;
that he curbed their violent and licentious propensities, so long
as they continued to come to him; that both of them manifested a
respectful obedience to him, which seemed in little consonance
with their natural tempers; but that they soon quitted him, weary
of such restraint, after having acquired as much as they thought
convenient of his peculiar accomplishment. The writings of Plato,
on the contrary, impress us with the idea that the association
of both of them with Sokratês must have been more continued and
intimate; for both of them are made to take great part in the
Platonic dialogues, while the attachment of Sokratês to Alkibiadês
is represented as stronger than that which he ever felt towards
any other man; a fact not difficult to explain, since the latter,
notwithstanding his ungovernable dispositions, was distinguished in
his youth not less for capacity and forward impulse, than for beauty;
and since youthful beauty fired the imagination of the Greeks,
especially that of Sokratês, more than the charms of the other sex.[754]
From the year 420 B.C., in which the
activity of Alkibiadês as a political leader commenced, it seems
unlikely that he could have seen much of Sokratês, and after the
year 415 B.C. the fact is impossible;
since in that year he became a permanent exile, with the exception of
three or four months in the year 407 B.C.
At the moment of the trial of Sokratês, therefore, his connection
with Alkibiadês must at least have been a fact long past and gone.
Respecting Kritias, we make out less; and as he was a kinsman of Plato, one of the
well-known companions of Sokratês, and present at his trial, and
himself an accomplished and literary man, his association with
Sokratês may have continued longer; at least a color was given for
so asserting. Though the supposition that any of the vices either
of Kritias or Alkibiadês were encouraged, or even tolerated, by
Sokratês, can have arisen in none but prejudiced or ill-informed
minds, yet it is certain that such a supposition was entertained; and
that it placed him before the public in an altered position after
the enormities of the Thirty. Anytus, incensed with him already on
the subject of his son, would be doubly incensed against him as the
reputed tutor of Kritias.
Of Melêtus, the primary, though not the most important accuser, we
know only that he was a poet; of Lykon, that he was a rhetor. Both
these classes had been alienated by the cross-examining dialectics
to which many of their number had been exposed by Sokratês. They
were the last men to bear such an exposure with patience, and their
enmity, taken as a class rarely unanimous, was truly formidable when
it bore upon any single individual.
We know nothing of the speeches of either of the accusers before
the dikastery, except what can be picked out from the remarks in
Xenophon and the defence of Plato. Of the three counts of the
indictment, the second was the easiest for them to support, on
plausible grounds. That Sokratês was a religious innovator, would
be considered as proved by the peculiar divine sign, of which he
was wont to speak freely and publicly, and which visited no one
except himself. Accordingly, in the “Platonic Defence,” he never
really replies to this second charge. He questions Melêtus before
the dikastery, and the latter is represented as answering, that he
meant to accuse Sokratês of not believing in the gods at all;[755] to
which imputed disbelief Sokratês answers with an emphatic negative.
In support of the first count, however,—the charge of general
disbelief in the gods recognized by the city,—nothing in his conduct
could be cited; for he was exact in his legal worship like other
citizens, and even more than others, if Xenophon is correct.[756]
But it would
appear that the old calumnies of the Aristophanic “Clouds” were
revived, and that the effect of that witty drama, together with
similar efforts of Eupolis and others, perhaps hardly less witty,
was still enduring; a striking proof that these comedians were no
impotent libellers. Sokratês manifests greater apprehension of the
effect of the ancient impressions, than of the speeches which had
been just delivered against him: but these latter speeches would of
course tell, by refreshing the sentiments of the past, and reviving
the Aristophanic picture of Sokratês, as a speculator on physics
as well as a rhetorical teacher for pleading, making the worse
appear the better reason.[757] Sokratês, in the “Platonic Defence,”
appeals to the number of persons who had heard him discourse,
whether any of them had ever heard him say one word on the subject
of physical studies;[758] while Xenophon goes further, and
represents him as having positively discountenanced them, on
the ground of impiety.[759]
As there were three distinct accusers to speak against Sokratês,
so we may reasonably suppose that they would concert beforehand
on what topics each should insist; Melêtus undertaking that which
related to religion, while Anytus and Lykon would dwell on the
political grounds of attack. In the “Platonic Apology,” Sokratês
comments emphatically on the allegations of Melêtus, questions
him publicly before the dikasts, and criticizes his replies: he
makes little allusion to Anytus, or to anything except what is
formally embodied in the indictment; and treats the last count,
the charge of corrupting youth, in connection with the first, as
if the corruption alleged consisted in irreligious teaching. But
Xenophon intimates that the accusers, in enforcing this allegation of
pernicious teaching, went into other matters quite distinct from the
religious tenets of Sokratês, and denounced him as having taught them
lawlessness and disrespect, as well towards their parents as towards
their country. We find mention made in Xenophon of accusatory grounds
similar to those in the “Clouds;” similar also to those which modern
authors usually advance against the sophists.
Sokratês, said Anytus and the other accusers, taught young men to despise the
existing political constitution, by remarking that the Athenian
practice of naming archons by lot was silly, and that no man of
sense would ever choose in this way a pilot or a carpenter, though
the mischief arising from bad qualification, was in these cases
far less than in the case of the archons.[760] Such teaching, it
was urged, destroyed in the minds of the hearers respect for the
laws and constitution, and rendered them violent and licentious. As
examples of the way in which it had worked, his two pupils Kritias
and Alkibiadês might be cited, both formed in his school; one, the
most violent and rapacious of the Thirty recent oligarchs; the
other, a disgrace to the democracy, by his outrageous insolence
and licentiousness;[761] both of them authors of ruinous mischief
to the city.
