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CHAPTER LXVIII.
SOCRATES
That the professional teachers called Sophists in
Greece were intellectual and moral corrupters, and that much corruption grew up
under their teaching m the Athenian mind, are common statements which I have
towards endeavoured to show to be erroneous. Corresponding to these statements
is another, which represents Socrates 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 favourable interpretation of
evidence, as exhibited towards Socrates, 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 Socrates, or Lawful Dealing against Revolution”—goes even
further, and maintains confidently that Socrates was most justly condemned as a
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 Socrates
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—generally different from that of any professional teacher—without
parallel either among contemporaries or successors.
The life of Socrates 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 stained
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. His mother, Phaenarete,
was a midwife, and he had a brother by the mother’s side named Patroclus.
Respecting his wife Xanthippe 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 Socrates, without being absolutely
poor, were humble and unimportant; but he was of genuine Attic breed, belonging
to the ancient gens Daedalidae, which took its name
from Daedalus the mythical artist as progenitor.
The personal qualities of Socrates, 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 Potidaea, 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, Socrates could drink more wine than any guest present, yet without
being overcome or intoxicated. He abstained, on principle, from all extreme
gymnastic training, which required, as necessary condition, extraordinary
abundance of food. 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. 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 favour 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. We cannot 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 demeanour.
Of those friends, the best known to us are Xenophon
and Xenophon and Plato, though there existed in antiquity various dialogues
composed and memoranda put together, by other hearers of Socrates, respecting
his conversations and teaching, which are all now lost. The “Memorabilia” of
Xenophon profess to record actual conversations held by Socrates, and are
prepared with the announced purpose of vindicating him against the accusations
of Meletus and his other accusers on the trial, as well as against unfavourable
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 Socrates 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
Socrates, and employed the name of the latter as spokesman for these opinions
in various dialogues. How much, in the Platonic Socrates, 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 rigour.
The “Apology of Socrates,” the “Criton,” and the “Phaedon” (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,”
the cosmic theories in the “Timaeus,” and the hypothesis of Ideas, as
substantive existences apart from the phenomenal world, in the various
dialogues wherever it is stated, certainly belonged to the second. Of the
ethical dialogues, much may be probably taken to represent Sokrates more or
less platonized.
But though the opinions put by Plato into the Socrates
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 Socrates 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 Socrates was often, indeed
usually, of a more negative, analytical, and generalizing tendency; 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,
Socrates, 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 Socrates—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, Aristophanes 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 Socrates. Of the circumstances of his life we
are almost wholly ignorant. He served as an hoplite at Potidaea, at Delium, and at Amphipolis; with credit apparently in all,
though exaggerated encomiums on the part of his friends provoked an equally
exaggerated scepticism on the part of Athenaeus and others. He seems never to
have filled any political office until the year (B.C. 406) of the battle of
Arginusae, 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 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.
Though these points are requisite to be established,
in order that we may rightly interpret the character of Socrates, 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 or belief of acting under
a mission and signs from especially his Daemon 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 Socrates 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 Socrates 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: his practice was to talk or
converse—to prattle or prose, 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 must crowded, among the booths and tables
where goods were exposed for sale : his whole day was usually spent in this
public manner. 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, &c. 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 of Xenophon’s Memorabilia
recounts his visit to, and dialogue with, Theodote—a beautiful Hetaera 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. Many of them came, attracted by
his reputation, during the later years of his life, from other Grecian cities :
Megara, Thebes, Elis, Cyrene, &c.
