"But," says Socrates, "there must be certain acts
which are the proper products of justice, as of other functions or
skills?
which are the proper products of justice, as of other functions or
skills?
A Short History of Greek Philosophy by J. Marshall
This is what the physician tries to do by his drugs; this is
what the Sophist tries to do by his words. Virtue then is teachable in
so far as it is possible to persuade a boy or a man by rhetoric that
that course of conduct which pleases others is a pleasant course for
him. But if any one happens not to be persuaded of this, and continues
to prefer his own particular course of conduct, this _is_ for him the
good course. You cannot blame him; you cannot say he is wrong. If you
punish him you simply endeavour to supply the dose of unpleasantness
which may {89} be needed to put the balance in his case on the same
side as it already occupies in the case of other people.
It may be worth while to anticipate a little, and insert here in
summary the refutation of this position put into the mouth of Socrates
by Plato in the _Theaetetus_: "But I ought not to conceal from you that
there is a serious objection which may be urged against this doctrine
of Protagoras. For there are states, such as madness and dreaming, in
which perception is false; and half our life is spent in dreaming; and
who can say that at this instant we are not dreaming? Even the fancies
of madmen are real at the time. But if knowledge is perception, how
can we distinguish between the true and the false in such cases? . . .
Shall I tell you what amazes me in your friend Protagoras? 'What may
that be? ' I like his doctrine that what appears is; but I wonder that
he did not begin his great work on truth with a declaration that a pig,
or a dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a
measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he
might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he
was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one
man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own
judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what
need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why
should we be less knowing than he is, or have to go to him, if every
man is the measure of all things? " . . . Socrates now resumes the
argument. As he is very desirous of doing justice to Protagoras, he
insists on citing his own words: 'What appears to each man is to him. '
"And how," asks Socrates, "are these words reconcilable with the fact
that all mankind are agreed in thinking themselves wiser than others in
some respects, and inferior to them in others? In the hour of danger
they are ready to fall down and worship any one who is their superior
in wisdom as if he were a god. And the world is full of men who are
asking to be taught and willing to be ruled, and of other men who are
willing to rule and teach them. All which implies that men do judge of
one another's impressions, and think some wise and others foolish. How
will Protagoras answer this argument? For he cannot say that no one
deems another ignorant or mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands
and tens of thousands are ready to maintain the opposite. The
multitude may not and do not agree in Protagoras' own thesis, 'that man
is the measure of all things,' and then who is to decide? Upon hip own
showing must not his 'truth' depend on the number of suffrages, and be
more or less true in proportion as he has more or fewer of them? And
{91} [the majority being against him] he will be bound to acknowledge
that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, which is a famous
jest. And if he admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak
truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak truly. But his
opponents will refuse to admit this as regards themselves, and he must
admit that they are right in their refusal. The conclusion is, that
all mankind, including Protagoras himself, will deny that he speaks
truly; and his truth will be true neither to himself nor to anybody
else" (Jowett, _Plato_, iv. pp. 239 _sqq. _)
The refutation seems tolerably complete, but a good deal had to happen
before Greece was ready to accept or Plato to offer such a refutation.
{92}
CHAPTER X
THE SOPHISTS (_concluded_)
_Nothing knowable--The solitude of scepticism--The lawlessness of
scepticism--The good in scepticism_
[183]
Gorgias was perhaps even more eminent a Sophist than Protagoras. He
was a native of Leontini in Sicily, and came to Athens in the year 427
B. C. on a public embassy from his native city. The splendid reputation
for political and rhetorical ability, which preceded him to Athens, he
fully justified both by his public appearances before the Athenian
assembly, and by the success of his private instructions to the crowds
of wealthy young men who resorted to him. He dressed in magnificent
style, and affected a lofty and poetical manner of speech, which
offended the more critical, but which pleased the crowd.
[181]
He also, like Protagoras, published a treatise in which he expounded
his fundamental principles, and like Protagoras, he preceded it with a
striking if somewhat ironical title, and an apophthegm in which he
summarised his doctrine. The title of his work was _Of the
Non-Existent_, that is, _Of Nature_, and {93} his dictum, "Nothing
exists, or if anything exists, it cannot be apprehended by man, and
even if it could be apprehended, the man who apprehended it could not
expound or explain it to his neighbour. " In support of this strange
doctrine, Gorgias adopted the quibbling method of argument which had
been applied with some success to dialectical purposes by Zeno,
Melissus, and others (see above, pp. 44 _sqq. _)
[185]
His chief argument to prove the first position laid down by him
depended on a double and ambiguous use of the word _is_; "That which is
not, _is_ the non-existent: the word _is_ must, therefore, be
applicable to it as truly as when we say That which is, _is_;
therefore, being is predicable of that which is not. " So conversely he
proved not-being to be predicable of that which is. And in like manner
he made away with any possible assertions as to the finite or infinite,
the eternal or created, nature of that which is. Logic could supply
him with alternative arguments from whatever point he started, such as
would seem to land the question in absurdity. Hence his first position
was (he claimed) established, that 'Nothing is. '
To prove the second, that even if anything is, it cannot be known to
man, he argued thus: "If what a man thinks is not identical with what
is, plainly what is cannot be thought. And that what a man thinks is
not identical with what is can be {94} shown from the fact that
thinking does not affect the facts. You may imagine a man flying, or a
chariot coursing over the deep, but you do not find these things to
occur because you imagine them. Again, if we assume that what we think
is identical with what is, then it must be impossible to think of what
is not. But this is absurd; for we can think of such admittedly
imaginary beings as Scylla and Chimaera, and multitudes of others.
There is therefore no necessary relation between our thoughts and any
realities; we may believe, but we cannot prove, which (if any) of our
conceptions have relation to an external fact and which have not. "
[187]
Nor thirdly, supposing any man had obtained an apprehension of what is
real, could he possibly communicate it to any one else. If a man saw
anything, he could not possibly by verbal description make clear what
it is he sees to a man who has never seen. And so if a man has not
himself the apprehension of reality, mere words from another cannot
possibly give him any idea of it. He may imagine he has the same idea
as the speaker, but where is he going to get the common test by which
to establish the identity?
Without attempting to follow Gorgias further, we can see plainly enough
the object and purport of the whole doctrine. Its main result is to
_isolate_. It isolates each man from his fellows; he cannot tell {95}
what they know or think, they cannot reach any common ground with him.
It isolates him from nature; he cannot tell what nature is, he cannot
tell whether he knows anything of nature or reality at all. It
isolates him from himself; he cannot tell for certain what relation
exists (if any) between what he imagines he perceives at any moment and
any remembered or imagined previous experiences; he cannot be sure that
there ever were any such experiences, or what that self was (if
anything) which had them, or whether there was or is any self
perceiving anything.
Let us imagine the moral effect on the minds of the ablest youth of
Greece of such an absolute collapse of belief. The philosophic
scepticism did not deprive them of their appetites or passions; it did
not in the least alter their estimate of the prizes of success, or the
desirability of wealth and power. All it did was to shatter the
invisible social bonds of reverence and honour and truth and justice,
which in greater or less degree act as a restraining force upon the
purely selfish appetites of men. Not only belief in divine government
disappeared, but belief in any government external or internal; justice
became a cheating device to deprive a man of what was ready to his
grasp; good-faith was stupidity when it was not a more subtle form of
deceit; morality was at best a mere convention which a man might cancel
if {96} he pleased; the one reality was the appetite of the moment, the
one thing needful its gratification; society, therefore, was universal
war, only with subtler weapons.
Of course Protagoras and Gorgias were only notable types of a whole
horde of able men who in various ways, and with probably less clear
notions than these men of the drift or philosophic significance of
their activity, helped all over Greece in the promulgation of this new
gospel of self-interest. Many Sophists no doubt troubled themselves
very little with philosophical questions; they were 'agnostics,'
know-nothings; all they professed to do was to teach some practical
skill of a verbal or rhetorical character. They had nothing to do with
the nature or value of ideals; they did not profess to say whether any
end or aim was in itself good or bad, but given an end or aim, they
were prepared to help those who hired them to acquire a skill which
would be useful towards attaining it.
But whether a philosophy or ultimate theory of life be expressly stated
or realised by a nation or an individual, or be simply ignored by them,
there always is some such philosophy or theory underlying their action,
and that philosophy or theory tends to work itself out to its logical
issue in action, whether men openly profess it or no. And the theory
of negation of law in nature or in man which underlay {97} the
sophistic practice had its logical and necessary effect on the social
structure throughout Greece, in a loosening of the bonds of religion,
of family reverence and affection, of patriotism, of law, of honour.
Thucydides in a well-known passage (iii. 82) thus describes the
prevalent condition of thought in his own time, which was distinctively
that of the sophistic teaching: "The common meaning of words was turned
about at men's pleasure; the most reckless bravo was deemed the most
desirable friend; a man of prudence and moderation was styled a coward;
a man who listened to reason was a good-for-nothing simpleton. People
were trusted exactly in proportion to their violence and
unscrupulousness, and no one was so popular as the successful
conspirator, except perhaps one who had been clever enough to outwit
him at his own trade, but any one who honestly attempted to remove the
causes of such treacheries was considered a traitor to his party. As
for oaths, no one imagined they were to be kept a moment longer than
occasion required; it was, in fact, an added pleasure to destroy your
enemy if you had managed to catch him through his trusting to your
word. "
These are the words not of Plato, who is supposed often enough to allow
his imagination to carry him beyond his facts about the Sophists as
about others, nor are they the words of a satiric poet such as {98}
Aristophanes. They are the words of the most sober and philosophic of
Greek historians, and they illustrate very strikingly the tendency,
nay, the absolute necessity, whereby the theories of philosophers in
the closet extend themselves into the market-place and the home, and
find an ultimate realisation of themselves for good or for evil in the
'business and bosoms' of the common crowd.
It is not to be said that the individualistic and iconoclastic movement
which the Sophists represented was wholly bad, or wholly unnecessary,
any more (to again quote a modern instance) than that the French
Revolution was. There was much, no doubt, in the traditional religion
and morality of Greece at that time which represented obsolete and
antiquated conditions, when every city lived apart from its neighbours
with its own narrow interests and local cults and ceremonials. Greece
was ceasing to be an unconnected crowd of little separate communities;
unconsciously it was preparing itself for a larger destiny, that of
conqueror and civiliser of East and West. This scepticism, utterly
untenable and unworkable on the lines extravagantly laid down by its
leading teachers, represented the birth of new conditions of thought
and action adapted to the new conditions of things. On the surface,
and accepted literally, it seemed to deny the possibility of knowledge;
it threatened to destroy humanity and {99} civilisation. But its
strength lay latent in an implied denial only of what was merely
traditional; it denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions; it
was laying the foundations of a broader humanity. It represented the
claim of a new generation to have no dogma or assumption thrust on it
by mere force, physical or moral. "_I_ too am a man," it said; "_I_
have rights; _my_ reason must be convinced. " This is the fundamental
thought at the root of most revolutions and reformations and revivals,
and the thought is therefore a necessary and a just one.
Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable condition of human affairs
that nothing new, however necessary or good can come into being out of
the old, without much sorrow and many a birth-pang. The extravagant,
the impetuous, the narrow-minded on both sides seize on their points of
difference, raise them into battle-cries, and make what might be a
peaceful regeneration a horrid battlefield of contending hates. The
Christ when He comes brings not peace into the world, but a sword. And
men of evil passions and selfish ambitions are quick on both sides to
make the struggle of old and new ideals a handle for their own
indulgence or their own advancement; the Pharisees and the Judases
between them make the Advent in some of its aspects a sorry spectacle.
A reconciler was wanted who should wed what {100} was true in the new
doctrine of individualism with what was valuable in the old doctrine of
universal and necessary truth; who should be able to say, "Yes, I
acknowledge that your individual view of things must be reckoned with,
and mine, and everybody else's; and for that very reason do I argue for
a universal and necessary truth, because the very truth for you as an
individual is just this universal. " The union and identification of
the Individual and Universal,--this paradox of philosophy is the
doctrine of Socrates.
{101}
CHAPTER XI
SOCRATES
_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of
men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is
knowledge_
The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the
practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any
further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of
the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social and moral
chaos. Only by brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth
evoke a new order; only out of the moral darkness could a new
intellectual light be made to shine. The social and personal anarchy
seemed to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophy of nature; if
ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it must be through a
revision of the theory of morals. If it could be proved that the
doctrine of individualism, of isolation, which the analysis of a
Protagoras or a Gorgias had reached, was not only _unlivable_ but
unthinkable,--carried the seeds of its own destruction, theoretical as
well as practical, within {102} itself,--then the analysis of
_perception_, from which this moral individualism issued, might itself
be called to submit to revision, and a stable point of support in the
moral world might thus become a centre of stability for the
intellectual and the physical also.
By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis of philosophy
produced in Greece through the moral and social chaos of the sophistic
teaching had two issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried
out on the one side with a less, on the other side with a greater
completeness. The less complete reaction from sophistic teaching
attempted only such reconstruction of the moral point of view as should
recover a law or principle of general and universally cogent character,
whereon might be built anew a _moral_ order without attempting to
extend the inquiry as to a universal principle into the regions of
abstract truth or into physics. The more complete and logical
reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal principle in morals,
undertook a logical reconstruction on the recovered universal basis all
along the line of what was knowable.
To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the
world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to
deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the
way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended
exposition of the new point of {103} view. Those who in succession to
him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in
the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_.
Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the
knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle.
Greek philosophy then marks with the life of Socrates a parting of the
ways in two senses: _first_, inasmuch as with him came the reaction
from a physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in a moral
chaos; and _second_, inasmuch as from him the two great streams of
later philosophy issued--the one a philosophy of law or universals in
_action_, the other a philosophy of law or universals in _thought_ and
_nature_ as well.
Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and Phaenarete a midwife, was
born at Athens in or about the year 469 B. C. His parents were probably
poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too poor to pay the
fees required for instruction by the Sophists of his time. But in
whatever way acquired or assimilated, it is certain that there was
little of the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which
Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.
Among a people distinguished generally for their handsome features and
noble proportions, Socrates was a notable exception. His face was
squat and {104} round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick; he was
clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress, a thorough
'Bohemian,' as we should call him. He was, however, gifted with an
uncommon bodily vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by
temperament moderate in food and drink, yet capable on occasion of
drinking most people 'under the table. ' He was of an imperturbable
humour, not to be excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein of
sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural shrewdness astonishing, all
the more astonishing because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism
and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he felt the visitation
of a mysterious internal voice, to which or to his own internal
communings he would sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted
stillness for hours. The voice within him was felt as a restraining
force, limiting his action in various ways, but leaving him free to
wander about among his fellows, to watch their doings and interpret
their thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of every class,
high and low, rich and poor, concerning righteousness and justice and
goodness and purity and truth. He did not enter on his philosophic
work with some grand general principle ready-made, to which he was
prepared to fit the facts by hook or by crook. Rather he compared
himself to his mother, the midwife; he sought to help others to {105}
express themselves; he had nothing to tell them, he wanted them to tell
him. This was the irony of Socrates, the eternal _questioning_, which
in time came to mean in people's minds what the word does now. For it
was hard, and grew every year harder, to convince people that so subtle
a questioner was as ignorant as he professed to be; or that the man who
could touch so keenly the weak point of all other men's answers, had no
answer to the problems of life himself.
In striking contrast, then, to the method of all previous philosophies,
Socrates busied himself to begin with, not with some general
intellectual _principle_, but with a multitude of different _people_,
with their notions especially on moral ideas, with the meaning or
no-meaning which they attached to particular words,--in short, with the
individual, the particular, the concrete, the every-day. He did not at
all deny that he had a purpose in all this. On the contrary, he openly
professed that he was in search of the lost universal, the lost _law_
of men's thoughts and actions. He was convinced that life was not the
chaos that the Sophists made out; that nobody really believed it to be
a chaos; that, on the contrary, everybody had a meaning and purport in
his every word and act, which could be made intelligible to himself and
others, if you could only get people to think out clearly what they
really meant. Philosophy {106} had met her destruction in the busy
haunts of men; there where had been the bane, Socrates' firm faith
sought ever and everywhere the antidote.
This simple enough yet profound and far-reaching practice of Socrates
was theorised in later times as a logical method, known to us as
_Induction_, or the discovery of universal laws or principles out [195]
of an accumulation of particular facts. And thus Aristotle, with his
technical and systematising intellect, attributes two main innovations
in philosophy to Socrates; the _Inductive_ process of reasoning, and
the establishing of _General Ideas_ or Definitions upon or through this
process. This, true enough as indicating what was latent in the
Socratic method, and what was subsequently actually developed out of it
by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless probably an anachronism if one
seeks to represent it as consciously present in Socrates' mind.
Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just because he wanted to
get at the people about him, and through them at what they thought. He
was the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor; he created, so
to speak, the raw material for a theory of induction and definition; he
knew and cared nothing about such theories himself.
A story which may or may not be true in fact is put in Socrates' mouth
by Plato, as to the cause which first started him on his "search for
definitions. " {107} One of his friends, he tells us, named Chaerephon,
went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and asked whether there was
anybody wiser than Socrates. The answer was given that there was none
wiser. This answer was reported to Socrates, who was much astonished,
his own impression being that he had no wisdom or knowledge at all. So
with a view to prove the oracle wrong he went in succession to various
people of eminence and reputation in the various walks of
life,--statesmen and poets and handicraftsmen and others,--in the
expectation that they would show, on being questioned, such a knowledge
of the principles on which their work was based as would prove their
superior wisdom. But to his astonishment he found one after another of
these men wanting in any apprehension of principles at all. They
seemed to work by a kind of haphazard or 'rule of thumb,' and indeed
felt annoyed that anything more should be expected of them. From which
at the last Socrates came to the conclusion that perhaps the oracle was
right in this sense at least, that, if he himself knew nothing more
than his fellows, he was at least conscious of his own ignorance,
whereas they were not.
Whether this tale may not itself be a specimen of Socrates' irony we
cannot tell, but at all events it illustrates from another point of
view the real meaning of Socrates' life. He, at least, was not content
{108} to rest in haphazard and rule of thumb; he was determined to go
on till he found out what was the law or principle of men's acts and
words. The ignorance of others as to any such law or principle in
their own case did not convince him that there was no such law or
principle; only it was there (he thought) working unconsciously, and
therefore in a way defencelessly. And so he compares himself at times
to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and irritate people out of
their easy indifference, and force them to ask themselves what they
were really driving at. Or again, he compares himself to the
torpedo-fish, because he tried to give people a shock whenever they
attempted to satisfy him with shallow and unreal explanations of their
thoughts and actions.
The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of Socrates' life, thus
devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the
enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends,
the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested
enemies, the satires of poets; and lastly, the story of the final
attack by an ungrateful people on their one great teacher, of his
unjust condemnation and heroic death--all this we must pass over here.
The story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is one of the
noblest in history. What is more to {109} the purpose for us is to
ascertain how far his search for definitions was successful; how far he
was able to
Take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them;
how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a universal principle,
out of the confused babel of common life and thought and speech, strong
enough and wide enough on which to build a new order for this world, a
new hope for the world beyond.
We have said that Socrates made the individual and the concrete the
field of his search. And not only did he look to individuals for
light, he looked to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to himself. That is to
say, if he met a carpenter, it was on his carpentering that he
questioned him; if a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor; if a
statesman, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not want general
vague theories on subjects of which his interlocutors could not be
supposed to have any special experience or knowledge; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.
And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty and
isolation of the sophistic teaching 'in the air,' was that when you get
a man to talk on his own trade, which he _knows_, as is proved by the
actual work he produces, you find invariably two {110} things--_first_,
that the skill is the man's _individual_ possession no doubt, the
result of inborn capacity and continuous training and practice; but
_second_, that just in proportion to that individual skill is the man's
conviction that his skill has reference to a _law_ higher than himself,
outside himself. If the man whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful
statesman, he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to _law_ or
right among the citizens; if he was a skilful sculptor, he produced
_beautiful_ things; if he was a skilful handicraftsman, he produced
_useful_ things. Justice, beauty, utility; these three words in
different ways illustrated the existence of something always realising
itself no doubt in individuals and their works, but nevertheless
exercising a governing influence upon these to such a degree that this
ideal something might be conceived as _prior_ to the individual or his
work; or secondly, as _inherent_ in them and giving value to them; or
thirdly, as coming in at the end as the _perfection_ or completion of
them. This law or ideal then had a threefold aspect in its own nature,
being conceivable as Justice, as Beauty, as Utility; it had a threefold
aspect in relation to the works produced in accordance with it, as the
cause _producing_, the cause _inhering_, the cause completing or
_perfecting_.
We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing thus: "You clever
Sophists, when we let you take {111} us into the region of abstract
talk, have a knack of so playing with words that in the end we don't
seem to know anything for certain, especially on such subjects as we
have hitherto thought the most important, such as God and right and
truth and justice and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless
against you; and what is more, any smart youth, whose opinion on any
practical matter no one would think of taking, can very soon pick up
the trick from you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than
himself by his clever argumentation; all going to prove that there is
nothing certain, nothing real, nothing binding; nothing but opinions
and conventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in the universe.
"But when I go and have a quiet talk with any man who really is a known
master of some craft or skill, about that craft or skill, I find no
doubt whatever existing in his mind about there being a law, a
something absolutely real and beautiful and true in connection with it.
He, on the contrary, lives with no other purpose or hope or desire but
as far as he can to realise in what he works at something of this real
and beautiful and true, which was before him, will be after him, is the
only valuable thing in him, but yet which honours him with the function
of, in his day and generation, expressing it before the eyes of men. "
{112} "Have we not here a key to the great secret? If each man, in
respect of that which he knows best because he lives by it and for it,
knows with intimate knowledge and certainty that there at least there
is a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater than he,--have we
not here a hint of the truth for the universe as a whole; that there
also and in all its operations, great as well as small, there must be a
Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before all things, works
in and gives value to all things, will be the consummation of all
things? Is not this what we mean by the Divine? "
Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things of life, but bending
from the airy speculations of the proud to the realities which true
labour showed him, laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of
nature, and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.
"Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his new vision of things.