Moreover, the youth learned from him conceit of their own superior
wisdom, and the habit of insulting their fathers as well as of
slighting their other kinsmen. Sokratês told them, it was urged,
that even their fathers, in case of madness, might be lawfully put
under restraint; and that when a man needed service, those whom he
had to look to, were not his kinsmen, as such, but the persons best
qualified to render it: thus, if he was sick, he must consult a
surgeon; if involved in a lawsuit, those who were most conversant
with such a situation. Between friends also, mere good feeling and
affection was of little use; the important circumstance was, that
they should acquire the capacity of rendering mutual service to each
other. No one was worthy of esteem except the man who knew what was
proper to be done, and could explain it to others: which meant, urged
the accuser, that Sokratês was not only the wisest of men, but the
only person capable of making his pupils wise; other advisers being
worthless compared with him.[762]
He was in the habit too, the accusation proceeded, of citing
the worst passages out of distinguished poets, and of perverting
them to the mischievous purpose of spoiling the dispositions of
youth, planting in them criminal and despotic tendencies. Thus he
quoted a line of Hesiod: “No work is disgraceful; but indolence
is disgraceful:” explaining it to mean, that a man might without scruple do
any sort of work, base or unjust as it might be, for the sake of
profit. Next, Sokratês was particularly fond of quoting those lines
of Homer, in the second book of the Iliad, wherein Odysseus is
described as bringing back the Greeks, who had just dispersed from
the public agora in compliance with the exhortation of Agamemnôn,
and were hastening to their ships. Odysseus caresses and flatters
the chiefs, while he chides and even strikes the common men; though
both were doing the same thing, and guilty of the same fault; if
fault it was, to obey what the commander-in-chief had himself
just suggested. Sokratês interpreted this passage, the accuser
affirmed, as if Homer praised the application of stripes to poor
men and the common people.[763]
Nothing could be easier than for an accuser to find matter for
inculpation of Sokratês, by partial citations from his continual
discourses, given without the context or explanations which had
accompanied them; by bold invention, where even this partial basis
was wanting; sometimes also by taking up real error, since no man
who is continually talking, especially extempore, can always talk
correctly. Few teachers would escape, if penal sentences were
permitted to tell against them, founded upon evidence such as this.
Xenophon, in noticing the imputations, comments upon them all,
denies some, and explains others. As to the passages out of Hesiod
and Homer, he affirms that Sokratês drew from them inferences quite
contrary to those alleged;[764] which latter seem, indeed, altogether
unreasonable, invented to call forth the deep-seated democratical
sentiment of the Athenians, after the accuser had laid his
preliminary ground by connecting Sokratês with Kritias and
Alkibiadês. That Sokratês improperly depreciated either filial duty
or the domestic affections, is in like manner highly improbable.
We may much more reasonably believe the assertion of Xenophon, who
represents him to have exhorted the hearer “to make himself as wise,
and as capable of rendering service, as possible; so that, when he
wished to acquire esteem from father or brother or friend, he might
not sit still, in reliance on the simple fact of relationship,
but might earn such feeling by doing them positive good.”[765] To
tell a young man
that mere good feeling would be totally insufficient, unless he were
prepared and competent to carry it into action, is a lesson which
few parents would wish to discourage. Nor would any generous parent
make it a crime against the teaching of Sokratês, that it rendered
his son wiser than himself, which probably it would do. To restrict
the range of teaching for a young man, because it may make him think
himself wiser than his father, is only one of the thousand shapes in
which the pleading of ignorance against knowledge was then, and still
continues occasionally to be, presented.
Nevertheless, it is not to be denied that these attacks of
Anytus bear upon the vulnerable side of the Sokratic general theory
of ethics, according to which virtue was asserted to depend upon
knowledge. I have already remarked that this is true, but not the
whole truth; a certain state of the affections and dispositions being
not less indispensable, as conditions of virtue, than a certain state
of the intelligence. An enemy, therefore, had some pretence for
making it appear that Sokratês, stating a part of the truth as the
whole, denied or degraded all that remained. But though this would
be a criticism not entirely unfounded against his general theory,
it would not hold against his precepts or practical teaching, as we
find them in Xenophon; for these, as I have remarked, reach much
wider than his general theory, and inculcate the cultivation of
habits and dispositions not less strenuously than the acquisition of
knowledge.
The censures affirmed to have been cast by Sokratês against the
choice of archons by lot at Athens, are not denied by Xenophon. The
accuser urged that “by such censures Sokratês excited the young men
to despise the established constitution, and to become lawless and
violent in their conduct.”[766] This is just the same pretence, of
tendency to bring the government into hatred and contempt, on which
in former days prosecutions for public libel were instituted against
writers in England, and on which they still continue to be abundantly instituted
in France, under the first President of the Republic. There can
hardly be a more serious political mischief than such confusion
of the disapproving critic with a conspirator, and imposition of
silence upon dissentient minorities. Nor has there ever been any
case in which such an imputation was more destitute of color than
that of Sokratês, who appealed always to men’s reason and very
little to their feelings; so little, indeed, that modern authors
make his coldness a matter of charge against him; who never omitted
to inculcate rigid observance of the law, and set the example of
such observance himself. Whatever may have been his sentiments about
democracy, he always obeyed the democratical government, nor is there
any pretence for charging him with participation in oligarchical
schemes. It was the Thirty who, for the first time in his long life,
interdicted his teaching altogether, and were on the point almost of
taking his life; while his intimate friend Chærephon was actually in
exile with the democrats.[767]
Xenophon lays great emphasis on two points, when defending
Sokratês against his accusers. First, that his own conduct was
virtuous, self-denying, and strict in obedience to the law. Next,
that he accustomed his hearers to hear nothing except appeals to
their reason, and impressed on them obedience only to their rational
convictions. That such a man, with so great a weight of presumption
in his favor, should be tried and found guilty as a corruptor of
youth,—the most undefined of all imaginable charges,—is a grave and
melancholy fact in the history of mankind. Yet when we see upon what
light evidence modern authors are willing to admit the same charge
against the sophists, we have no right to wonder that the Athenians
when addressed, not through that calm reason to which Sokratês
appealed, but through all their antipathies, religious as well as
political, public as well as private—were exasperated into dealing
with him as the type and precursor of Kritias and Alkibiadês.