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 Socrates 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 Aristophanes 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 m the market-place, than if Prodicus or Protagoras, whom most of them did
not know by sight, had been brought on the stage. It was of little importance
either to them or to Aristophanes whether Socrates 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 Socrates, 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 Socrates : 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 accordingly avails himself of such 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 alurs over at least, if
it does not deny, that speciality of inspiration from the gods, which those who
talked with Socrates (as we learn even from Xenophon) believed, and which
Sokrates himself believed also. 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. Though later writers
speak of this as the daemon or genius of Sokrates, he himself does not
personify it, hut treats it merely as a “divine sign, a prophetic or
supernatural voice”. 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 : and so completely did he march with a
consciousness of this bridle in his month, 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 scruples to
talk of it in that jesting way which doubtless they caught from himself. 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 Daemon or Genius of Socrates as described
by himself and as conceived in the genuine Platonic dialogues—a voice always prohibitory, and bearing exclusively upon his own personal
conduct. That which Plutarch and other admirers of Socrates conceived as a
Daemon or intermediate Being between gods and men, was looked upon by the
fathers of the Christian Church as a devil—by Le Clerc as one of the fallen
angels—by some other modern commentators as mere ironical phraseology on the
part of Socrates himself. Without presuming to determine the question raised in
the former hypotheses, I believe that the last is untrue, and that the
conviction of Socrates 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.
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, Chaerephon. The question
put was, whether any other man was wiser than wiser than Socrates; to which the
Pythian priestess replied that no other man was wiser. Socrates 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, Socrates 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 Socrates) was that I was a wiser man than he, for neither he nor
I knew anything of what was truly good and honourable; 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, Socrates
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 Socrates.
“In this research and scrutiny (said Socrates 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 Socrates,
felt most convinced of his own worthlessness as to wisdom, was really the
wisest of men. My service to the god has not only constrained me to live in
constant poverty 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 Potidaea, 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. 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. My mission as your monitor is
a mark of the special favour of the god to you; and if you condemn me, it will
be your loss, for you will find none other such. Perhaps you will ask me, Why
cannot you go away, Socrates, 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”.
I have given rather ample extracts from the Platonic
Apology, because no one can conceive fairly the character of Socrates who does
not enter into the spirit of that impressive discourse. We see in it plain
evidence of a 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 Chaerephon from
Delphi was a fact of far more importance in his history than the so-called
Daemon, 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 tram of
generalizing dialectics and Zenonian negation—an
intellectual vein with which the religious impulse rarely comes into
continence. 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, 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 Socrates, 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—“a elenctic 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”. Nothing
of this character belonged either to Parmenides and Anaxagoras before him, or to
Plato and Aristotle after him. Both Pythagoras and Empedocles did indeed lay
claim to supernatural communications, mingled with their philosophical
teaching. But though there be thus far a general analogy between them and
Socrates, the modes of manifestation were so utterly different that no fair
comparison can be instituted.
The third and most important characteristic of
Socrates—that trough 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 Cosmos as one
undistinguishable whole, blending together cosmogony, astronomy, geometry, physics, metaphysics, &c. The
Ionic as well as the Eleatic philosophers, Pythagoras as well as Empedocles,
all set before themselves this vast and undefined problem; each framing some
system suited to his own vein of imagination, religious, poetical, scientific,
or sceptical. According to that honourable 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 Socrates received his education. He
received at least the ordinary amount of instruction in all: he devoted himself
as a young man to the society and lessons of the physical philosopher Archelaus
(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. 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—before
he struck out any novelties of his own. And in Plato’s dialogue called
“Parmenides,” Socrates appears as a young man full of ardour for the discussion
of the Parmenidean theory, looking up with reverence to Parmenides and Zeno,
and receiving from them, instructions in the process of dialectical
investigation. I have already in the preceding chapter 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 Sokrates, imbibing this conviction from the ancient Parmenides 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 both
the positive conclusions and the negative conclusions which could be deduced
from it, however laborious such a process might be, and however little
appreciated by the multitude. Little as we know the circumstances which went to
form the remarkable mind of Socrates, 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.”
To a mind at all exigent on the score of proof,
physical science as handled in that day wag indeed likely to appear not only
unsatisfactory, but hopeless; and Socrates, 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. His master Archelaus, though
mainly occupied with physics, also speculated more or less concerning moral
subjects—concerning justice and injustice, the laws, &c., and is said to
have maintained the tenet, that justice and injustice were determined by law or
convention, not by nature. From him, perhaps, Socrates 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. Socrates could not go into the
public assembly, the Dikastery, or even the theatre, without hearing
discussions about what was just or unjust, honourable or base, expedient or
hurtful, &c., 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 Socrates, which formed his bond of connexion 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 Socrates 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,” Socrates
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 phaenomena 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.
