Shall I tell you what amazes me in your friend
Protagoras?
A Short History of Greek Philosophy by J. Marshall
[132]
These four elements constitute the total _corpus_ of the universe,
eternal, as a whole unmoved and immovable, perfect like a sphere. But
within this sphere-like self-centred All there are eternally proceeding
separations and new unions of the elements of things; and every one of
these is at once a birth {63} and an infinity of dyings, a dying and an
infinity of births. Towards this perpetual life in death, and death in
life, two forces work inherent in the universe. One of these he names
Love, Friendship, Harmony, Aphrodite goddess of Love, Passion, Joy; the
other he calls Hate, Discord, Ares god of War, Envy, Strife. Neither
of the one nor of the other may man have apprehension by the senses;
they are spiritually discerned; yet of the first men have some
adumbration in the creative force within their own members, which they
name by the names of Love and Nuptial Joy.
Somewhat prosaically summing up the teaching of Empedocles, Aristotle
says that he thus posited _six_ first principles in nature--four
material, two motive or efficient. And he goes on to remark that in
the working out of his theory of nature Empedocles, though using his
originative principles more consistently than Anaxagoras used his
principle of _Nous_ or Thought, not infrequently, nevertheless, resorts
to some natural force in the elements themselves, or even to chance or
necessity. "Nor," he continues, "has he clearly marked off the
functions of his two efficient forces, nay, he has so confounded them
that at times it is Discord that through separation leads to new
unions, and Love that through union causes diremption of that which was
before. " At times, too, Empedocles seems to have had a vision of these
two forces, not as the counteracting yet {64} co-operative
_pulsations_, so to speak, of the universal life, but as rival forces
having had in time their periods of alternate supremacy and defeat.
While all things were in union under the influence of Love, then was
there neither Earth nor Water nor Air nor Fire, much less any of the
individual things that in eternal interchange are formed of them; but
all was in perfect sphere-like balance, enwrapped in the serenity of an
eternal silence. Then came the reign of Discord, whereby war arose in
heaven as of the fabled giants, and endless change,--endless birth, and
endless death.
These inconsistencies of doctrine, which Aristotle notes as faults in
Empedocles, are perhaps rather proofs of the philosophic value of his
conceptions. Just as Hegel in modern philosophy could only adequately
formulate his conceptions through logical contradictions, so also,
perhaps, under the veil of antagonisms of utterance, Empedocles sought
to give a fuller vision,--Discord, in his own doctrine, not less than
in his conception of nature, being thus the co-worker with Love. The
ordinary mind for the ordinary purposes of science seeks exactness of
distinction in things, and language, being the creation of ordinary
experience, lends itself to such a purpose; the philosophic mind,
finding ready to its hand no forms of expression adapted to its
conceptions, which have for their final end Union and not Distinction,
{65} can only attain its purpose by variety, or even contradictoriness,
of representation. Thus to ordinary conception cause must precede
effect; to the philosophic mind, dealing as it does with the idea of an
organic whole, everything is at once cause and effect, is at once
therefore prior to and subsequent to every other, is at once the ruling
and the ruled, the conditioning and that which is conditioned.
So, to Empedocles there are four elements, yet in the eternal
perfection, the silent reign of Love, there are none of them. There
are two forces working upon these and against each other, yet each is
like the other either a unifying or a separating force, as one pleases
to regard them; and in the eternal silence, the ideal perfectness,
there is no warfare at all. There is joy in Love which creates, and in
creating destroys; there is joy in the eternal Stillness, nay, this is
itself the ultimate joy. There are two forces working, Love and Hate,
yet is there but one force, and that force is Necessity. And for final
contradiction, the universe is self-balanced, self-conditioned, a
perfect sphere; therefore this Necessity is perfect self-realisation,
and consequently perfect freedom.
The men who have had the profoundest vision of things--Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, ay, and Aristotle himself when he was the
thinker and not the critic; not to speak of the great moderns, whether
preachers or philosophers--have none of {66} them been greatly
concerned for consistency of expression, for a mere logical
self-identity of doctrine. Life in every form, nay, existence in any
form, is a union of contradictories, a complex of antagonisms; and the
highest and deepest minds are those that are most adequate to have the
vision of these antagonisms in their contrariety, and also in their
unity; to see and hear as Empedocles did the eternal war and clamour,
but to discern also, as he did in it and through it and behind it and
about it, the eternal peace and the eternal silence.