After all, the exasperation, and the consequent verdict of guilty,
were not wholly the fault of the dikasts, nor wholly brought about
by his accusers and his numerous private enemies. No such verdict
would have been given, unless by what we must call the consent and concurrence of
Sokratês himself. This is one of the most important facts of the
case, in reference both to himself and to the Athenians.
We learn from his own statement in the “Platonic Defence,” that
the verdict of guilty was only pronounced by a majority of five or
six, amidst a body so numerous as an Athenian dikastery; probably
five hundred and fifty-seven in total number,[768] if a confused
statement in Diogenes Laërtius can be trusted. Now any one who
reads that defence, and considers it in conjunction with the
circumstances of the case and the feelings of the dikasts, will see
that its tenor is such as must have turned a much greater number
of votes than six against him. And we are informed by the distinct
testimony of Xenophon,[769] that Sokratês approached his trial
with the feelings of one who hardly wished to be acquitted. He
took no thought whatever for the preparation of his defence; and
when his friend Hermogenês remonstrated with him on the serious
consequences of such an omission, he replied, first, that the just
and blameless life, which he was conscious of having passed, was
the best of all preparations for defence; next, that having once
begun to meditate on what it would be proper for him to say, the
divine sign had interposed to forbid him from proceeding. He went on
to say, that it was no wonder that the gods should deem it better
for him to die now, than to live longer. He had hitherto lived in
perfect satisfaction, with a consciousness of progressive moral
improvement, and with esteem, marked and unabated, from his friends. If his
life were prolonged, old age would soon overpower him; he would
lose in part his sight, his hearing, or his intelligence; and life
with such abated efficacy and dignity would be intolerable to him.
Whereas, if he were condemned now, he should be condemned unjustly,
which would be a great disgrace to his judges, but none to him; nay,
it would even procure for him increase of sympathy and admiration,
and a more willing acknowledgment from every one that he had been
both a just man and an improving preceptor.[770]
These words, spoken before his trial, intimate a state of
belief which explains the tenor of the defence, and formed one
essential condition of the final result. They prove that Sokratês
not only cared little for being acquitted, but even thought that
the approaching trial was marked out by the gods as the term of
his life, and that there were good reasons why he should prefer
such a consummation as best for himself. Nor is it wonderful that
he should entertain that opinion, when we recollect the entire
ascendency within him of strong internal conscience and intelligent
reflection, built upon an originally fearless temperament, and
silencing what Plato[771] calls “the child within us, who trembles
before death;” his great love of colloquial influence, and incapacity
of living without it; his old age, now seventy years, rendering it
impossible that such influence could much longer continue, and the
opportunity afforded to him, by now towering above ordinary men under
the like circumstances, to read an impressive lesson, as well as to
leave behind him a reputation yet more exalted than that which he had
hitherto acquired. It was in this frame of mind that Sokratês came to
his trial, and undertook his unpremeditated defence, the substance
of which we now read in the “Platonic Apology.” His calculations,
alike high-minded and well-balanced, were completely realized. Had
he been acquitted after such a defence, it would have been not only
a triumph over his personal enemies, but would have been a sanction
on the part of the people and the popular dikastery to his teaching,
which, indeed,
had been enforced by Anytus,[772] in his accusing argument, in reference to
acquittal generally, even before he heard the defence: whereas his
condemnation, and the feelings with which he met it, have shed double
and triple lustre over his whole life and character.
Prefaced by this exposition of the feelings of Sokratês, the
“Platonic Defence” becomes not merely sublime and impressive, but
also the manifestation of a rational and consistent purpose. It
does, indeed, include a vindication of himself against two out
of the three counts of the indictment; against the charge of not
believing in the recognized gods of Athens, and that of corrupting
the youth; respecting the second of the three, whereby he was
charged with religious innovation, he says little or nothing.