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 Socrates took of physical science and its prospects. It
is the very same scepticism in substance, and carried further in degree, though
here invested with a religious colouring, 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 blameable. 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
Sokrates) 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 Socrates—“You may judge how unprofitable are
these studies by observing how widely the students differ among themselves”—remains
in high favour down to the present day, and may constantly be seen employed
against theoretical arguments, in every department.
Socrates 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. Yet here again, if a man had been diligent in
learning all that the gods permitted to be learnt—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, so far as to signify beforehand how
they intended to act in putting the final hand and in settling the
undecipherable portions of the problem. 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 Socrates, one of
the most signal evidences of their care for the human race. 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. 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.
Such was the capital innovation made
by Sokrates in regard to the subject of Athenian study, bringing down
philosophy (to use the expression of Cicero) 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 Socrates 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”; 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 subject of study, exhibit Socrates 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.
“Socrates (says the latter) continued
incessantly discussing human affairs (the sense of this word will be understood
by what has been said above), investigating—What is piety? What is impiety?
What is the honourable 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 honourable; men who
were ignorant of them he assimilated to slaves.”
Socrates (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. Moreover, Aristotle says: “To Socrates
we may unquestionably assign two novelties—Inductive Discourses and the
Definitions of general terms”
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 Socrates, and is thus a better witness than Plato, whose genius
not only conceived but greatly enlarged it for didactic purposes of is 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 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, &c. But familiar as these words have now
become, they denote a mental process, of which, in 440—430 B.C., few men
besides Sokrates had any conscious perception. Of course men conceived and
described things in classes, as is implied in the very form and 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 favourable 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 me 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 analyse 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 Prodicus discriminated the significations of words nearly
equivalent and liable to be confounded. All these proceedings appeared then so
new as to incur the ridicule even of Plato; yet they were branches of that same
analytical tendency which Sokrates 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 criticise 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, Socrates.
To comprehend the full value of the
improvements struck out by Socrates, 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, Empedocles, Democritus, 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 Cosmos first began, and how it continued to move on.
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.
These early philosophers endeavoured to find out the beginnings, the component
elements, the moving cause or causes, of things in the mass; 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 Socrates. 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;
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 Socrates originated.
It was at that time a great progress
to break 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 “Phaedon” of Plato) that
Socrates, 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 our security for general truth
greatly 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 Sophistes 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 Socrates. What was now begun by
Socrates 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 M. 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—Empedocles, Anaxagoras,
and the Pythagoreans, and that the movement in advance of these latter
commences with Socrates.
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 Sokrates 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 Socrates
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. 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 Socrates, professing ignorance, put any such question, he
found no difficulty in obtaining an answer, given offhand, 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, Sokrates 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 m 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. Socrates, 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
connexion between the dialectic method and the logical distribution of
particulars into species and genera. The discussion first raised by Socrates
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 Plato1 calls seeing the One in the Many, and the
Many in the One. Without any predecessor to copy, Socrates fell as it were
instinctively into that which Aristotle 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, Socrates
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 Socrates—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 Socrates acted in pursuing this
system of conversation and interrogation. He probably began it in a tentative
way, 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 Chaerephon came back with the oracular answer from Delphi (noticed a few pages above), to
which Socrates himself alluded 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 Socrates at once laments and
accounts for before the Dikasts. 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 Socrates—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 Sokrates 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 selfestimation 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,” of human life with
its duties, purposes, and conditions—the knowledge of which Sokrates 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,
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.
In pursuing the thread of his
examination, there was no topic upon which Socrates 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. 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 Socrates 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 learnt: 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.
Such was the general contrast which
Socrates 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 Aristeides and Pericles
acquired the eminent qualities essential for guiding and governing Athens,
since they neither learnt them under any known master, as they had studied
music and gymnastics, nor could ensure 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, 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…? In several of the
Platonic dialogues, the discussion turns on the analysis of these
last-mentioned words—the “Laches” and “Protagoras” on courage, the “Charmides”
on temperance, the “Euthyphron” on holiness.