Philosophy, in fact, is a form of poesy; it is, if one pleases so to
call it, 'fiction founded upon fact. ' It is not for that reason the
less noble a form of human thought, rather is it the more noble, in the
same way as poetry is nobler than mere narrative, and art than
representation, and imagination than perception. Philosophy is indeed
one of the noblest forms of poetry, because the facts which are its
basis are the profoundest, the most eternally interesting, the most
universally significant. And not only has it nobility in respect of
the greatness of its subject matter, it has also possibilities of an
essential truth deeper and more far-reaching and more fruitful than any
demonstrative system of fact can have. A great poem or work of art of
any kind is an adumbration of truths which transcend any actual fact,
and as such it brings us nearer to the underlying fundamentals of {67}
reality which all actual occurrences only by accumulation _tend_ to
realise. Philosophy, then, in so far as it is great, is, like other
great art, prophetic in both interpretations of the word, both as
expounding the inner truth that is anterior to actuality, and also as
anticipating that final realisation of all things for which 'the whole
creation groaneth. ' It is thus at the basis of religion, of art, of
morals; it is the accumulated sense of the highest in man with respect
to what is greatest and most mysterious in and about him.
The facts, indeed, with which philosophy attempts to deal are so vital
and so vast that even the greatest intellects may well stagger
occasionally under the burden of their own conceptions of them. To
rise to the height of such an argument demands a more than Miltonic
imagination; and criticisms directed only at this or that fragment of
the whole are as irrelevant, if not as inept, as the criticism of the
mathematician directed against _Paradise Lost_, that it 'proved
nothing. ' The mystery of being and of life, the true purport and
reality of this world of which we seem to be a part, and yet of which
we seem to have some apprehension as though we were other than a part;
the strange problems of creation and change and birth and death, of
love and sin and purification; of a heaven dreamt of or believed in, or
somehow actually apprehended; of life here, and of an immortality
yearned after and hoped for--these {68} problems, these mysteries, no
philosophy ever did or ever can empty of their strangeness, or bring
down to the level of the commonplace 'certainties' of daily life or of
science, which are no more than shadows after all, that seem
certainties because of the background of mystery on which they are cast.
But just as an individual is a higher being, a fuller, more truly human
creature, when he has got so far removed from the merely animal
existence as to realise that there are such problems and mysteries, so
also the humanisation of the race, the development of its noblest
peoples and its noblest literatures, have been conditioned by the
successive visions of these mysteries in more and more complex
organisation by the great philosophers and poets and preachers. The
systems of such men may die, but such deaths mean, as Empedocles said
of the ordinary deaths of things, only an infinity of new births.
Being dead, their systems yet speak in the inherited language and ideas
and aspirations and beliefs that form the never-ending, still-renewing
material for new philosophies and new faiths. In Thales, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles we have been touching hands with an
apostolic succession of great men and great thinkers and great
poets--men of noble life and lofty thoughts, true prophets and
revealers. And the apostolic succession even within the Greek world
does not fail for centuries yet.
{69}
Passing from the general conceptions of Empedocles to those more
particular rationalisations of particular problems which very largely
provided the motive of early philosophies, while scientific methods
were in an undeveloped and uncritical condition, we may notice such
interesting statements as the following: [135] "The earth, which is at
the centre of the sphere of the universe, remains firm, because the
spin of the universe as a whole keeps it in its place like the water in
a spinning cup. " He has the same conception of the early condition of
the earth as in other cosmogonies. At first it was a chaos of watery
slough, which slowly, under the influence of sky and sun, parted off
into earth and sea. The sea was the 'sweat' of the earth, and by
analogy with the sweat it was salt. The heavens, on the other hand,
were formed of air and fire, and the sun was, as it were, a speculum at
which the effulgence and the heat of the whole heavens concentrated.
But that the aether and the fire had not been fully separated from
earth and water he held to be proved by the hot fountains and fiery
phenomena which must have been so familiar to a native of Sicily.
Curiously enough he imagined fire to possess a solidifying power, and
therefore attributed to it the solidity of the earth and the hardness
of the rocks. No doubt he had observed some effects of fire in
'metamorphic' formations in his own vicinity.