But it bears no resemblance to the speech of one standing on his
trial, with the written indictment concluding “Penalty, Death,”
hanging up in open court before him. On the contrary, it is an
emphatic lesson to the hearers, embodied in the frank outpouring of
a fearless and self-confiding conscience. It is undertaken, from
the beginning, because the law commands; with a faint wish, and
even not an unqualified wish, but no hope, that it may succeed.[773]
Sokratês first replies to the standing antipathies against him
without, arising from the number of enemies whom his cross-examining
elenchus had aroused against him, and from those false reports which
the Aristophanic “Clouds” had contributed so much to circulate. In
accounting for the rise of these antipathies, he impresses upon the
dikasts the divine mission under which he was acting, not without
considerable doubts whether they will believe him to be in earnest;[774]
and gives that interesting exposition of his intellectual campaign,
against “the conceit of knowledge without the reality,” of which I
have already
spoken. He then goes into the indictment, questions Melêtus in
open court, and dissects his answers. Having rebutted the charge
of irreligion, he reverts again to the imperative mandate of the
gods under which he is acting, “to spend his life in the search for
wisdom, and in examining himself as well as others;” a mandate,
which if he were to disobey, he would be then justly amenable to
the charge of irreligion;[775] and he announces to the dikasts
distinctly, that, even if they were now to acquit him, he neither
could nor would relax in the course which he had been pursuing.[776]
He considers that the mission imposed upon him is among the
greatest blessings ever conferred by the gods upon Athens.[777]
He deprecates those murmurs of surprise or displeasure, which his
discourse evidently called forth more than once,[778] though not so much
on his own account as on that of the dikasts, who will be benefited
by hearing him, and who will hurt themselves and their city much
more than him, if they should now pronounce condemnation.[779]
It was not on his own account that he sought to defend himself,
but on account of the Athenians, lest they by condemning him
should sin against the gracious blessing of the god; they would
not easily find such another, if they should put him to death.[780]
Though his mission had spurred him on to indefatigable activity
in individual colloquy, yet the divine sign had always forbidden
him from taking active part in public proceedings; on the two
exceptional occasions when he had stood publicly forward,—once
under the democracy, once under the oligarchy,—he had shown the
same resolution as at present; not to be deterred by any terrors
from that course which he believed to be just.[781] Young men were delighted as well as
improved by listening to his cross-examinations; in proof of the
charge that he had corrupted them, no evidence had been produced;
neither any of themselves, who, having been once young when they
enjoyed his conversation, had since grown elderly; nor any of their
relatives; while he on his part could produce abundant testimony to
the improving effect of his society, from the relatives of those
who had profited by it.[782]
“No man (says he) knows what death is; yet men fear it as if they
knew well that it was the greatest of all evils, which is just a
case of that worst of all ignorance, the conceit of knowing what you
do not really know. For my part, this is the exact point on which
I differ from most other men, if there be any one thing in which
I am wiser than they; as I know nothing about Hades, so I do not
pretend to any knowledge; but I do know well, that disobedience to
a person better than myself, either god or man, is both an evil and
a shame; nor will I ever embrace evil certain, in order to escape
evil which may for aught I know be a good.[783] Perhaps you may feel
indignant at the resolute tone of my defence; you may have expected
that I should do as most others do in less dangerous trials than
mine; that I should weep, beg and entreat for my life, and bring
forward my children and relatives to do the same. I have relatives
like other men, and three children; but not one of them shall appear
before you for any such purpose. Not from any insolent dispositions
on my part, nor any wish to put a slight upon you, but because I
hold such conduct to be degrading to the reputation which I enjoy;
for I have a reputation for superiority among you, deserved or
undeserved as it may be. It is a disgrace to Athens, when her
esteemed men lower themselves, as they do but too often, by such
mean and cowardly supplications; and you dikasts, instead of being
prompted thereby to spare them, ought rather to condemn them the more
for so dishonoring the city.[784] Apart from any reputation of mine, too, I should
be a guilty man, if I sought to bias you by supplications. My duty
is to instruct and persuade you, if I can; but you have sworn to
follow your convictions in judging according to the laws, not to
make the laws bend to your partiality; and it is your duty so to do.
Far be it from me to habituate you to perjury; far be it from you to
contract any such habit. Do not, therefore, require of me proceedings
dishonorable in reference to myself, as well as criminal and impious
in regard to you, especially at a moment when I am myself rebutting
an accusation of impiety advanced by Melêtus. I leave to you and to
the god, to decide as may turn out best both for me and for you.”[785]
No one who reads the “Platonic Apology” of Sokratês will ever wish
that he had made any other defence. But it is the speech of one who
deliberately foregoes the immediate purpose of a defence, persuasion
of his judges; who speaks for posterity, without regard to his own
life: “solâ posteritatis curâ, et abruptis vitæ blandimentis.”[786] The
effect produced upon the dikasts was such as Sokratês anticipated
beforehand, and heard afterwards without surprise as without
discomposure, in the verdict of guilty. His only surprise was, at the
extreme smallness of the majority whereby that verdict was passed.[787]
And this is the true matter for astonishment. Never before had
the Athenian dikasts heard such a speech addressed to them. While
all of them, doubtless, knew Sokratês as a very able and very
eccentric man, respecting his purposes and character they would
differ; some regarding him with unqualified hostility, a few others
with respectful admiration, and a still larger number with simple
admiration for ability, without any decisive sentiment either
of antipathy or esteem. But by all these three categories, hardly excepting even
his admirers, the speech would be felt to carry one sting which
never misses its way to the angry feelings of the judicial bosom,
whether the judges in session be one or a few or many, the sting of
“affront to the court.” The Athenian dikasts were always accustomed
to be addressed with deference, often with subservience: they now
heard themselves lectured by a philosopher who stood before them like
a fearless and invulnerable superior, beyond their power, though
awaiting their verdict; one who laid claim to a divine mission, which
probably many of them believed to be an imposture, and who declared
himself the inspired uprooter of “conceit of knowledge without the
reality,” which purpose many would not understand, and some would not
like. To many, his demeanor would appear to betray an insolence not
without analogy to Alkibiadês or Kritias, with whom his accuser had
compared him. I have already remarked, in reference to his trial,
that, considering the number of personal enemies whom he made, the
wonder is, not that he was tried at all, but that he was not tried
until so late in his life: I now remark in reference to the verdict,
that, considering his speech before the dikastery, we cannot be
surprised that he was found guilty, but only that such verdict passed
by so small a majority as five or six.
That the condemnation of Sokratês was brought on distinctly by
the tone and tenor of his defence, is the express testimony of
Xenophon. “Other persons on trial (he says) defended themselves in
such manner as to conciliate the favor of the dikasts, or flatter,
or entreat them, contrary to the laws, and thus obtained acquittal.
But Sokratês would resort to nothing of this customary practice of
the dikastery contrary to the laws. Though he might easily have
been let off by the dikasts, if he would have done anything of the
kind even moderately, he preferred rather to adhere to the laws and
die, than to save his life by violating them.”[788] Now no one in
Athens except Sokratês, probably, would have construed the laws as
requiring the tone of oration which he adopted; nor would he himself
have so construed them, if he had been twenty years younger, with less of acquired
dignity, and more years of possible usefulness open before him.