By these and similar discussions did
Socrates, 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; 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, bur 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, 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 a handmaid,
expositor, or apologist of the pre-existing sentiment; as an accessory after
the fact, not as a test of 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 analyse the general propositions
themselves, or to reflect whether he had verified their import, and could apply
them rationally and consistently.
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 pre-established 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
in signification, and competent both to apply comprehensive words and to assume
the truth or falsehood of large propositions, without any special analysis or
study.
There is one important difference,
however, to note, between our time and that of Socrates. In his day, the
impressions not only respecting man and society, but also respecting the
physical world, were of this same self-propagating and unscientific character.
The popular astronomy of the Socratic 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 Nicias, or Anytus and Meletus, but even
Socrates himself protested against the impudence of Anaxagoras, when he
degraded the divine Helios and Selene 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”. 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 Socrates 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 Socrates, 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 : 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. Socrates 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,”.... 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.
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. It was in furtherance of
these rational conceptions—“Science and Art”—that Socrates 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 yourself”—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. His manner of enforcing it was alike original and
effective; and though he was dexterous in varying his topics 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 Socrates 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, Socrates 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.
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; producing upon several of them an effect of permanent alienation,
so that they never came near him again, 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
then a lofty admiration of Socrates, but were fond of trying to copy his
negative polemics. Probably men like Alcibiades and Critias frequented his
society chiefly for this 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 Socrates, 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. 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 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. Timon the
Satirist and Zeno the Epicurean accordingly described him as a buffoon who
turned every one into ridicule, especially men of eminence.
It is by Plato that the negative and
indirect vein of Socrates has been worked out and immortalized; while Xenophon,
who sympathized little in it, complains that others looked at his master too
exclusively or this side, and that they could not conceive him as a guide to
virtue, but only as a stirring and propulsive force. One of the principal
objects of his “Memorabilia” is to show that Socrates, 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. 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,
&c. 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 Socrates with Prodicus 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
Socrates and Plato thought that little mental improvement could be produced by
expositions directly communicated, or by new written matter lodged in the
memory. It was necessary that mind should work upon mind, by short question and
answer, or an expert employment of the dialectic process, 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 Socrates if we supposed 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 Socratic 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. 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 Socrates 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. This second stage 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. Socrates 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 rigour of a Lycurgean nurse, whatever might
be the reluctance of the mother-mind to part with its new-born. Plato is
fertile in illustrating 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 Socrates 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. On the
subjects to which he applied himself—man and society—his hearers had done
little but feel and affirm: Socrates 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 Socrates, 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 instantiae negativae the scientific value of which is dwelt upon
in the “Novum Organon,”—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 track of particulars, as conditions of every just and consistent
generalization, and to divert it from becoming enslaved to unexamined formulae
or from delivering mere intensity of persuasion under the authoritative phrase
of reason. Instead of anxiety to plant in the hearer a conclusion leady-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 he 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 Sokrates, 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 Socratic method aspires. In many of the Platonic dialogues,
wherein Socrates 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
Socratic 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 Socrates, 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.
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 sceptical
subtlety.
But over and above any love of the
process, the subjects to which dialectics were applied, from Sokrates
downwards, man and society, ethics, polities, metaphysics, &c., 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 co-operating 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, 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 formulae. 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 labour 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 Socrates 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.
Understanding thus the method of
Socrates, 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 and 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 Socrates, 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
Socrates 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. Eukleides and the Megaric school of philosophers—Aristippus and the
Cyrenaic—Antisthenes and Diogenes, the first of those called the Cynics—all
emanated more or less directly from the stimulus imparted by Socrates, though
each followed a different vein of thought. Ethics continue to be what Socrates
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 Sokrates permanently enlarged the horizon, improved the
method, and multiplied the ascendant 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 Socrates,
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 Socrates, 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 (sometimes also a part of the Ethical End) as if it were
the whole. Socrates 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. 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, &c.,
taking account only of the intellect, is also certain, and has been remarked by
Aristotle as well as by many others. It is fruitless, in my judgment, to
attempt by any refined explanation to make out that Socrates 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, maybe 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 Socrates 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, honourable, 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.