Knowledge, yes; but _real_ knowledge; not mere head-knowledge or
lip-knowledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the man who by
obedience and teachableness and self-restraint has come to a knowledge
evidencing itself in _works_ expressive of the law that is in him, as
he is in it. _Virtue is knowledge_; on the one hand, therefore, not
something in the air, unreal, intangible; but something in me, in you,
in each man, something which you cannot handle except as individual and
{113} in individuals; on the other hand, something more than individual
or capricious or uncertain,--something which is absolute, over-ruling,
eternal.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And so if a man is virtuous, he is realising
what is best and truest in himself, he is fulfilling also what is best
and truest without himself. He is free, for only the truth makes free;
he is obedient to law, but it is at once a law eternally valid, and a
law which he dictates to himself. And therefore virtue is teachable,
inasmuch as the law in the teacher, perfected in him, is also the law
in the taught, latent in him, by both individually possessed, but
possessed by both in virtue of its being greater than both, of its
being something more than individual.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore the law of virtuous growth is
expressed in the maxim engraved on the Delphic temple, 'Know thyself. '
Know thyself, that is, realise thyself; by obedience and self-control
come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility;
satisfy yourself, in the only way in which true self-satisfaction is
possible, by realising in yourself the law which constitutes your real
being.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore all the manifold relations of
life,--the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform
activities of life,--labour and speech and art and literature and {114}
law; all the sentiments of life,--friendship and love and reverence and
courage and hope,--all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are
expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through
individuals, and in the same process realising them.
{115}
CHAPTER XII
SOCRATES (_concluded_)
_The dialectic method--Instruction through humiliation--Justice and
utility--Righteousness transcending rule_
It must not be imagined that anywhere in the recorded conversations of
Socrates can we find thus in so many words expounded his fundamental
doctrine. Socrates was not an expositor but a questioner; he
disclaimed the position of a teacher, he refused to admit that any were
his pupils or disciples. But his questioning had two sides, each in
its way leading people on to an apprehension of the ideal in existence.
The first side may be called the negative or destructive, the second,
the positive or constructive. In the first, whose object was to break
down all formalism, all mere regard for rules or traditions or
unreasoned maxims, his method had considerable resemblance to that of
the Sophists; like them he descended not infrequently to what looked
very like quibbling and word-play. As Aristotle observes, the
dialectic method differed from that of the Sophists not so much in its
form, as in the purpose for which it was employed. The end of the
{116} Sophists was to confuse, the end of Socrates was through
confusion to reach a more real, because a more reasoned certainty; the
Sophists sought to leave the impression that there was no such thing as
truth; he wished to lead people to the conviction that there was a far
deeper truth than they were as yet possessed of.
A specimen of his manner of conversation preserved for us by Xenophon
(_Memor_. IV. ii. ) will make the difference clearer. Euthydemus was a
young man who had shown great industry in forming a collection of wise
sayings from poets and others, and who prided himself on his superior
wisdom because of his knowledge of these. Socrates skilfully manages
to get the ear of this young man by commending him for his collection,
and asks him what he expects his learning to help him to become? A
physician? No, Euthydemus answers. An architect? No. And so in like
manner with other practical skills,--the geometrician's, astronomer's,
professional reciter's. None of these he discovers is what Euthydemus
aims at. He hopes to become a great politician and statesman. Then of
course he hopes to be a just man himself? Euthydemus flatters himself
he is that already.
"But," says Socrates, "there must be certain acts
which are the proper products of justice, as of other functions or
skills? "--"No doubt. "--"Then of course you can tell us what {117} those
acts or products are? "--"Of course I can, and the products of injustice
as well. "--"Very good; then suppose we write down in two opposite
columns what acts are products of justice and what of injustice. "--"I
agree," says Euthydemus. --"Well now, what of falsehood? In which
column shall we put it? "--"Why, of course in the unjust column. "--"And
cheating? "--"In the same column. "--"And stealing? "--"In it too. "--"And
enslaving? "--"Yes. "--"Not one of these can go to the just
column? "--"Why, that would be an unheard-of thing. "
"Well but," says Socrates, "suppose a general has to deal with some
enemy of his country that has done it great wrong; if he conquer and
enslave this enemy, is that wrong? "--"Certainly not. "--"If he carries
off the enemy's goods or cheats him in his strategy, what about these
acts? "--"Oh, of course they are quite right. But I thought you were
talking about deceiving or ill-treating friends. "--"Then in some cases
we shall have to put these very same acts in both columns? "--"I suppose
so. "
"Well, now, suppose we confine ourselves to friends. Imagine a general
with an army under him discouraged and disorganised. Suppose he tells
them that reserves are coming up, and by cheating them into this belief
he saves them from their discouragement, and enables them to win a
victory. What about this cheating of one's friends? "--"Why, I {118}
suppose we shall have to put this too on the just side. "--"Or suppose a
lad needs medicine, but refuses to take it, and his father cheats him
into the belief that it is something nice, and getting him to take it,
saves his life; what about that cheat? "--"That will have to go to the
just side too. "--"Or suppose you find a friend in a desperate frenzy,
and steal his sword from him, for fear he should kill himself; what do
you say to that theft? "--"That will have to go there too. "--"But I
thought you said there must be no cheating of friends? "--"Well, I must
take it all back, if you please. "--"Very good. But now there is
another point I should like to ask you. Whether do you think the man
more unjust who is a voluntary violator of justice, or he who is an
involuntary violator of it? "--"Upon my word, Socrates, I no longer have
any confidence in my answers. For the whole thing has turned out to be
exactly the contrary of what I previously imagined. However, suppose I
say that the voluntary deceiver is the more unjust. "--"Do you consider
that justice is a matter of knowledge just as much (say) as
writing? "--"Yes, I do. "--"Well now, which do you consider the better
skilled as a writer, the man who makes a mistake in writing or in
reading what is written, because he chooses to do so, or the man who
does so because he can't help it? "--"Oh, the first; because he can put
it right whenever he likes. "--"Very {119} well, if a man in the same
way breaks the rule of right, knowing what he is doing, while another
breaks the same rule because he can't help it, which by analogy must be
the better versed in justice? "--"The first, I suppose. "--"And the man
who is better versed in justice must be the juster man? "--"Apparently
so; but really, Socrates, I don't know where I am. I have been
flattering myself that I was in possession of a philosophy which could
make a good and able man of me. But how great, think you, must now be
my disappointment, when I find myself unable to answer the simplest
question on the subject? "
Many other questions are put to him, tending to probe his
self-knowledge, and in the end he is brought to the conclusion that
perhaps he had better hold his tongue, for it seems he knows nothing at
all. And so he went away deeply despondent, despising himself as an
absolute dolt. "Now many," adds Xenophon, "when brought into this
condition by Socrates, never came near him again. But Euthydemus
concluded that his only hope of ever being worth anything was in seeing
as much of Socrates as he could, and so he never quitted his side as
long as he had a chance, but tried to follow his mode of living. And
Socrates, when he perceived this to be his temper, no longer tormented
him, but sought with all simplicity and clearness to {120} show him
what he deemed it best for him to do and think. "
Was this cross-examination mere 'tormenting' with a purpose, or can we
discover underlying it any hint of what Socrates deemed to be the truth
about justice?
Let us note that throughout he is in search of a _definition_, but that
as soon as any attempt is made to define or classify any particular
type of action as just or unjust, _special circumstances_ are suggested
which overturn the classification. Let us note further that while the
immediate result is apparently only to confuse, the remoter but more
permanent result is to raise a suspicion of any hard and fast
definitions, and to suggest that there is something deeper in life than
language is adequate to express, a 'law in the members,' a living
principle for good, which transcends forms and maxims, and which alone
gives real value to acts. Note further the suggestion that this living
principle has a character analogous to the knowledge or skill of an
accomplished artificer; it has relation on the one hand to law, as a
principle binding on the individual, it has relation on the other hand
to _utility_, as expressing itself, not in words, but in acts
beneficial to those concerned. Hence the Socratic formula, Justice is
equivalent to the _Lawful_ on the one hand, to the _Useful_ on the
other.
{121}
Socrates had thus solved by anticipation the apparently never-ending
controversy about morality. Is it a matter imposed by God upon the
heart and conscience of each individual? Is it dictated by the general
sense of the community? Is it the product of Utility? The Socratic
answer would be that it is all three, and that all three mean
ultimately the same thing. What God prescribes is what man when he is
truly man desires; and what God prescribes and man desires is that
which is good and useful for man. It is not a matter for verbal
definition but for vital realisation; the true morality is that which
_works_; the ideally desirable, is ultimately the only possible, course
of action, for all violations of it are ultimately suicidal.
Note finally the suggestion that the man who _knows_ (in Socrates'
sense of knowledge) what is right, shows only more fully his
righteousness when he voluntarily sins; it is the 'unwilling sinner'
who is the wrongdoer. When we consider this strange doctrine in
relation to the instances given,--the general with his army, the father
with his son, the prudent friend with his friend in desperate
straits,--we see that what is meant is that 'sin' in the real sense is
not to be measured or defined by conformity or otherwise to some formal
standard, at least in the case of those who _know_, that is, in the
case of men who have realised goodness in its true nature in {122}
their characters and lives. As St. Paul expressed it (Rom. xiii. 10),
"Love is the fulfilling of the law. " Or again (Gal. v. 23), after
enumerating the 'fruits of the spirit'--love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance--he
adds, "Against such there is no law. "
In the domain of life, not less than in that of the arts, the highest
activity does not always or necessarily take the form of conformity to
rule. There are critical moments when rules fail, when, in fact,
obedience to rule would mean disobedience to that higher law, of which
rules and formulae are at best only an adumbration. The originality of
the great musician or painter consists in just such transcendence of
accepted formulae; this is why he invariably encounters opposition and
obloquy from the learned conventional pedants of his time. And in the
domain of morals the martyrs, reformers, prophets are in like manner
'willing sinners. ' They are denounced, persecuted, crucified; for are
they not disturbers of society; do they not unsettle young men; do they
not come, as Christ came, not to bring peace into the world, but a
sword? And thus it is that the willing sinners of one generation are
the martyrs and heroes of the next. Through their life and death a
richer meaning has been given to the law of beauty or of rectitude,
only, alas! in its turn to be translated into new conventions, new
{123} formulae, which shall in due time require new martyrs to
transcend them. And thus, on the other hand, the perfectly honest
sticklers for the old and common-place, unwilling sinners all
unconscious of their sin, are fated to bear in history the brand of men
who have persecuted the righteous without cause. To each, according to
the strange sad law of life, time brings its revenges.
{124}
CHAPTER XIII
THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS
_A philosopher at ease--The sensual sty--Citizens of the world--The tub
of Diogenes--A philosophy of abstracts_
[204]
I. ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAICS. --Aristippus was a native of Cyrene, a
Greek colony on the north coast of Africa. He is said to have come to
Athens because of his desire to hear Socrates; but from the notices of
him which we find in Xenophon's memoirs he appears to have been from
the first a somewhat intractable follower, dissenting especially from
the poverty and self-denial of the master's mode of life. [205] He in
course of time founded a school of his own, called the Cyrenaic from
his own place of birth, and from the fact that many subsequent leaders
of the school also belonged to Cyrene. Among his notable disciples
were his daughter Arete, her son named Aristippus after his
grandfather, Ptolemaeus the Aethiopian, Antipater of Cyrene, and a long
succession of others.