Without debasing himself by unbecoming flattery or supplication,
he would have avoided lecturing them as a master and superior,[789]
or ostentatiously asserting a divine mission for purposes which
they would hardly understand, or an independence of their verdict
which they might construe as defiance. The rhetor Lysias is said
to have sent to him a composed speech for his defence, which he
declined to use, not thinking it suitable to his dignity. But such
a man as Lysias would hardly compose what would lower the dignity
even of the loftiest client, though he would look to the result
also; nor is there any doubt that if Sokratês had pronounced it,—or
even a much less able speech, if inoffensive,—he would have been
acquitted. Quintilian,[790] indeed, expresses his satisfaction that
Sokratês maintained that towering dignity which brought out the
rarest and most exalted of his attributes, but which at the same time
renounced all chance of acquittal. Few persons will dissent from this
criticism: but when we look at the sentence, as we ought in fairness
to do, from the point of view of the dikasts, justice will compel us
to admit that Sokratês deliberately brought it upon himself.
If the verdict of guilty was thus brought upon Sokratês by his
own consent and coöperation, much more may the same remark be made
respecting the capital sentence which followed it. In Athenian
procedure, the penalty inflicted was determined by a separate vote of
the dikasts, taken after the verdict of guilty. The accuser having
named the penalty which he thought suitable, the accused party on his
side named some lighter penalty upon himself; and between these two
the dikasts were called on to make their option, no third proposition
being admissible. The prudence of an accused party always induced him
to propose, even against himself, some measure of punishment which
the dikasts might
be satisfied to accept, in preference to the heavier sentence invoked
by his antagonist.
Now Melêtus, in his indictment and speech against Sokratês, had
called for the infliction of capital punishment. It was for Sokratês
to make his own counter-proposition, and the very small majority,
by which the verdict had been pronounced, afforded sufficient proof
that the dikasts were no way inclined to sanction the extreme penalty
against him. They doubtless anticipated, according to the uniform
practice before the Athenian courts of justice, that he would suggest
some lesser penalty; fine, imprisonment, exile, disfranchisement,
etc. And had he done this purely and simply, there can be little
doubt that the proposition would have passed. But the language of
Sokratês, after the verdict, was in a strain yet higher than before
it; and his resolution to adhere to his own point of view, disdaining
the smallest abatement or concession, only the more emphatically
pronounced. “What counter proposition shall I make to you (he said)
as a substitute for the penalty of Melêtus? Shall I name to you the
treatment which I think I deserve at your hands? In that case, my
proposition would be that I should be rewarded with a subsistence
at the public expense in the prytaneum; for that is what I really
deserve as a public benefactor; one who has neglected all thought of
his own affairs, and embraced voluntary poverty, in order to devote
himself to your best interests, and to admonish you individually on
the serious necessity of mental and moral improvement. Assuredly, I
cannot admit that I have deserved from you any evil whatever; nor
would it be reasonable in me to propose exile or imprisonment, which
I know to be certain and considerable evils, in place of death, which
may perhaps be not an evil, but a good. I might, indeed, propose to
you a pecuniary fine; for the payment of that would be no evil. But
I am poor, and have no money: all that I could muster might perhaps
amount to a mina: and I therefore propose to you a fine of one mina,
as punishment on myself. Plato, and my other friends near me, desire
me to increase this sum to thirty minæ, and they engage to pay it for
me. A fine of thirty minæ, therefore, is the counter penalty which I
submit for your judgment.”[791]
Subsistence in the prytaneum at
the public expense, was one of the greatest honorary distinctions
which the citizens of Athens ever conferred; an emphatic token of
public gratitude. That Sokratês, therefore, should proclaim himself
worthy of such an honor, and talk of assessing it upon himself in
lieu of a punishment, before the very dikasts who had just passed
against him a verdict of guilty, would be received by them as nothing
less than a deliberate insult; a defiance of judicial authority,
which it was their duty to prove, to an opinionated and haughty
citizen, that he could not commit with impunity. The persons who
heard his language with the greatest distress, were doubtless Plato,
Krito, and his other friends around him; who, though sympathizing
with him fully, knew well that he was assuring the success of the
proposition of Melêtus,[792] and would regret that he should thus throw
away his life by what they would think an ill-placed and unnecessary
self-exaltation. Had he proposed, with little or no preface, the
substitute-fine of thirty minæ with which this part of his speech
concluded, there is every reason for believing that the majority of
dikasts would have voted for it.
The sentence of death passed against him, by what majority we
do not know. But Sokratês neither altered his tone, nor manifested
any regret for the language by which he had himself seconded the
purpose of his accusers. On the contrary, he told the dikasts, in
a short address prior to his departure for the prison, that he was
satisfied both with his own conduct and with the result. The divine
sign, he said, which was wont to restrain him, often on very small
occasions, both in deeds and in words, had never manifested itself
once to him throughout the whole day, neither when he came thither
at first, nor at any one point throughout his whole discourse.
The tacit acquiescence of this infallible monitor satisfied him
not only that he had spoken rightly, but that the sentence passed
was in reality no evil to him; that to die now was the best thing
which could befall him.[793] Either death was tantamount to a sound,
perpetual, and dreamless sleep, which in his judgment would be no
loss, but rather a gain, compared with the present life; or else,
if the common
mythes were true, death would transfer him to a second life in
Hades, where he would find all the heroes of the Trojan war, and
of the past generally, so as to pursue in conjunction with them
the business of mutual cross-examination, and debate on ethical
progress and perfection.[794]
There can be no doubt that the sentence really appeared to
Sokratês in this point of view, and to his friends also, after the
event had happened, though doubtless not at the time when they were
about to lose him. He took his line of defence advisedly, and with
full knowledge of the result. It supplied him with the fittest of
all opportunities for manifesting, in an impressive manner, both his
personal ascendency over human fears and weakness, and the dignity
of what he believed to be his divine mission. It took him away in
his full grandeur and glory, like the setting of the tropical sun,
at a moment when senile decay might be looked upon as close at hand.