The opinion here maintained
illustrates forcibly the general doctrine of Socrates. 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 sumtotal 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 ensure 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 Socrates 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.
Socrates affirmed that “well-doing”
was the noblest pursuit of man. “Well-doing” consisted in doing a thing well,
after having learnt 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 most beloved by the gods is he who
as a 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.” This is the
Socratic 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 all men that what they chiefly required
was teaching and practice as preparations for act; and that therefore
ignorance, especially ignorance mistaking itself for knowledge, was their
capital deficiency. The religion of Socrates, as well as his ethics, had
reference to practical human ends. His mind had little of that
transcendentalism which his scholar Plato exhibits in such abundance.
It is indisputable, then, that
Socrates 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. In
truth, this is one particular characteristic of his admonitions. He exhorted
men to limit their external wants, to he sparing in indulgence, and to
cultivate, even in preference to honours 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 Socrates 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 Prodicus,
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 Socrates.
The political opinions of Socrates
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”. Just as the pilot governed on
shipboard, the surgeon in a sick man’s house, the trainer in a palaestra—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 (Socrates 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, nor would any one pick out a
carpenter or a musician in like manner.
We do not know what provisions
Socrates 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 tune make choice of another. But it does not appear
that Socrates 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, Socrates), for if he does, he will
himself be the greatest loser.”
We may notice in this doctrine of
Socrates 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 define it, would
have been something like that which is worked out in the “Cyropaedia”
of Xenophon.
In describing the persevering activity
of Socrates, 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 Arginusae, 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
Aristophanes 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 Meletus,
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:—“Socrates 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 Socrates 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 Socrates 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 Socrates 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 longstanding and uncontradicted calumnies—raised against him
throughout his cross-examining career.
In truth, the mission of Socrates, 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 mental
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, 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 Socrates
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 constituent items, we shall
wonder only that Socrates could have gone on so long standing in the
market-place to aggravate it, and that the indictment of Meletus 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. The truth is, that as history presents to us only one man who
ever devoted his life to prosecute this duty of an elenctic 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 behaviour, among one
another, which characterized the Athenian population, and which Pericles 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 Socrates from being disturbed by the numerous enemies
which he provoked. At Sparta, at Thebes, at Argos, Miletus, 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 aesthetical 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
Socrates 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 Socrates.
In the first place, Anytus, one of the
accusers of Socrates, appears to have become incensed against him on private
grounds. The son of Anytus had manifested interest in his conversation; and
Socrates, observing in the young man intellectual impulse and promise,
endeavoured to dissuade his father from bringing him up to his own trade of a
leather-seller. It was in this general way that a great proportion of the
antipathy against Socrates 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; hence the general charge against Socrates of
corrupting the youth. Now, this circumstance had recently happened in the
peculiar case of Anytus, a rich tradesman, a leading man m politics, and just
now of peculiar influence in the city, because he had been one of the leading
fellow-labourers 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 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 Socrates and the Sophists.
While we can thus point out a recent
occurrence, which had brought one of the most ascendant politicians in the city
into special exasperation against Socrates, another circumstance which weighed
him down was his past connexion with the deceased Critias and Alcibiades. 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 Critias 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 Socrates had educated both Critias and Alcibiades was affirmed by
the accusers, and seemingly believed by the general public, both at the time
and afterwards. 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 Socrates 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 Socrates to Alcibiades 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 male beauty fired the imagination of Greeks, especially that of
Sokrates, more than the charms of women. From the year 420 B.C., in which the
activity of Alkibiades as a political leader commenced, it seems unlikely that
he could have seen much of Socrates, 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
Socrates, therefore, his connexion with Alcibiades must at least have been a
fact long past and gone. Respecting Critias we make out less. As he was a
kinsman of Plato (one of the well-known companions of Socrates, and present at
his trial), and himself an accomplished and literary man, his association with
Socrates may have continued longer; at least a colour was given for so
asserting. Though the supposition that any of the vices either of Critias or
Alcibiades were encouraged, or even tolerated, by Socrates, 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 Critias.