{70}
[137]
He had also a conception of the gradual development on the earth of
higher and higher forms of life, the first being rude and imperfect,
and a 'struggle for existence' ensuing in which the monstrous and the
deficient gradually were eliminated--the "two-faced, the
double-breasted, the oxen-shaped with human prows, or human-shaped with
head of ox, or hemaphrodite," and so forth. Love and Strife worked out
their ends upon these varied forms; some procreated and reproduced
after their image, others were incapable of reproduction from mere
monstrosity or [138] weakness, and disappeared. Something other than
mere chance thus governed the development of things; there was a law, a
reason, a _Logos_ governing the process. This law or reason he perhaps
fancifully illustrated by attributing the different characters of flesh
and sinew and bone to the different numerical proportions, in which
they severally contain the different elements.
On this Aristotle, keen-scented critic as he was, has a question, or
series of questions, to ask as to the relation between this Logos, or
principle of orderly combination, and Love as the ruling force in all
unions of things. "Is Love," he asks, "a cause of mixtures of any
sort, or only of such sorts as Logos dictates? And whether then is
Love identical with this Logos, or are they separate and distinct; and
if so, what settles their separate functions? " Questions {71} which
Empedocles did not answer, and perhaps would not have tried to answer
had he heard them.
[139]
The soul or life-principle in man Empedocles regarded as an ordered
composite of all the elements or principles of the life in nature, and
in this kinship of the elements in man and the elements in nature he
found a rationale of our powers of perception. "By the earth," said
he, "we have perception of earth; by water we have perception of water;
of the divine aether, by aether; of destructive fire, by fire; of love,
by love; of strife, by strife. " He therefore, as Aristotle observes,
drew no radical distinction between sense-apprehension and thought. He
located the faculty of apprehension more specifically in the blood,
conceiving that in it the combination of the elements was most
complete. And the variety of apprehensive gift in different persons he
attributed to the greater or lesser perfectness of this blood mixture
in them individually. Those that were dull and stupid had a relative
deficiency of the lighter and more invisible elements; those that were
quick and impulsive had a relatively larger proportion of these.
Again, specific faculties depended on local perfection of mixture in
certain organs; orators having this perfectness in their tongues,
cunning craftsmen possessing it in their hands, and so on. And the
degrees of capacity of sensation, which he found in various animals, or
even plants, he explained in similar fashion.
{72} The process of sensation he conceived to be conditioned by an
actual emission from the bodies perceived of elements or images of
themselves which found access to our apprehension through channels
[140] congruous to their nature. But ordering, criticising, organising
these various apprehensions was the Mind or _Nous_, which he conceived
to be of divine nature, to be indeed an expression or emanation of the
Divine. And here has been preserved a strangely interesting passage,
in which he incorporates and develops in characteristic fashion the
doctrine of transmigration [141] of souls: "There is a decree of
Necessity, a law given of old from the gods, eternal, sealed with
mighty oaths, that when any heavenly creature (daemon) of those that
are endowed with length of days, shall in waywardness of heart defile
his hands with sin of deed or speech, he shall wander for thrice ten
thousand seasons far from the dwellings of the blest, taking upon him
in length of time all manner of mortal forms, traversing in turn the
many toilsome paths of existence. Him the aetherial wrath hurries
onward to the deep, and the deep spews him forth on to the threshold of
earth, and unworn earth casts him up to the fires of the sun, and again
the aether hurls him into the eddies. One receives him, and then
another, but detested is he of them all. Of such am I also one, an
exile and a wanderer from God, a slave to strife and its madness. "
{73}
Thus to his mighty conception the life of all creation, and not of man
only, was a great expiation, an eternal round of punishment for sin;
and in the unending flux of life each creature rose or fell in the
scale of existence according to the deeds of good or ill done in each
successive life; rising sometimes to the state of men, or among men to
the high functions of physicians and prophets and kings, or among
beasts to the dignity of the lion, or among trees to the beauty of the
laurel; or, on the contrary, sinking through sin to lowest forms of
bestial or vegetable life. Till at the last they who through obedience
and right-doing have expiated their wrong, are endowed by the blessed
gods with endless honour, to dwell for ever with them and share their
banquets, untouched any more with human care and sorrow and pain.