He calculated that his defence and bearing on the trial would be the
most emphatic lesson which he could possibly read to the youth of
Athens; more emphatic, probably, than the sum total of those lessons
which his remaining life might suffice to give, if he shaped his
defence otherwise. This anticipation of the effect of the concluding
scene of his life, setting the seal on all his prior discourses,
manifests itself in portions of his concluding words to the dikasts,
wherein he tells them that they will not, by putting him to death,
rid themselves of the importunity of the cross-examining elenchus;
that numbers of young men, more restless and obtrusive than he,
already carried within them that impulse, which they would now
proceed to apply; his superiority having hitherto kept them back.[795]
It was thus the persuasion of Sokratês, that his removal would be
the signal for numerous apostles, putting forth with increased
energy that process of interrogatory test and spur to which he had
devoted his life, and which doubtless was to him far dearer and more
sacred than his life. Nothing could be more effective than his lofty
bearing on his trial, for inflaming the enthusiasm of young men thus
predisposed; and
the loss of life was to him compensated by the missionary successors
whom he calculated on leaving behind.
Under ordinary circumstances, Sokratês would have drunk the cup of
hemlock in the prison, on the day after his trial. But it so happened
that the day of his sentence was immediately after that on which
the sacred ship started on its yearly ceremonial pilgrimage from
Athens to Delos, for the festival of Apollo. Until the return of this
vessel to Athens, it was accounted unholy to put any person to death
by public authority. Accordingly, Sokratês remained in prison,—and
we are pained to read, actually with chains on his legs,—during
the interval that this ship was absent, thirty days altogether.
His friends and companions had free access to him, passing nearly
all their time with him in the prison; and Krito had even arranged
a scheme for procuring his escape, by a bribe to the jailer.
This scheme was only prevented from taking effect by the decided
refusal of Sokratês to become a party in any breach of the law;[796] a
resolution, which we should expect as a matter of course, after the
line which he had taken in his defence. His days were spent in the
prison, in discourse respecting ethical and human subjects, which had
formed the charm and occupation of his previous life: it is to the
last of these days that his conversation with Simmias, Kebês, and
Phædon, on the immortality of the soul is referred, in the Platonic
dialogue called “Phædon.” Of that conversation the main topics and
doctrines are Platonic rather than Sokratic. But the picture which
the dialogue presents of the temper and state of mind of Sokratês,
during the last hours of his life, is one of immortal beauty and
interest, exhibiting his serene and even playful equanimity, amidst
the uncontrollable emotions of his surrounding friends,—the genuine,
unforced persuasion, governing both his words and his acts, of what
he had pronounced before the dikasts, that the sentence of death
was no calamity to him,[797]—and the unabated maintenance of that
earnest interest in the improvement of man and society, which had
for so many years formed both his paramount motive and his active
occupation. The details of the last scene are given with minute
fidelity, even down to the moment of his dissolution; and it is consoling to remark
that the cup of hemlock—the means employed for executions by public
order at Athens—produced its effect by steps far more exempt from
suffering than any natural death which was likely to befall him.
Those who have read what has been observed above respecting the
strong religious persuasions of Sokratês, will not be surprised to
hear that his last words, addressed to Krito immediately before he
passed into a state of insensibility, were: “Krito, we owe a cock
to Æsculapius: discharge the debt, and by no means omit it.”[798]
Thus perished the “parens philosophiæ,” the first of ethical
philosophers; a man who opened to science both new matter, alike
copious and valuable; and a new method, memorable not less for its
originality and efficacy, than for the profound philosophical basis
on which it rests. Though Greece produced great poets, orators,
speculative philosophers, historians, etc., yet other countries
having the benefit of Grecian literature to begin with, have nearly
equalled her in all these lines, and surpassed her in some. But
where are we to look for a parallel to Sokratês, either in or out
of the Grecian world? The cross-examining elenchus, which he not
only first struck out, but wielded with such matchless effect and to
such noble purposes, has been mute ever since his last conversation
in the prison; for even his great successor Plato was a writer and
lecturer, not a colloquial dialectician. No man has ever been found
strong enough to bend his bow; much less, sure enough to use it as he
did. His life remains as the only evidence, but a very satisfactory
evidence, how much can be done by this sort of intelligent
interrogation; how powerful is the interest which it can be made to
inspire; how energetic the stimulus which it can apply in awakening
dormant reason and generating new mental power.
It has been often customary to exhibit Sokratês as a moral
preacher, in which character probably he has acquired to himself
the general reverence attached to his name. This is, indeed, a
true attribute, but not the characteristic or salient attribute,
nor that by which he permanently worked on mankind. On the other
hand, Arkesilaus, and the New Academy,[799] a century and more afterwards,
thought that they were following the example of Sokratês—and Cicero
seems to have thought so too—when they reasoned against everything;
and when they laid it down as a system, that, against every
affirmative position, an equal force of negative argument might be
brought up as counterpoise. Now this view of Sokratês is, in my
judgment, not merely partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such
systematic distrust of the powers of the mind to attain certainty.