Aristippus was a man of considerable subtlety of mind, a ready speaker,
clever in adapting himself to persons and circumstances. On one
occasion, being {125} asked what benefit he considered philosophy had
conferred upon him, he answered, "The capacity of associating with
every one without embarrassment. " Philosophy, in fact, was to
Aristippus a method of social culture, a means of making the best of
life as he found it. As Horace observes of him (_Epp_. i. 17. 23)--
Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res
Tentantem majora, fere praesentibus aequum.
"Every aspect and manner of life and fortune fitted Aristippus; he
aimed at what was greater, yet kept an even, mind whatever his present
condition. "
[206]
As we have already said, this school was _incompletely_ Socratic,
inasmuch as philosophy was not an end in itself, knowledge whether of
oneself or of other matters had no intrinsic interest for them;
philosophy was only a means towards pleasurable living, enabling them
so to analyse and classify the several experiences of life as to render
a theory of satisfactory [207] existence possible. With them first
came into prominence a phrase which held a large place in all
subsequent Greek philosophy, the _End_ of existence, by which was meant
that which summed up the good in existence, that which made life worth
living, that which was good and desirable in and for itself, and not
merely as a means to something else. What then according to the
Cyrenaics was the End of life? {126} Their answer was that life had at
each moment its own End, in the pleasure of that moment. The past was
gone, the future not yet with us; remembrance of the one, fear or hope
of the other, might contribute to affect the purity of the present
pleasure, but such as it was the present pleasure was a thing apart,
complete in and for itself. Nor was its perfection qualified by any
question of the means by which it was procured; the moment's pleasure
was pleasurable, whatever men might say as to the manner of its [208]
procuring. This pleasure was a tranquil activity of the being, like
the gently heaving sea, midway between violent motion which was pain,
and absolute calm which was insensibility. As a state of activity it
was something positive, not a mere release from [209] pain, not a
simple filling up of a vacuum. Nothing was in its essential nature
either just or noble or base; custom and convention pronounced them one
or other. The wise man made the best he could of his conditions;
valuing mental activity and friendship and wealth and bodily exercise,
and avoiding envy and excessive indulgence of passion and superstition,
not because the first were in themselves good or the second evil, but
because they were respectively helpers or hinderers of pleasure. He is
the master and possessor of pleasure not who abstains from it, but who
uses it and keeps his self-command in the using. Moderate
indulgence--this is wisdom.
{127}
[210]
The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, is the feeling of the
moment for the man who feels it; all question of causes of feelings is
delusive. We can say with truth and certainty, I have the sensation of
white or the sensation of sweet. But that there is a white or a sweet
thing which is the cause of the sensation, that we cannot say for
certain. A man may very well have the sensation white or sweet from
something which has no such quality, as men in delusion or madness have
impressions that are true and real inasmuch as they have them, although
other people do not admit their reality. There is, therefore, no
criterion of truth as between man and man; we may employ the same
words, but each has his own impressions and his own individual
experiences.
One can easily understand this as the doctrine of such a man as
Aristippus, the easy-going man of the world, the courtier and the wit,
the favourite of the tyrant Dionysius; it fits in well enough with a
life of genial self-indulgence; it always reappears whenever a man has
reconciled himself 'to roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. ' But life
is not always, nor for most persons at any time, a thing of ease and
soft enchantments, and the Cyrenaic philosophy must remain for the
general work-a-day world a stale exotic. 'Every man for himself and
the devil take the hindmost,' is a maxim which comes as a rule {128}
only to the lips of the worldly successful, while they think themselves
strong enough to stand alone. But this solitude of selfishness neither
works nor lasts; every man at some time becomes 'the hindmost,' if not
before, at least in the hour of death for him or his; at that hour he
is hardly disposed, for himself or those he loves, to repeat his maxim.
II. ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNICS. --Aristippus, in his praises of pleasure
as the one good for man (see above, p. 126), remarks that there were
some who [209] refused pleasure "from perversity of mind," taking
pleasure, so to speak, in the denial of pleasure. The school of the
Cynics made this perverse mood, as Aristippus deemed it, the maxim of
their philosophy. As the Cyrenaic school was the school of the rich,
the courtly, the self-indulgent, so the Cynic was the school of the
poor, the exiles, the ascetics. Each was an extreme expression of a
phase of Greek life and thought, though there was this point of union
[215] between them, that _liberty_ of a kind was sought by both. The
Cyrenaics claimed liberty to please themselves in the choice of their
enjoyments; the Cynics sought liberty through denial of enjoyments.
[219] Both, moreover, were cosmopolitan; they mark the decay of the
Greek patriotism, which was essentially civic, and the rise of the
wider but less intense conception of humanity. Aristippus, in a
conversation with Socrates (Xenoph. _Memor_. II. i. ) on the {129}
qualifications of those who are fitted to be magistrates, disclaims all
desire to hold such a position himself. "There is," he says, "to my
thinking, a middle way, neither of rule nor of slavery, but of freedom,
which leads most surely to true happiness. So to avoid all the evils
of partisanship and faction I nowhere take upon me the position of a
citizen, but in every city remain a sojourner and a stranger. " And in
like manner Antisthenes the Cynic, being asked how a man should
approach politics, answered, "He will approach it as he will fire, not
too near, lest he be burnt; not too far away, lest he starve of cold. "
And Diogenes, being asked of what city he was, answered, "I am a
citizen of the world. " The Cynic ideal, in fact, was summed up in
these four words--wisdom, independence, free speech, liberty.
[214]
Antisthenes, founder of the school, was a native of Athens, but being
of mixed blood (his mother was a Thracian) he was not recognised as an
Athenian citizen. He was a student first under Gorgias, and acquired
from him a considerable elegance of literary style; subsequently he
became a devoted hearer of Socrates, and became prominent among his
followers for an asceticism surpassing his master's. One day, we are
told, he showed a great rent in the thread-bare cloak which was his
only garment, whereupon Socrates slily remarked, "I can see through
your cloak your love of glory. " He carried a leathern {130} scrip and
a staff, and the 'scrip and staff' became distinctive marks of his
school. The name Cynic, derived from the Greek word for a dog, is
variously accounted for, some attributing it to the 'doglike' habits of
the school, others to their love of 'barking' criticism, others to the
fact that a certain gymnasium in the outskirts of Athens, called
Cynosarges, sacred to Hercules the patron-divinity of men in the
political position of Antisthenes, was a favourite resort of his. He
was a voluminous, some thought a too voluminous, [216] expounder of his
tenets. Like the other Incomplete Socratics, his teaching was mainly
on ethical questions.
[215]
His chief pupil and successor was the famous Diogenes, a native of
Sinope, a Greek colony on the Euxine Sea. He even bettered the
instructions of his master in the matter of extreme frugality of
living, claiming that he was a true follower of Hercules in preferring
independence to every other good. The tale of his living in a cask or
tub is well known. His theory was that the peculiar privilege of the
gods consisted in their need of nothing; men approached nearest the
life of the gods in needing as little as possible.
[217]
Many other sayings of one or other teacher are quoted, all tending to
the same conclusion. For example, "I had rather be mad than enjoying
myself! " "Follow the pleasures that come after pains, not those which
bring pains in their train. " "There {131} are pains that are useless,
there are pains that are natural: the wise choose the latter, and thus
find happiness even through pain. For the very contempt of pleasure
comes with practice to be the highest pleasure. " "When I wish a
treat," says Antisthenes, "I do not go and buy it at great cost in the
marketplace; I find my storehouse of pleasures in the soul. "
[218]
The life of the wise man, therefore, was a training of mind and body to
despise pleasure and attain independence. In this way virtue was
teachable, and could be so acquired as to become an inseparable
possession. The man who had thus attained to wisdom, not of words, but
of deeds, was, as it were, in an impregnable fortress that could
neither crumble into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so
Antisthenes, being asked what was the most essential point of learning,
answered, "To unlearn what is evil. " That is to say, to the Cynic
conception, men were born with a root of evil in them in the love of
pleasure; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul and body by practice
from the allurements of pleasure, until both were so perfectly
accustomed to its denial as to find an unalloyed pleasure in the very
act of [219] refusing it. In this way virtue became absolutely
sufficient for happiness, and so far was it from being necessary to
have wealth or the admiration of men in addition, that the true kingly
life was "to do well, {132} and be ill spoken of. " All else but virtue
was a matter of indifference.
The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them to hold of small account
the forms and prejudices of ordinary society: they despised the rites
of marriage; they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no
multifarious theology; there was but one divinity--the power that ruled
all nature, the one absolutely self-centred independent being, whose
manner of [221] existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any
sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some
of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time.
Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man
was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not
establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As
Antisthenes once said to Plato, "A horse I see, but 'horseness' I do
not see. " What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve
for the present.
[222]
III. EUCLIDES THE MEGARIC. --Euclides, a native of Megara on the
Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted hearer of Socrates, making his way to
hear him, sometimes even at the 'risk of his life, in defiance of a
decree of his native city forbidding intercourse with Athens. When
Plato and other Athenian followers of Socrates thought well to quit
Athens for {133} a time after Socrates' execution, they were kindly
entertained by Euclides at Megara.
The exact character of the development which the Socratic teaching
received from Euclides and his school is a matter of considerable
doubt. The allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and [223]
others are only fragmentary. We gather, however, from them that
Euclides was wholly antithetical to the personal turn given to
philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and
developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224]
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good,
and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of
himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such
absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus,
in insensibility to these through reason, man attained his highest good.
The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the
continued survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier
philosophy. As such it had a very definite influence, sometimes
through agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems of Plato
and Aristotle now to be dealt with.
{134}
CHAPTER XIV
PLATO
_Student and wanderer--The Dialogues--Immortal longings--Art is
love--Knowledge through remembrance--Platonic love_
[239]
This great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philosophy, as one may call
him, for his fertility, his variety, his humour, his imagination, his
poetic grace, was born at Athens in the year 429 B. C. He was of noble
family, numbering among his ancestors no less a man than the great
lawgiver Solon, and tracing back his descent even further to the [240]
legendary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early age he seems to
have begun to study the philosophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and
before he was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that time,
however, he met Socrates; and at once giving up all thought of poetic
fame he burnt his poem, and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates.
For ten years he was his constant companion. When Socrates met his
death in 399, Plato and other followers of the master fled at first to
Megara, as already mentioned (above, p. 132); he then entered on a
period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and {135} Egypt, thence to
Italy and Sicily. In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of
the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended
the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was
delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens. [241]
Ultimately he was ransomed, and found his way back to Athens, but he is
said to have paid a second visit to Sicily when the younger Dionysius
became tyrant. He seems to have entertained the hope that he might so
influence this young man as to be able to realise through him the dream
of his life, a government in accordance with the dictates of [242]
philosophy. His dream, however, was disappointed of fruition, and he
returned to Athens, there in the 'groves of Academus' a mythic hero of
Athens, to spend the rest of his days in converse with his followers,
and there at the ripe age of eighty-one he died. From the scene of his
labours his philosophy has ever since been known as the Academic [243]
philosophy. Unlike Socrates, he was not content to leave only a memory
of himself and his conversations. He was unwearied in the redaction
and correction of his written dialogues, altering them here and there
both in expression and in structure. It is impossible, therefore, to
be absolutely certain as to the historical order of composition or
publication among his numerous {136} dialogues, but a certain
approximate order may be fixed.
what the Sophist tries to do by his words. Virtue then is teachable in
so far as it is possible to persuade a boy or a man by rhetoric that
that course of conduct which pleases others is a pleasant course for
him. But if any one happens not to be persuaded of this, and continues
to prefer his own particular course of conduct, this _is_ for him the
good course. You cannot blame him; you cannot say he is wrong. If you
punish him you simply endeavour to supply the dose of unpleasantness
which may {89} be needed to put the balance in his case on the same
side as it already occupies in the case of other people.