Of Meletus, 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 Socrates. They were the last men to bear such an exposure with
patience; while 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 Socrates 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 the second charge. He questions Meletus
before the Dikastery, and the latter is represented as answering, that he meant
to accuse Socrates of not believing in the gods at all; to which imputed
disbelief Socrates 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.
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. Socrates 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
Socrates as a speculator on physics as well as a rhetorical teacher for
pleading, making the worse appear the better reason. Socrates in the “Platonic
Defence” appeals to the number of persons who had listened to his conversation,
whether any of them had ever heard him say one word on the subject of physical
studies; while Xenophon goes farther, and represents him as having positively
discountenanced them, on the ground of impiety.
As there were three distinct accusers
to speak against Socrates, so we may reasonably suppose that they would concert
beforehand on what topics each should insist—Meletus undertaking that which
related to religion, while Anytus and Lykon would
dwell on the political grounds of attack. In the “Platonic Apology,” Socrates
comments emphatically on the allegations of Meletus, questions him publicly
before the Dikasts, and criticises 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 connexion 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 Socrates, 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.
Socrates (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 there arising from bad qualification was far less
than in the case of the Archons. 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, Critias and Alcibiades, 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; both
of them authors of ruinous mischief to the city.
Moreover, the youth learnt from him
conceit of their own superior wisdom, and the habit of insulting their fathers
as well as of slighting their other kinsmen. Socrates 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 were 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 Socrates
was not only the wisest of men, but the only person capable of making his
pupils wise; other advisers being worthless compared with him.
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, Socrates 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
Agamemnon, 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. Socrates interpreted this
passage (the accuser affirmed) as if Homer praised the application of stripes
to poor men and the common people.
Nothing could be easier than for an
accuser to find matter for inculpation of Socrates, 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 Socrates drew from them inferences quite contrary to
those alleged; 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 Socrates with Critias and
Alcibiades. That Socrates 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”. 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 Socrates,
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 Socratic
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
Socrates, 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 Socrates against the choice Archons by lot at Athens are not denied by
Xenophon. The accuser urged that “by such censures Socrates excited the young
men to despise the established constitution, and to become lawless and violent
in their conduct”. 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 continued to be abundantly instituted in France, under the first
President of the Republic (1850). There can hardly be a more serious political
mischief than such confusion of the disapproving critic with a conspirator, and
such imposition of silence upon dissentient minorities. Nor has there ever been
any case in which such an imputation was more destitute of colour than that of
Socrates, 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 Chaerephon was actually in exile
with the democrats.
Xenophon lays great emphasis on two
points, when defending Socrates against his accusers. First, Socrates was in
his own conduct virtuous, self-denying, and strict in obedience to the law.
Next, 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 favour, should be tried and
found guilty as a corrupter 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 Sokrates 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
Critias and Alcibiades.
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 Socrates 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 557 in total number, if a confused statement in Diogenes Laertius
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 that Socrates 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 Hermogenes
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.
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 proved that Socrates 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 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 Socrates 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 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 Socrates, 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 selfconfiding 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. Socrates 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, 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 Meletus 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; 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. He considers that the
mission imposed upon him is among the greatest blessings ever conferred by the
gods upon Athens. He deprecates those murmurs of surprise or displeasure which
his discourse evidently called forth more than once—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. 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. 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. 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 witnesses 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.
“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 he a good. 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 dishonouring the city. 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 dishonourable 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 Meletus. I leave to you and to
the god to decide as may turn out best both for me and for you.”
No one who reads the “Platonic
Apology” of Socrates 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—“sola posteritatis cura,
et abruptis vitae blandimentis”.
The effect produced upon the Dikasts was such as
Socrates 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? 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 Socrates 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 demeanour would appear to betray an insolence
not without analogy to Alcibiades or Critias, 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, hut 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 Socrates 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 favour of the Dikasts,
or flatter or entreat them contrary to the laws, and thus obtained acquittal.