He laid down a clear, though erroneous line of distinction between
the knowable and the unknowable. About physics, he was more than a
skeptic; he thought that man could know nothing; the gods did not
intend that man should acquire any such information, and therefore
managed matters in such a way as to be beyond his ken, for all
except the simplest phenomena of daily wants; moreover, not only man could not
acquire such information, but ought not to labor after it. But
respecting the topics which concern man and society, the views of
Sokratês were completely the reverse. This was the field which the
gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to
human study and acquisition of knowledge; a field, wherein, with
that view, they managed phenomena on principles of constant and
observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains
might know them. Nay, Sokratês went a step further; and this forward
step is the fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary
impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these
things but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well,
unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn
them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing
better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable
being. Sokratês felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just,
temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught
himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety,
and patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly
Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon,
and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and
means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that
few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied
to acquire it; yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he
did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here,
then, Sokratês found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was,
that universal “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” against
which he declares such emphatic war; and against which, also, though
under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon
declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards:
“Opinio copiæ inter causas inopiæ est.” Sokratês found that those
notions respecting human and social affairs, on which each man
relied and acted, were nothing but spontaneous products of the
“intellectus sibi permissus,” of the intellect left to itself either
without any guidance, or with only the blind guidance of sympathies,
antipathies, authority, or silent assimilation. They were products
got together, to use Bacon’s language, “from much faith and much
chance, and from
the primitive suggestions of boyhood,” not merely without care or
study, but without even consciousness of the process, and without
any subsequent revision. Upon this basis the sophists, or professed
teachers for active life, sought to erect a superstructure of virtue
and ability; but to Sokratês, such an attempt appeared hopeless
and contradictory—not less impracticable than Bacon in his time
pronounced it to be, to carry up the tree of science into majesty
and fruit-bearing, without first clearing away those fundamental
vices which lay unmolested and in poisonous influence round its root.
Sokratês went to work in the Baconian manner and spirit; bringing
his cross-examining process to bear, as the first condition to all
further improvement, upon these rude, self-begotten, incoherent
generalizations, which passed in men’s minds for competent and
directing knowledge. But he, not less than Bacon, performs this
analysis, not with a view to finality in the negative, but as
the first stage towards an ulterior profit; as the preliminary
purification, indispensable to future positive result. In the
physical sciences, to which Bacon’s attention was chiefly turned, no
such result could be obtained without improved experimental research,
bringing to light facts new and yet unknown; but on those topics
which Sokratês discussed, the elementary data of the inquiry were all
within the hearer’s experience, requiring only to be pressed upon
his notice, affirmatively as well as negatively, together with the
appropriate ethical and political end; in such manner as to stimulate
within him the rational effort requisite for combining them anew upon
consistent principles.
If, then, the philosophers of the New Academy considered Sokratês
either as a skeptic, or as a partisan of systematic negation,
they misinterpreted his character, and mistook the first stage
of his process—that which Plato, Bacon, and Herschel call the
purification of the intellect—for the ultimate goal. The elenchus,
as Sokratês used it, was animated by the truest spirit of positive
science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment.[800]
There are two points, and two points only, in topics concerning
man and society, with regard to which Sokratês is a skeptic;
or rather,
which he denies; and on the negation of which, his whole method and
purpose turn. He denies, first, that men can know that on which
they have bestowed no conscious effort, no deliberate pains, no
systematic study, in learning. He denies, next, that men can practise
what they do not know;[801] that they can be just, or temperate, or
virtuous generally, without knowing what justice, or temperance, or
virtue is. To imprint upon the minds of his hearers his own negative
conviction, on these two points is, indeed, his first object, and
the primary purpose of his multiform dialectical manœuvring. But
though negative in his means, Sokratês is strictly positive in his
ends; his attack is undertaken only with distinct view to a positive
result; in order to shame them out of the illusion of knowledge, and
to spur them on and arm them for the acquisition of real, assured,
comprehensive, self-explanatory knowledge, as the condition and
guarantee of virtuous practice. Sokratês was, indeed, the reverse
of a skeptic; no man ever looked upon life with a more positive and
practical eye; no man ever pursued his mark with a clearer perception
of the road which he was travelling; no man ever combined, in like
manner, the absorbing enthusiasm of a missionary,[802] with the acuteness,
the originality, the inventive resource, and the generalizing
comprehension, of a philosopher.
His method yet survives, as far as such method can survive, in
some of the dialogues of Plato. It is a process of eternal value
and of universal application. That purification of the intellect,
which Bacon signalized as indispensable for rational or scientific
progress, the Sokratic elenchus affords the only known instrument
for at least partially accomplishing. However little that instrument
may have been applied since the death of its inventor, the necessity and use of it
neither have disappeared, nor ever can disappear. There are few men
whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge
against which Sokratês made war: there is no man whose notions have
not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious,
uncertified association, resting upon forgotten particulars, blending
together disparates or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old
and familiar phrases, and oracular propositions, of which he has
never rendered to himself account: there is no man, who, if he be
destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found
it a necessary branch of self-education, to break up, disentangle,
analyze, and reconstruct, these ancient mental compounds; and who
has not been driven to do it by his own lame and solitary efforts,
since the giant of the colloquial elenchus no longer stands in the
market-place to lend him help and stimulus.
To hear of any man,[803] especially of so illustrious a man,
being condemned to death on such accusations as that of heresy and
alleged corruption of youth, inspires at the present day a sentiment
of indignant reprobation, the force of which I have no desire to
enfeeble. The fact stands eternally recorded as one among the
thousand misdeeds of intolerance, religious and political. But since
amidst this catalogue each item has its own peculiar character,
grave or light, we are bound to consider at what point of the scale
the condemnation of Sokratês is to be placed, and what inferences
it justifies in regard to the character of the Athenians. Now if
we examine the circumstances of the case, we shall find them all
extenuating; and so powerful, indeed, as to reduce such inferences
to their minimum, consistent with the general class to which the
incident belongs.