It may be worth while to anticipate a little, and insert here in
summary the refutation of this position put into the mouth of Socrates
by Plato in the _Theaetetus_: "But I ought not to conceal from you that
there is a serious objection which may be urged against this doctrine
of Protagoras. For there are states, such as madness and dreaming, in
which perception is false; and half our life is spent in dreaming; and
who can say that at this instant we are not dreaming? Even the fancies
of madmen are real at the time. But if knowledge is perception, how
can we distinguish between the true and the false in such cases? . . .
Shall I tell you what amazes me in your friend Protagoras? 'What may
that be? ' I like his doctrine that what appears is; but I wonder that
he did not begin his great work on truth with a declaration that a pig,
or a dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a
measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he
might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he
was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one
man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own
judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what
need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why
should we be less knowing than he is, or have to go to him, if every
man is the measure of all things? " . . . Socrates now resumes the
argument. As he is very desirous of doing justice to Protagoras, he
insists on citing his own words: 'What appears to each man is to him. '
"And how," asks Socrates, "are these words reconcilable with the fact
that all mankind are agreed in thinking themselves wiser than others in
some respects, and inferior to them in others? In the hour of danger
they are ready to fall down and worship any one who is their superior
in wisdom as if he were a god. And the world is full of men who are
asking to be taught and willing to be ruled, and of other men who are
willing to rule and teach them. All which implies that men do judge of
one another's impressions, and think some wise and others foolish. How
will Protagoras answer this argument? For he cannot say that no one
deems another ignorant or mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands
and tens of thousands are ready to maintain the opposite. The
multitude may not and do not agree in Protagoras' own thesis, 'that man
is the measure of all things,' and then who is to decide? Upon hip own
showing must not his 'truth' depend on the number of suffrages, and be
more or less true in proportion as he has more or fewer of them? And
{91} [the majority being against him] he will be bound to acknowledge
that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, which is a famous
jest. And if he admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak
truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak truly. But his
opponents will refuse to admit this as regards themselves, and he must
admit that they are right in their refusal. The conclusion is, that
all mankind, including Protagoras himself, will deny that he speaks
truly; and his truth will be true neither to himself nor to anybody
else" (Jowett, _Plato_, iv. pp. 239 _sqq. _)
The refutation seems tolerably complete, but a good deal had to happen
before Greece was ready to accept or Plato to offer such a refutation.
{92}
CHAPTER X
THE SOPHISTS (_concluded_)
_Nothing knowable--The solitude of scepticism--The lawlessness of
scepticism--The good in scepticism_
[183]
Gorgias was perhaps even more eminent a Sophist than Protagoras. He
was a native of Leontini in Sicily, and came to Athens in the year 427
B. C. on a public embassy from his native city. The splendid reputation
for political and rhetorical ability, which preceded him to Athens, he
fully justified both by his public appearances before the Athenian
assembly, and by the success of his private instructions to the crowds
of wealthy young men who resorted to him. He dressed in magnificent
style, and affected a lofty and poetical manner of speech, which
offended the more critical, but which pleased the crowd.
[181]
He also, like Protagoras, published a treatise in which he expounded
his fundamental principles, and like Protagoras, he preceded it with a
striking if somewhat ironical title, and an apophthegm in which he
summarised his doctrine. The title of his work was _Of the
Non-Existent_, that is, _Of Nature_, and {93} his dictum, "Nothing
exists, or if anything exists, it cannot be apprehended by man, and
even if it could be apprehended, the man who apprehended it could not
expound or explain it to his neighbour. " In support of this strange
doctrine, Gorgias adopted the quibbling method of argument which had
been applied with some success to dialectical purposes by Zeno,
Melissus, and others (see above, pp. 44 _sqq. _)
[185]
His chief argument to prove the first position laid down by him
depended on a double and ambiguous use of the word _is_; "That which is
not, _is_ the non-existent: the word _is_ must, therefore, be
applicable to it as truly as when we say That which is, _is_;
therefore, being is predicable of that which is not. " So conversely he
proved not-being to be predicable of that which is. And in like manner
he made away with any possible assertions as to the finite or infinite,
the eternal or created, nature of that which is. Logic could supply
him with alternative arguments from whatever point he started, such as
would seem to land the question in absurdity. Hence his first position
was (he claimed) established, that 'Nothing is. '
To prove the second, that even if anything is, it cannot be known to
man, he argued thus: "If what a man thinks is not identical with what
is, plainly what is cannot be thought. And that what a man thinks is
not identical with what is can be {94} shown from the fact that
thinking does not affect the facts. You may imagine a man flying, or a
chariot coursing over the deep, but you do not find these things to
occur because you imagine them. Again, if we assume that what we think
is identical with what is, then it must be impossible to think of what
is not. But this is absurd; for we can think of such admittedly
imaginary beings as Scylla and Chimaera, and multitudes of others.
There is therefore no necessary relation between our thoughts and any
realities; we may believe, but we cannot prove, which (if any) of our
conceptions have relation to an external fact and which have not. "
[187]
Nor thirdly, supposing any man had obtained an apprehension of what is
real, could he possibly communicate it to any one else. If a man saw
anything, he could not possibly by verbal description make clear what
it is he sees to a man who has never seen. And so if a man has not
himself the apprehension of reality, mere words from another cannot
possibly give him any idea of it. He may imagine he has the same idea
as the speaker, but where is he going to get the common test by which
to establish the identity?
Without attempting to follow Gorgias further, we can see plainly enough
the object and purport of the whole doctrine. Its main result is to
_isolate_. It isolates each man from his fellows; he cannot tell {95}
what they know or think, they cannot reach any common ground with him.
It isolates him from nature; he cannot tell what nature is, he cannot
tell whether he knows anything of nature or reality at all. It
isolates him from himself; he cannot tell for certain what relation
exists (if any) between what he imagines he perceives at any moment and
any remembered or imagined previous experiences; he cannot be sure that
there ever were any such experiences, or what that self was (if
anything) which had them, or whether there was or is any self
perceiving anything.
Let us imagine the moral effect on the minds of the ablest youth of
Greece of such an absolute collapse of belief. The philosophic
scepticism did not deprive them of their appetites or passions; it did
not in the least alter their estimate of the prizes of success, or the
desirability of wealth and power. All it did was to shatter the
invisible social bonds of reverence and honour and truth and justice,
which in greater or less degree act as a restraining force upon the
purely selfish appetites of men. Not only belief in divine government
disappeared, but belief in any government external or internal; justice
became a cheating device to deprive a man of what was ready to his
grasp; good-faith was stupidity when it was not a more subtle form of
deceit; morality was at best a mere convention which a man might cancel
if {96} he pleased; the one reality was the appetite of the moment, the
one thing needful its gratification; society, therefore, was universal
war, only with subtler weapons.
Of course Protagoras and Gorgias were only notable types of a whole
horde of able men who in various ways, and with probably less clear
notions than these men of the drift or philosophic significance of
their activity, helped all over Greece in the promulgation of this new
gospel of self-interest. Many Sophists no doubt troubled themselves
very little with philosophical questions; they were 'agnostics,'
know-nothings; all they professed to do was to teach some practical
skill of a verbal or rhetorical character. They had nothing to do with
the nature or value of ideals; they did not profess to say whether any
end or aim was in itself good or bad, but given an end or aim, they
were prepared to help those who hired them to acquire a skill which
would be useful towards attaining it.
But whether a philosophy or ultimate theory of life be expressly stated
or realised by a nation or an individual, or be simply ignored by them,
there always is some such philosophy or theory underlying their action,
and that philosophy or theory tends to work itself out to its logical
issue in action, whether men openly profess it or no. And the theory
of negation of law in nature or in man which underlay {97} the
sophistic practice had its logical and necessary effect on the social
structure throughout Greece, in a loosening of the bonds of religion,
of family reverence and affection, of patriotism, of law, of honour.
Thucydides in a well-known passage (iii. 82) thus describes the
prevalent condition of thought in his own time, which was distinctively
that of the sophistic teaching: "The common meaning of words was turned
about at men's pleasure; the most reckless bravo was deemed the most
desirable friend; a man of prudence and moderation was styled a coward;
a man who listened to reason was a good-for-nothing simpleton. People
were trusted exactly in proportion to their violence and
unscrupulousness, and no one was so popular as the successful
conspirator, except perhaps one who had been clever enough to outwit
him at his own trade, but any one who honestly attempted to remove the
causes of such treacheries was considered a traitor to his party. As
for oaths, no one imagined they were to be kept a moment longer than
occasion required; it was, in fact, an added pleasure to destroy your
enemy if you had managed to catch him through his trusting to your
word. "
These are the words not of Plato, who is supposed often enough to allow
his imagination to carry him beyond his facts about the Sophists as
about others, nor are they the words of a satiric poet such as {98}
Aristophanes. They are the words of the most sober and philosophic of
Greek historians, and they illustrate very strikingly the tendency,
nay, the absolute necessity, whereby the theories of philosophers in
the closet extend themselves into the market-place and the home, and
find an ultimate realisation of themselves for good or for evil in the
'business and bosoms' of the common crowd.
It is not to be said that the individualistic and iconoclastic movement
which the Sophists represented was wholly bad, or wholly unnecessary,
any more (to again quote a modern instance) than that the French
Revolution was. There was much, no doubt, in the traditional religion
and morality of Greece at that time which represented obsolete and
antiquated conditions, when every city lived apart from its neighbours
with its own narrow interests and local cults and ceremonials. Greece
was ceasing to be an unconnected crowd of little separate communities;
unconsciously it was preparing itself for a larger destiny, that of
conqueror and civiliser of East and West. This scepticism, utterly
untenable and unworkable on the lines extravagantly laid down by its
leading teachers, represented the birth of new conditions of thought
and action adapted to the new conditions of things. On the surface,
and accepted literally, it seemed to deny the possibility of knowledge;
it threatened to destroy humanity and {99} civilisation. But its
strength lay latent in an implied denial only of what was merely
traditional; it denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions; it
was laying the foundations of a broader humanity. It represented the
claim of a new generation to have no dogma or assumption thrust on it
by mere force, physical or moral. "_I_ too am a man," it said; "_I_
have rights; _my_ reason must be convinced. " This is the fundamental
thought at the root of most revolutions and reformations and revivals,
and the thought is therefore a necessary and a just one.
Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable condition of human affairs
that nothing new, however necessary or good can come into being out of
the old, without much sorrow and many a birth-pang. The extravagant,
the impetuous, the narrow-minded on both sides seize on their points of
difference, raise them into battle-cries, and make what might be a
peaceful regeneration a horrid battlefield of contending hates. The
Christ when He comes brings not peace into the world, but a sword. And
men of evil passions and selfish ambitions are quick on both sides to
make the struggle of old and new ideals a handle for their own
indulgence or their own advancement; the Pharisees and the Judases
between them make the Advent in some of its aspects a sorry spectacle.