But Socrates 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.” Now no one in Athens except Socrates, 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, 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 Socrates had
pronounced it, or even a much less able speech, if inoffensive, he would have
been acquitted. Quintilian indeed expresses his satisfaction that Socrates
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 oi the Dikasts, justice will compel us to admit that Sokrates
deliberately brought it upon himself.
If the verdict of guilty was thus
brought upon Socrates by his own consent and co-operation, 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 Meletus, in his indictment and
speech against Socrates, had called for the infliction of capital punishment.
It was for Socrates 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 noway 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… And had he done this purely and simply, there can be little
doubt that the proposition would have passed. But the language of Socrates,
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 Meletus? 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 minae, and they engage to pay it for me. A
fine of thirty minae, therefore, is the
counter-penalty which I submit for your judgment.”
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
Socrates, therefore, should proclaim himself worthy of such an honour, 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, Crito, and his other friends around him, who, though sympathizing with
him fully, knew well that he was assuring the success of the proposition of
Meletus, 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 minae 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 Socrates 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. 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 myths 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.
There can be no doubt that the
sentence really appeared to Socrates in this point of view, and to his friends
also, after 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.
It was thus the persuasion of Socrates 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, Socrates
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 prison for 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, Socrates 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 Crito had even
arranged a scheme for procuring his escape, by a bribe to the gaoler. This
scheme was only prevented from taking effect by the decided refusal of Socrates
to become a party in any breach of the law—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, Kebes, and Phaedon, on the immortality of the soul, is
referred in the Platonic Dialogue called “Phaedon”. Of that conversation the
main topics and doctrines are Platonic rather than Socratic. But the picture
which the dialogue presents of the temper and state of mind of Sokrates, 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—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 Socrates will not be surprised
to hear that his last words, addressed to Crito immediately before he passed
into a state of insensibility, were—“Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius:
discharge the debt, and by no means omit it”.
Thus perished the “parens philosophiae”—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, &c., 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 Socrates, 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 Socrates 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, Arkesilau,
and the New Academy, a century and more afterwards, thought that they were
following the example of Socrates (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 Socrates 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 sceptic—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 labour after it. But respecting the
topics which concern man and society, the views of Sokrates 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, Socrates went a step farther— 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 lie 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. Sokrates 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, patriotism, &c., 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 Socrates 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.
Sokrates 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 processes teachers for active life, sought to erect a
superstructure of virtue and ability; but to Sokrates 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. Sokrates 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 Socrates 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 fur combining them anew upon consistent principles.
If then the philosophers of the New
Academy considered Socrates either as a sceptic 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 Socrates used it, was
animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable
precursor to its attainment. There are two points, and two points only, in
topics concerning man and society, with regard to which Sokrates is a sceptic—or
rather, which he denies, and on the negation of which his whole method and
purposes 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; 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 manoeuvring. But though
negative in his means, Socrates 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. Socrates was indeed the reverse
of a sceptic: 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 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 Socratic 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 Socrates 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, analyse, and
reconstruct these ancient mental compounds, and who has not been driven to 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, 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 Socrates 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.
Sokrates 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 Republica”
and generally” In 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 Socrates 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, 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, Socrates 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
Socrates 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 Meletus 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 Socrates will see that he himself contributed quite
as much to the result us all the three accusers united. Not only he omitted to
do all that might have been done without dishonour, to ensure acquittal, but he
held positive language very nearly such as Meletus 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
Sokrates 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 m an essentially gloomy catalogue.
Let us add, that as Socrates himself
did not account his own condemnation and death, at his age, to be any
misfortune, but rather a favourable dispensation of the gods, who removed him
just in time to escape that painful consciousness of intellectual decline which
induced Democritus to prepare the poison tor himself, so his friend Xenophon
goes a step farther, and while protesting against the verdict of guilty, extols
the manner of death as a subject of triumph—as the happiest, most honourable,
and most gracious way, in which the gods could set the seal upon an useful and
exalted life.
It is asserted by Diodorus, and
repeated with exaggerations by other later authors, that after the death of
Socrates 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. 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 Socrates 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 some time:
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 Aeschines 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 Sokrates after his own
speech, retracted that sentiment after his decease.
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