First, the sentiment now prevalent is founded
upon a conviction that such matters as heresy and heretical teaching
of youth are not proper for judicial cognizance. Even in the modern
world, such a conviction is of recent date; and in the fifth
century B.C. it was unknown. Sokratês
himself would not have agreed in it; and all Grecian governments,
oligarchical and democratical alike, recognized the opposite. The
testimony furnished by Plato is on this point decisive. When we
examine the two positive communities which he constructs, in the
treatises “De Republicâ” and “De Legibus,” we find that there
is nothing about which he is more anxious, than to establish
an unresisted orthodoxy of doctrine, opinion, and education. A
dissenting and free-spoken teacher, such as Sokratês was at Athens,
would not have been allowed to pursue his vocation for a week, in the
Platonic Republic. Plato would not, indeed, condemn him to death;
but he would put him to silence, and in case of need send him away.
This, in fact, is the consistent deduction, if you assume that the
state is to determine what is orthodoxy and orthodox teaching,
and to repress what contradicts its own views. Now all the Grecian
states, including Athens, held this principle[804] of interference
against the dissenting teacher. But at Athens, though the principle
was recognized, yet the application of it was counteracted by
resisting forces which it did not find elsewhere; by the democratical
constitution, with its liberty of speech and love of speech, by the
more active spring of individual intellect, and by the toleration,
greater there than anywhere else, shown to each man’s peculiarities
of every sort. In any other government of Greece, as well as in the
Platonic Republic, Sokratês would have been quickly arrested in his
career, even if not severely punished; in Athens, he was allowed to
talk and teach publicly for twenty-five or thirty years, and then
condemned when an old man. Of these two applications of the same
mischievous principle, assuredly the latter is at once the more
moderate and the less noxious.
Secondly, the force of this last consideration, as an extenuating
circumstance in regard to the Athenians, is much increased, when we
reflect upon the number of individual enemies whom Sokratês made to
himself in the prosecution of his cross-examining process. Here were a multitude
of individuals, including men personally the most eminent and
effective in the city, prompted by special antipathies, over
and above general convictions, to call into action the dormant
state-principle of intolerance against an obnoxious teacher. If,
under such provocation, he was allowed to reach the age of seventy,
and to talk publicly for so many years, before any real Melêtus stood
forward, this attests conspicuously the efficacy of the restraining
dispositions among the people, which made their practical habits more
liberal than their professed principles.
Thirdly, whoever has read the account of the trial and defence
of Sokratês, will see that he himself contributed quite as much to
the result as all the three accusers united. Not only he omitted
to do all that might have been done without dishonor, to insure
acquittal, but he held positive language very nearly such as
Melêtus himself would have sought to put in his mouth. He did this
deliberately,—having an exalted opinion both of himself and his own
mission,—and accounting the cup of hemlock, at his age, to be no
calamity. It was only by such marked and offensive self-exaltation
that he brought on the first vote of the dikastery, even then the
narrowest majority, by which he was found guilty: it was only by a
still more aggravated manifestation of the same kind, even to the
pitch of something like insult, that he brought on the second vote,
which pronounced the capital sentence. Now it would be uncandid not
to allow for the effect of such a proceeding on the minds of the
dikastery. They were not at all disposed, of their own accord, to put
in force the recognized principle of intolerance against him. But
when they found that the man who stood before them charged with this
offence, addressed them in a tone such as dikasts had never heard
before and could hardly hear with calmness, they could not but feel
disposed to credit all the worst inferences which his accusers had
suggested, and to regard Sokratês as a dangerous man both religiously
and politically, against whom it was requisite to uphold the majesty
of the court and constitution.
In appreciating this memorable incident, therefore, though the
mischievous principle of intolerance cannot be denied, yet all
the circumstances show that that principle was neither irritable
nor predominant in the Athenian bosom; that even a large body of
collateral antipathies did not readily call it forth against any
individual;
that the more liberal and generous dispositions, which deadened its
malignity, were of steady efficacy, not easily overborne; and that
the condemnation ought to count as one of the least gloomy items in
an essentially gloomy catalogue.
Let us add, that as Sokratês himself did not account his own
condemnation and death, at his age, to be any misfortune, but rather
a favorable dispensation of the gods, who removed him just in
time to escape that painful consciousness of intellectual decline
which induced Demokritus to prepare the poison for himself, so his
friend Xenophon goes a step further, and while protesting against
the verdict of guilty, extols the manner of death as a subject of
triumph; as the happiest, most honorable, and most gracious way, in
which the gods could set the seal upon a useful and exalted life.[805]
It is asserted by Diodorus, and repeated with exaggerations
by other later authors, that after the death of Sokratês the
Athenians bitterly repented of the manner in which they had treated
him, and that they even went so far as to put his accusers to
death without trial.[806] I know not upon what authority this
statement is made, and I disbelieve it altogether. From the tone of
Xenophon’s “Memorabilia,” there is every reason to presume that the
memory of Sokratês still continued to be unpopular at Athens when
that collection was composed. Plato, too, left Athens immediately
after the death of his master, and remained absent for a long series
of years: indirectly, I think, this affords a presumption that no
such reaction took place in Athenian sentiment as that which Diodorus
alleges; and the same presumption is countenanced by the manner in
which the orator Æschinês speaks of the condemnation, half a century
afterwards. I see no reason to believe that the Athenian dikasts,
who doubtless felt themselves justified, and more than justified, in
condemning Sokratês after his own speech, retracted that sentiment
after his decease.
Transcriber's note
- The book cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
- Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the book.
- Blank pages have been skipped.
- Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected, after comparison with a later edition of
this work. Greek text has also been corrected after checking with this later edition and
with Perseus, when the reference was found.
- Original spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been kept, but variant spellings were made
consistent when a predominant usage was found.
- Some inconsistencies in the use of accents over proper nouns
(like “Euthydemus” and “Euthydêmus”) have been retained.
- At Page 409, note 649, the word “οὐδαμοῦ” has
been inserted in the sentence “οὔτ᾽ ἐν τῷ λόγῳ οὐδαμοῦ μέλλοντί τι ἐρεῖν·”, as suggested by modern
editions of Plato.