A reconciler was wanted who should wed what {100} was true in the new
doctrine of individualism with what was valuable in the old doctrine of
universal and necessary truth; who should be able to say, "Yes, I
acknowledge that your individual view of things must be reckoned with,
and mine, and everybody else's; and for that very reason do I argue for
a universal and necessary truth, because the very truth for you as an
individual is just this universal. " The union and identification of
the Individual and Universal,--this paradox of philosophy is the
doctrine of Socrates.
{101}
CHAPTER XI
SOCRATES
_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of
men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is
knowledge_
The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the
practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any
further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of
the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social and moral
chaos. Only by brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth
evoke a new order; only out of the moral darkness could a new
intellectual light be made to shine. The social and personal anarchy
seemed to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophy of nature; if
ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it must be through a
revision of the theory of morals. If it could be proved that the
doctrine of individualism, of isolation, which the analysis of a
Protagoras or a Gorgias had reached, was not only _unlivable_ but
unthinkable,--carried the seeds of its own destruction, theoretical as
well as practical, within {102} itself,--then the analysis of
_perception_, from which this moral individualism issued, might itself
be called to submit to revision, and a stable point of support in the
moral world might thus become a centre of stability for the
intellectual and the physical also.
By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis of philosophy
produced in Greece through the moral and social chaos of the sophistic
teaching had two issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried
out on the one side with a less, on the other side with a greater
completeness. The less complete reaction from sophistic teaching
attempted only such reconstruction of the moral point of view as should
recover a law or principle of general and universally cogent character,
whereon might be built anew a _moral_ order without attempting to
extend the inquiry as to a universal principle into the regions of
abstract truth or into physics. The more complete and logical
reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal principle in morals,
undertook a logical reconstruction on the recovered universal basis all
along the line of what was knowable.
To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the
world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to
deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the
way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended
exposition of the new point of {103} view. Those who in succession to
him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in
the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_.
Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the
knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle.
Greek philosophy then marks with the life of Socrates a parting of the
ways in two senses: _first_, inasmuch as with him came the reaction
from a physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in a moral
chaos; and _second_, inasmuch as from him the two great streams of
later philosophy issued--the one a philosophy of law or universals in
_action_, the other a philosophy of law or universals in _thought_ and
_nature_ as well.
Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and Phaenarete a midwife, was
born at Athens in or about the year 469 B. C. His parents were probably
poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too poor to pay the
fees required for instruction by the Sophists of his time. But in
whatever way acquired or assimilated, it is certain that there was
little of the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which
Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.
Among a people distinguished generally for their handsome features and
noble proportions, Socrates was a notable exception. His face was
squat and {104} round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick; he was
clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress, a thorough
'Bohemian,' as we should call him. He was, however, gifted with an
uncommon bodily vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by
temperament moderate in food and drink, yet capable on occasion of
drinking most people 'under the table. ' He was of an imperturbable
humour, not to be excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein of
sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural shrewdness astonishing, all
the more astonishing because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism
and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he felt the visitation
of a mysterious internal voice, to which or to his own internal
communings he would sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted
stillness for hours. The voice within him was felt as a restraining
force, limiting his action in various ways, but leaving him free to
wander about among his fellows, to watch their doings and interpret
their thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of every class,
high and low, rich and poor, concerning righteousness and justice and
goodness and purity and truth. He did not enter on his philosophic
work with some grand general principle ready-made, to which he was
prepared to fit the facts by hook or by crook. Rather he compared
himself to his mother, the midwife; he sought to help others to {105}
express themselves; he had nothing to tell them, he wanted them to tell
him. This was the irony of Socrates, the eternal _questioning_, which
in time came to mean in people's minds what the word does now. For it
was hard, and grew every year harder, to convince people that so subtle
a questioner was as ignorant as he professed to be; or that the man who
could touch so keenly the weak point of all other men's answers, had no
answer to the problems of life himself.
In striking contrast, then, to the method of all previous philosophies,
Socrates busied himself to begin with, not with some general
intellectual _principle_, but with a multitude of different _people_,
with their notions especially on moral ideas, with the meaning or
no-meaning which they attached to particular words,--in short, with the
individual, the particular, the concrete, the every-day. He did not at
all deny that he had a purpose in all this. On the contrary, he openly
professed that he was in search of the lost universal, the lost _law_
of men's thoughts and actions. He was convinced that life was not the
chaos that the Sophists made out; that nobody really believed it to be
a chaos; that, on the contrary, everybody had a meaning and purport in
his every word and act, which could be made intelligible to himself and
others, if you could only get people to think out clearly what they
really meant. Philosophy {106} had met her destruction in the busy
haunts of men; there where had been the bane, Socrates' firm faith
sought ever and everywhere the antidote.
This simple enough yet profound and far-reaching practice of Socrates
was theorised in later times as a logical method, known to us as
_Induction_, or the discovery of universal laws or principles out [195]
of an accumulation of particular facts. And thus Aristotle, with his
technical and systematising intellect, attributes two main innovations
in philosophy to Socrates; the _Inductive_ process of reasoning, and
the establishing of _General Ideas_ or Definitions upon or through this
process. This, true enough as indicating what was latent in the
Socratic method, and what was subsequently actually developed out of it
by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless probably an anachronism if one
seeks to represent it as consciously present in Socrates' mind.
Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just because he wanted to
get at the people about him, and through them at what they thought. He
was the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor; he created, so
to speak, the raw material for a theory of induction and definition; he
knew and cared nothing about such theories himself.
A story which may or may not be true in fact is put in Socrates' mouth
by Plato, as to the cause which first started him on his "search for
definitions. " {107} One of his friends, he tells us, named Chaerephon,
went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and asked whether there was
anybody wiser than Socrates. The answer was given that there was none
wiser. This answer was reported to Socrates, who was much astonished,
his own impression being that he had no wisdom or knowledge at all. So
with a view to prove the oracle wrong he went in succession to various
people of eminence and reputation in the various walks of
life,--statesmen and poets and handicraftsmen and others,--in the
expectation that they would show, on being questioned, such a knowledge
of the principles on which their work was based as would prove their
superior wisdom. But to his astonishment he found one after another of
these men wanting in any apprehension of principles at all. They
seemed to work by a kind of haphazard or 'rule of thumb,' and indeed
felt annoyed that anything more should be expected of them. From which
at the last Socrates came to the conclusion that perhaps the oracle was
right in this sense at least, that, if he himself knew nothing more
than his fellows, he was at least conscious of his own ignorance,
whereas they were not.
Whether this tale may not itself be a specimen of Socrates' irony we
cannot tell, but at all events it illustrates from another point of
view the real meaning of Socrates' life. He, at least, was not content
{108} to rest in haphazard and rule of thumb; he was determined to go
on till he found out what was the law or principle of men's acts and
words. The ignorance of others as to any such law or principle in
their own case did not convince him that there was no such law or
principle; only it was there (he thought) working unconsciously, and
therefore in a way defencelessly. And so he compares himself at times
to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and irritate people out of
their easy indifference, and force them to ask themselves what they
were really driving at. Or again, he compares himself to the
torpedo-fish, because he tried to give people a shock whenever they
attempted to satisfy him with shallow and unreal explanations of their
thoughts and actions.
The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of Socrates' life, thus
devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the
enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends,
the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested
enemies, the satires of poets; and lastly, the story of the final
attack by an ungrateful people on their one great teacher, of his
unjust condemnation and heroic death--all this we must pass over here.
The story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is one of the
noblest in history. What is more to {109} the purpose for us is to
ascertain how far his search for definitions was successful; how far he
was able to
Take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them;
how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a universal principle,
out of the confused babel of common life and thought and speech, strong
enough and wide enough on which to build a new order for this world, a
new hope for the world beyond.
We have said that Socrates made the individual and the concrete the
field of his search. And not only did he look to individuals for
light, he looked to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to himself. That is to
say, if he met a carpenter, it was on his carpentering that he
questioned him; if a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor; if a
statesman, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not want general
vague theories on subjects of which his interlocutors could not be
supposed to have any special experience or knowledge; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.
And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty and
isolation of the sophistic teaching 'in the air,' was that when you get
a man to talk on his own trade, which he _knows_, as is proved by the
actual work he produces, you find invariably two {110} things--_first_,
that the skill is the man's _individual_ possession no doubt, the
result of inborn capacity and continuous training and practice; but
_second_, that just in proportion to that individual skill is the man's
conviction that his skill has reference to a _law_ higher than himself,
outside himself. If the man whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful
statesman, he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to _law_ or
right among the citizens; if he was a skilful sculptor, he produced
_beautiful_ things; if he was a skilful handicraftsman, he produced
_useful_ things. Justice, beauty, utility; these three words in
different ways illustrated the existence of something always realising
itself no doubt in individuals and their works, but nevertheless
exercising a governing influence upon these to such a degree that this
ideal something might be conceived as _prior_ to the individual or his
work; or secondly, as _inherent_ in them and giving value to them; or
thirdly, as coming in at the end as the _perfection_ or completion of
them. This law or ideal then had a threefold aspect in its own nature,
being conceivable as Justice, as Beauty, as Utility; it had a threefold
aspect in relation to the works produced in accordance with it, as the
cause _producing_, the cause _inhering_, the cause completing or
_perfecting_.
We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing thus: "You clever
Sophists, when we let you take {111} us into the region of abstract
talk, have a knack of so playing with words that in the end we don't
seem to know anything for certain, especially on such subjects as we
have hitherto thought the most important, such as God and right and
truth and justice and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless
against you; and what is more, any smart youth, whose opinion on any
practical matter no one would think of taking, can very soon pick up
the trick from you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than
himself by his clever argumentation; all going to prove that there is
nothing certain, nothing real, nothing binding; nothing but opinions
and conventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in the universe.
"But when I go and have a quiet talk with any man who really is a known
master of some craft or skill, about that craft or skill, I find no
doubt whatever existing in his mind about there being a law, a
something absolutely real and beautiful and true in connection with it.
He, on the contrary, lives with no other purpose or hope or desire but
as far as he can to realise in what he works at something of this real
and beautiful and true, which was before him, will be after him, is the
only valuable thing in him, but yet which honours him with the function
of, in his day and generation, expressing it before the eyes of men. "
{112} "Have we not here a key to the great secret? If each man, in
respect of that which he knows best because he lives by it and for it,
knows with intimate knowledge and certainty that there at least there
is a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater than he,--have we
not here a hint of the truth for the universe as a whole; that there
also and in all its operations, great as well as small, there must be a
Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before all things, works
in and gives value to all things, will be the consummation of all
things? Is not this what we mean by the Divine? "
Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things of life, but bending
from the airy speculations of the proud to the realities which true
labour showed him, laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of
nature, and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.
"Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his new vision of things.
Knowledge, yes; but _real_ knowledge; not mere head-knowledge or
lip-knowledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the man who by
obedience and teachableness and self-restraint has come to a knowledge
evidencing itself in _works_ expressive of the law that is in him, as
he is in it. _Virtue is knowledge_; on the one hand, therefore, not
something in the air, unreal, intangible; but something in me, in you,
in each man, something which you cannot handle except as individual and
{113} in individuals; on the other hand, something more than individual
or capricious or uncertain,--something which is absolute, over-ruling,
eternal.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And so if a man is virtuous, he is realising
what is best and truest in himself, he is fulfilling also what is best
and truest without himself. He is free, for only the truth makes free;
he is obedient to law, but it is at once a law eternally valid, and a
law which he dictates to himself. And therefore virtue is teachable,
inasmuch as the law in the teacher, perfected in him, is also the law
in the taught, latent in him, by both individually possessed, but
possessed by both in virtue of its being greater than both, of its
being something more than individual.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore the law of virtuous growth is
expressed in the maxim engraved on the Delphic temple, 'Know thyself. '
Know thyself, that is, realise thyself; by obedience and self-control
come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility;
satisfy yourself, in the only way in which true self-satisfaction is
possible, by realising in yourself the law which constitutes your real
being.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore all the manifold relations of
life,--the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform
activities of life,--labour and speech and art and literature and {114}
law; all the sentiments of life,--friendship and love and reverence and
courage and hope,--all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are
expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through
individuals, and in the same process realising them.
{115}
CHAPTER XII
SOCRATES (_concluded_)
_The dialectic method--Instruction through humiliation--Justice and
utility--Righteousness transcending rule_
It must not be imagined that anywhere in the recorded conversations of
Socrates can we find thus in so many words expounded his fundamental
doctrine. Socrates was not an expositor but a questioner; he
disclaimed the position of a teacher, he refused to admit that any were
his pupils or disciples. But his questioning had two sides, each in
its way leading people on to an apprehension of the ideal in existence.
The first side may be called the negative or destructive, the second,
the positive or constructive. In the first, whose object was to break
down all formalism, all mere regard for rules or traditions or
unreasoned maxims, his method had considerable resemblance to that of
the Sophists; like them he descended not infrequently to what looked
very like quibbling and word-play. As Aristotle observes, the
dialectic method differed from that of the Sophists not so much in its
form, as in the purpose for which it was employed. The end of the
{116} Sophists was to confuse, the end of Socrates was through
confusion to reach a more real, because a more reasoned certainty; the
Sophists sought to leave the impression that there was no such thing as
truth; he wished to lead people to the conviction that there was a far
deeper truth than they were as yet possessed of.
A specimen of his manner of conversation preserved for us by Xenophon
(_Memor_. IV. ii. ) will make the difference clearer. Euthydemus was a
young man who had shown great industry in forming a collection of wise
sayings from poets and others, and who prided himself on his superior
wisdom because of his knowledge of these. Socrates skilfully manages
to get the ear of this young man by commending him for his collection,
and asks him what he expects his learning to help him to become? A
physician? No, Euthydemus answers. An architect? No. And so in like
manner with other practical skills,--the geometrician's, astronomer's,
professional reciter's. None of these he discovers is what Euthydemus
aims at. He hopes to become a great politician and statesman. Then of
course he hopes to be a just man himself? Euthydemus flatters himself
he is that already.
"But," says Socrates, "there must be certain acts
which are the proper products of justice, as of other functions or
skills? "--"No doubt. "--"Then of course you can tell us what {117} those
acts or products are? "--"Of course I can, and the products of injustice
as well. "--"Very good; then suppose we write down in two opposite
columns what acts are products of justice and what of injustice. "--"I
agree," says Euthydemus. --"Well now, what of falsehood? In which
column shall we put it? "--"Why, of course in the unjust column. "--"And
cheating? "--"In the same column. "--"And stealing? "--"In it too. "--"And
enslaving? "--"Yes. "--"Not one of these can go to the just
column? "--"Why, that would be an unheard-of thing. "
"Well but," says Socrates, "suppose a general has to deal with some
enemy of his country that has done it great wrong; if he conquer and
enslave this enemy, is that wrong? "--"Certainly not. "--"If he carries
off the enemy's goods or cheats him in his strategy, what about these
acts? "--"Oh, of course they are quite right. But I thought you were
talking about deceiving or ill-treating friends. "--"Then in some cases
we shall have to put these very same acts in both columns? "--"I suppose
so. "
"Well, now, suppose we confine ourselves to friends. Imagine a general
with an army under him discouraged and disorganised. Suppose he tells
them that reserves are coming up, and by cheating them into this belief
he saves them from their discouragement, and enables them to win a
victory. What about this cheating of one's friends? "--"Why, I {118}
suppose we shall have to put this too on the just side. "--"Or suppose a
lad needs medicine, but refuses to take it, and his father cheats him
into the belief that it is something nice, and getting him to take it,
saves his life; what about that cheat? "--"That will have to go to the
just side too. "--"Or suppose you find a friend in a desperate frenzy,
and steal his sword from him, for fear he should kill himself; what do
you say to that theft? "--"That will have to go there too. "--"But I
thought you said there must be no cheating of friends? "--"Well, I must
take it all back, if you please. "--"Very good. But now there is
another point I should like to ask you. Whether do you think the man
more unjust who is a voluntary violator of justice, or he who is an
involuntary violator of it? "--"Upon my word, Socrates, I no longer have
any confidence in my answers. For the whole thing has turned out to be
exactly the contrary of what I previously imagined. However, suppose I
say that the voluntary deceiver is the more unjust. "--"Do you consider
that justice is a matter of knowledge just as much (say) as
writing? "--"Yes, I do. "--"Well now, which do you consider the better
skilled as a writer, the man who makes a mistake in writing or in
reading what is written, because he chooses to do so, or the man who
does so because he can't help it? "--"Oh, the first; because he can put
it right whenever he likes. "--"Very {119} well, if a man in the same
way breaks the rule of right, knowing what he is doing, while another
breaks the same rule because he can't help it, which by analogy must be
the better versed in justice? "--"The first, I suppose. "--"And the man
who is better versed in justice must be the juster man? "--"Apparently
so; but really, Socrates, I don't know where I am. I have been
flattering myself that I was in possession of a philosophy which could
make a good and able man of me. But how great, think you, must now be
my disappointment, when I find myself unable to answer the simplest
question on the subject? "
Many other questions are put to him, tending to probe his
self-knowledge, and in the end he is brought to the conclusion that
perhaps he had better hold his tongue, for it seems he knows nothing at
all. And so he went away deeply despondent, despising himself as an
absolute dolt. "Now many," adds Xenophon, "when brought into this
condition by Socrates, never came near him again. But Euthydemus
concluded that his only hope of ever being worth anything was in seeing
as much of Socrates as he could, and so he never quitted his side as
long as he had a chance, but tried to follow his mode of living. And
Socrates, when he perceived this to be his temper, no longer tormented
him, but sought with all simplicity and clearness to {120} show him
what he deemed it best for him to do and think. "
Was this cross-examination mere 'tormenting' with a purpose, or can we
discover underlying it any hint of what Socrates deemed to be the truth
about justice?
Let us note that throughout he is in search of a _definition_, but that
as soon as any attempt is made to define or classify any particular
type of action as just or unjust, _special circumstances_ are suggested
which overturn the classification. Let us note further that while the
immediate result is apparently only to confuse, the remoter but more
permanent result is to raise a suspicion of any hard and fast
definitions, and to suggest that there is something deeper in life than
language is adequate to express, a 'law in the members,' a living
principle for good, which transcends forms and maxims, and which alone
gives real value to acts. Note further the suggestion that this living
principle has a character analogous to the knowledge or skill of an
accomplished artificer; it has relation on the one hand to law, as a
principle binding on the individual, it has relation on the other hand
to _utility_, as expressing itself, not in words, but in acts
beneficial to those concerned. Hence the Socratic formula, Justice is
equivalent to the _Lawful_ on the one hand, to the _Useful_ on the
other.
{121}
Socrates had thus solved by anticipation the apparently never-ending
controversy about morality. Is it a matter imposed by God upon the
heart and conscience of each individual? Is it dictated by the general
sense of the community? Is it the product of Utility? The Socratic
answer would be that it is all three, and that all three mean
ultimately the same thing. What God prescribes is what man when he is
truly man desires; and what God prescribes and man desires is that
which is good and useful for man. It is not a matter for verbal
definition but for vital realisation; the true morality is that which
_works_; the ideally desirable, is ultimately the only possible, course
of action, for all violations of it are ultimately suicidal.
Note finally the suggestion that the man who _knows_ (in Socrates'
sense of knowledge) what is right, shows only more fully his
righteousness when he voluntarily sins; it is the 'unwilling sinner'
who is the wrongdoer. When we consider this strange doctrine in
relation to the instances given,--the general with his army, the father
with his son, the prudent friend with his friend in desperate
straits,--we see that what is meant is that 'sin' in the real sense is
not to be measured or defined by conformity or otherwise to some formal
standard, at least in the case of those who _know_, that is, in the
case of men who have realised goodness in its true nature in {122}
their characters and lives. As St. Paul expressed it (Rom. xiii. 10),
"Love is the fulfilling of the law. " Or again (Gal. v. 23), after
enumerating the 'fruits of the spirit'--love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance--he
adds, "Against such there is no law. "
In the domain of life, not less than in that of the arts, the highest
activity does not always or necessarily take the form of conformity to
rule. There are critical moments when rules fail, when, in fact,
obedience to rule would mean disobedience to that higher law, of which
rules and formulae are at best only an adumbration. The originality of
the great musician or painter consists in just such transcendence of
accepted formulae; this is why he invariably encounters opposition and
obloquy from the learned conventional pedants of his time. And in the
domain of morals the martyrs, reformers, prophets are in like manner
'willing sinners. ' They are denounced, persecuted, crucified; for are
they not disturbers of society; do they not unsettle young men; do they
not come, as Christ came, not to bring peace into the world, but a
sword? And thus it is that the willing sinners of one generation are
the martyrs and heroes of the next. Through their life and death a
richer meaning has been given to the law of beauty or of rectitude,
only, alas! in its turn to be translated into new conventions, new
{123} formulae, which shall in due time require new martyrs to
transcend them. And thus, on the other hand, the perfectly honest
sticklers for the old and common-place, unwilling sinners all
unconscious of their sin, are fated to bear in history the brand of men
who have persecuted the righteous without cause. To each, according to
the strange sad law of life, time brings its revenges.
{124}
CHAPTER XIII
THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS
_A philosopher at ease--The sensual sty--Citizens of the world--The tub
of Diogenes--A philosophy of abstracts_
[204]
I. ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAICS. --Aristippus was a native of Cyrene, a
Greek colony on the north coast of Africa. He is said to have come to
Athens because of his desire to hear Socrates; but from the notices of
him which we find in Xenophon's memoirs he appears to have been from
the first a somewhat intractable follower, dissenting especially from
the poverty and self-denial of the master's mode of life. [205] He in
course of time founded a school of his own, called the Cyrenaic from
his own place of birth, and from the fact that many subsequent leaders
of the school also belonged to Cyrene. Among his notable disciples
were his daughter Arete, her son named Aristippus after his
grandfather, Ptolemaeus the Aethiopian, Antipater of Cyrene, and a long
succession of others.
Aristippus was a man of considerable subtlety of mind, a ready speaker,
clever in adapting himself to persons and circumstances. On one
occasion, being {125} asked what benefit he considered philosophy had
conferred upon him, he answered, "The capacity of associating with
every one without embarrassment. " Philosophy, in fact, was to
Aristippus a method of social culture, a means of making the best of
life as he found it. As Horace observes of him (_Epp_. i. 17. 23)--
Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res
Tentantem majora, fere praesentibus aequum.
"Every aspect and manner of life and fortune fitted Aristippus; he
aimed at what was greater, yet kept an even, mind whatever his present
condition. "
[206]
As we have already said, this school was _incompletely_ Socratic,
inasmuch as philosophy was not an end in itself, knowledge whether of
oneself or of other matters had no intrinsic interest for them;
philosophy was only a means towards pleasurable living, enabling them
so to analyse and classify the several experiences of life as to render
a theory of satisfactory [207] existence possible. With them first
came into prominence a phrase which held a large place in all
subsequent Greek philosophy, the _End_ of existence, by which was meant
that which summed up the good in existence, that which made life worth
living, that which was good and desirable in and for itself, and not
merely as a means to something else. What then according to the
Cyrenaics was the End of life? {126} Their answer was that life had at
each moment its own End, in the pleasure of that moment. The past was
gone, the future not yet with us; remembrance of the one, fear or hope
of the other, might contribute to affect the purity of the present
pleasure, but such as it was the present pleasure was a thing apart,
complete in and for itself. Nor was its perfection qualified by any
question of the means by which it was procured; the moment's pleasure
was pleasurable, whatever men might say as to the manner of its [208]
procuring. This pleasure was a tranquil activity of the being, like
the gently heaving sea, midway between violent motion which was pain,
and absolute calm which was insensibility. As a state of activity it
was something positive, not a mere release from [209] pain, not a
simple filling up of a vacuum. Nothing was in its essential nature
either just or noble or base; custom and convention pronounced them one
or other. The wise man made the best he could of his conditions;
valuing mental activity and friendship and wealth and bodily exercise,
and avoiding envy and excessive indulgence of passion and superstition,
not because the first were in themselves good or the second evil, but
because they were respectively helpers or hinderers of pleasure. He is
the master and possessor of pleasure not who abstains from it, but who
uses it and keeps his self-command in the using. Moderate
indulgence--this is wisdom.
{127}
[210]
The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, is the feeling of the
moment for the man who feels it; all question of causes of feelings is
delusive. We can say with truth and certainty, I have the sensation of
white or the sensation of sweet. But that there is a white or a sweet
thing which is the cause of the sensation, that we cannot say for
certain. A man may very well have the sensation white or sweet from
something which has no such quality, as men in delusion or madness have
impressions that are true and real inasmuch as they have them, although
other people do not admit their reality. There is, therefore, no
criterion of truth as between man and man; we may employ the same
words, but each has his own impressions and his own individual
experiences.
One can easily understand this as the doctrine of such a man as
Aristippus, the easy-going man of the world, the courtier and the wit,
the favourite of the tyrant Dionysius; it fits in well enough with a
life of genial self-indulgence; it always reappears whenever a man has
reconciled himself 'to roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. ' But life
is not always, nor for most persons at any time, a thing of ease and
soft enchantments, and the Cyrenaic philosophy must remain for the
general work-a-day world a stale exotic. 'Every man for himself and
the devil take the hindmost,' is a maxim which comes as a rule {128}
only to the lips of the worldly successful, while they think themselves
strong enough to stand alone. But this solitude of selfishness neither
works nor lasts; every man at some time becomes 'the hindmost,' if not
before, at least in the hour of death for him or his; at that hour he
is hardly disposed, for himself or those he loves, to repeat his maxim.
II. ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNICS. --Aristippus, in his praises of pleasure
as the one good for man (see above, p. 126), remarks that there were
some who [209] refused pleasure "from perversity of mind," taking
pleasure, so to speak, in the denial of pleasure. The school of the
Cynics made this perverse mood, as Aristippus deemed it, the maxim of
their philosophy. As the Cyrenaic school was the school of the rich,
the courtly, the self-indulgent, so the Cynic was the school of the
poor, the exiles, the ascetics. Each was an extreme expression of a
phase of Greek life and thought, though there was this point of union
[215] between them, that _liberty_ of a kind was sought by both. The
Cyrenaics claimed liberty to please themselves in the choice of their
enjoyments; the Cynics sought liberty through denial of enjoyments.
[219] Both, moreover, were cosmopolitan; they mark the decay of the
Greek patriotism, which was essentially civic, and the rise of the
wider but less intense conception of humanity. Aristippus, in a
conversation with Socrates (Xenoph. _Memor_. II. i. ) on the {129}
qualifications of those who are fitted to be magistrates, disclaims all
desire to hold such a position himself. "There is," he says, "to my
thinking, a middle way, neither of rule nor of slavery, but of freedom,
which leads most surely to true happiness. So to avoid all the evils
of partisanship and faction I nowhere take upon me the position of a
citizen, but in every city remain a sojourner and a stranger. " And in
like manner Antisthenes the Cynic, being asked how a man should
approach politics, answered, "He will approach it as he will fire, not
too near, lest he be burnt; not too far away, lest he starve of cold. "
And Diogenes, being asked of what city he was, answered, "I am a
citizen of the world. " The Cynic ideal, in fact, was summed up in
these four words--wisdom, independence, free speech, liberty.
[214]
Antisthenes, founder of the school, was a native of Athens, but being
of mixed blood (his mother was a Thracian) he was not recognised as an
Athenian citizen. He was a student first under Gorgias, and acquired
from him a considerable elegance of literary style; subsequently he
became a devoted hearer of Socrates, and became prominent among his
followers for an asceticism surpassing his master's. One day, we are
told, he showed a great rent in the thread-bare cloak which was his
only garment, whereupon Socrates slily remarked, "I can see through
your cloak your love of glory. " He carried a leathern {130} scrip and
a staff, and the 'scrip and staff' became distinctive marks of his
school. The name Cynic, derived from the Greek word for a dog, is
variously accounted for, some attributing it to the 'doglike' habits of
the school, others to their love of 'barking' criticism, others to the
fact that a certain gymnasium in the outskirts of Athens, called
Cynosarges, sacred to Hercules the patron-divinity of men in the
political position of Antisthenes, was a favourite resort of his. He
was a voluminous, some thought a too voluminous, [216] expounder of his
tenets. Like the other Incomplete Socratics, his teaching was mainly
on ethical questions.
[215]
His chief pupil and successor was the famous Diogenes, a native of
Sinope, a Greek colony on the Euxine Sea. He even bettered the
instructions of his master in the matter of extreme frugality of
living, claiming that he was a true follower of Hercules in preferring
independence to every other good. The tale of his living in a cask or
tub is well known. His theory was that the peculiar privilege of the
gods consisted in their need of nothing; men approached nearest the
life of the gods in needing as little as possible.
[217]
Many other sayings of one or other teacher are quoted, all tending to
the same conclusion. For example, "I had rather be mad than enjoying
myself! " "Follow the pleasures that come after pains, not those which
bring pains in their train. " "There {131} are pains that are useless,
there are pains that are natural: the wise choose the latter, and thus
find happiness even through pain. For the very contempt of pleasure
comes with practice to be the highest pleasure. " "When I wish a
treat," says Antisthenes, "I do not go and buy it at great cost in the
marketplace; I find my storehouse of pleasures in the soul. "
[218]
The life of the wise man, therefore, was a training of mind and body to
despise pleasure and attain independence. In this way virtue was
teachable, and could be so acquired as to become an inseparable
possession. The man who had thus attained to wisdom, not of words, but
of deeds, was, as it were, in an impregnable fortress that could
neither crumble into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so
Antisthenes, being asked what was the most essential point of learning,
answered, "To unlearn what is evil. " That is to say, to the Cynic
conception, men were born with a root of evil in them in the love of
pleasure; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul and body by practice
from the allurements of pleasure, until both were so perfectly
accustomed to its denial as to find an unalloyed pleasure in the very
act of [219] refusing it. In this way virtue became absolutely
sufficient for happiness, and so far was it from being necessary to
have wealth or the admiration of men in addition, that the true kingly
life was "to do well, {132} and be ill spoken of. " All else but virtue
was a matter of indifference.
The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them to hold of small account
the forms and prejudices of ordinary society: they despised the rites
of marriage; they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no
multifarious theology; there was but one divinity--the power that ruled
all nature, the one absolutely self-centred independent being, whose
manner of [221] existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any
sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some
of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time.
Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man
was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not
establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As
Antisthenes once said to Plato, "A horse I see, but 'horseness' I do
not see. " What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve
for the present.
[222]
III. EUCLIDES THE MEGARIC. --Euclides, a native of Megara on the
Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted hearer of Socrates, making his way to
hear him, sometimes even at the 'risk of his life, in defiance of a
decree of his native city forbidding intercourse with Athens. When
Plato and other Athenian followers of Socrates thought well to quit
Athens for {133} a time after Socrates' execution, they were kindly
entertained by Euclides at Megara.
The exact character of the development which the Socratic teaching
received from Euclides and his school is a matter of considerable
doubt. The allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and [223]
others are only fragmentary. We gather, however, from them that
Euclides was wholly antithetical to the personal turn given to
philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and
developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224]
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good,
and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of
himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such
absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus,
in insensibility to these through reason, man attained his highest good.
The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the
continued survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier
philosophy. As such it had a very definite influence, sometimes
through agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems of Plato
and Aristotle now to be dealt with.
{134}
CHAPTER XIV
PLATO
_Student and wanderer--The Dialogues--Immortal longings--Art is
love--Knowledge through remembrance--Platonic love_
[239]
This great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philosophy, as one may call
him, for his fertility, his variety, his humour, his imagination, his
poetic grace, was born at Athens in the year 429 B. C. He was of noble
family, numbering among his ancestors no less a man than the great
lawgiver Solon, and tracing back his descent even further to the [240]
legendary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early age he seems to
have begun to study the philosophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and
before he was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that time,
however, he met Socrates; and at once giving up all thought of poetic
fame he burnt his poem, and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates.
For ten years he was his constant companion. When Socrates met his
death in 399, Plato and other followers of the master fled at first to
Megara, as already mentioned (above, p. 132); he then entered on a
period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and {135} Egypt, thence to
Italy and Sicily. In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of
the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended
the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was
delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens. [241]
Ultimately he was ransomed, and found his way back to Athens, but he is
said to have paid a second visit to Sicily when the younger Dionysius
became tyrant. He seems to have entertained the hope that he might so
influence this young man as to be able to realise through him the dream
of his life, a government in accordance with the dictates of [242]
philosophy. His dream, however, was disappointed of fruition, and he
returned to Athens, there in the 'groves of Academus' a mythic hero of
Athens, to spend the rest of his days in converse with his followers,
and there at the ripe age of eighty-one he died. From the scene of his
labours his philosophy has ever since been known as the Academic [243]
philosophy. Unlike Socrates, he was not content to leave only a memory
of himself and his conversations. He was unwearied in the redaction
and correction of his written dialogues, altering them here and there
both in expression and in structure. It is impossible, therefore, to
be absolutely certain as to the historical order of composition or
publication among his numerous {136} dialogues, but a certain
approximate order may be fixed.