[143]
The slaying of any living creature, therefore, Empedocles, like
Pythagoras, abhorred, for all were kin. All foul acts were forms of
worse than suicide; life should be a long act of worship, of expiation,
of purification. And in the dim past he pictured a vision of a golden
age, in which men worshipped not many gods, but Love only, and not with
sacrifices of blood, but with pious images, and cunningly odorous
incense, and offerings of fragrant myrrh. With abstinence also, and
above all with that noblest abstinence, the abstinence from vice and
wrong.
{74}
CHAPTER VIII
THE ATOMISTS (_concluded_)
_The laughing philosopher--Atoms and void--No god and no truth_
[143]
III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. --Leucippus is variously called a native
of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos, of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the
Eleatic. [144] Democritus was a native of Abdera. They seem to have
been almost contemporary with Socrates. The two are associated as
thorough-going teachers of the 'Atomic Philosophy,' but Democritus,
'the laughing philosopher,' as he was popularly called in later times,
in distinction from Heraclitus, 'the weeping philosopher,' was much the
more famous. [145] He lived to a great age. He himself refers to his
travels and studies thus: "Above all the men of my time I travelled
farthest, and extended my inquiries to places the most distant. I
visited the most varied climates and countries, heard the largest
number of learned men, nor has any one surpassed me in the gathering
together of writings and their interpretation, no, not even the most
learned of the Egyptians, with whom I spent five years. " We {75} are
also informed that, through desire of learning, he visited Babylon and
Chaldaea, to visit the astrologers and the priests.
[146]
Democritus was not less prolific as a writer than he was voracious as a
student, and in him first the division of philosophy into certain great
sections, such as physical, mathematical, ethical, was clearly [147]
drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his teaching in its more
strictly philosophical aspects. His main doctrine was professedly
antithetical to that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered,
worked out on abstract lines a theory of one indivisible, eternal,
immovable Being. Democritus, on the contrary, declared for two
co-equal elements, the Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The
latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As we should put it,
Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does
not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely
Space is unthinkable except by reference to body actually or
potentially filling or defining it.
What Democritus hoped to get by this double or correlative system was a
means of accounting for or conceiving of _change_ in nature. The
difficulty with the Eleatics was, as we have seen, how to understand
whence or why the transition from that which absolutely is, to this
strange, at least apparent, system of eternal flux and transformation.
Democritus {76} hoped to get over this difficulty by starting as fully
with that which _is not_, in other words, with that which _wants_
change in order to have any recognisable being at all, as with that
which _is_, and which therefore might be conceived as seeking and
requiring only to be what it is.
[148]
Having got his principle of stability and his principle of change on an
equal footing, Democritus next laid it down that all the differences
visible in things were differences either of shape, of arrangement, or
of position; practically, that is, he considered that what seem, to us
to be qualitative differences in things, _e. g. _ hot or cold, sweet or
sour, green or yellow, are only resulting impressions from different
shapes, or different arrangements, or different modes of presentation,
among the atoms of which things are composed.
Coming now to that which _is_, Democritus, as against the Eleatics,
maintained that this was not a unity, some one immovable, unchangeable
existence, but an innumerable number of atoms, invisible by reason of
their smallness, which career through empty space (that which _is
not_), and by their union bring objects into being, by their separation
bring these to destruction. The action of these atoms on each other
depended on the manner in which they were brought into contact; but in
any case the unity of any object was only an apparent unity, it being
really constituted of a multitude of interlaced and mutually related
{77} particles, and all growth or increase of the object being
conditioned by the introduction into the structure of additional atoms
from without.
[149]
For the motions of the atoms he had no anterior cause to offer, other
than necessity or fate. They existed, and necessarily and always had
existed, in a state of whirl; and for that which always had been he
maintained that no preceding cause could legitimately or reasonably be
demanded.
[150]
Nothing, then, could come out of nothing; all the visible structure of
the universe had its origin in the movements of the atoms that
constituted it, and conditioned its infinite changes. The atoms, by a
useful but perhaps too convenient metaphor, he called the _seeds_ of
all things. They were infinite in number, though not infinite in the
number, of their shapes. Many atoms were similar to each other, and
this similarity formed a basis of union among them, a warp, so to
speak, or solid foundation across which the woof of dissimilar atoms
played to constitute the differences of things.
[151]
Out of this idea of an eternal eddy or whirl Democritus developed a
cosmogony. The lighter atoms he imagined flew to the outmost rim of
the eddy, there constituting the heavenly fires and the heavenly
aether. The heavier atoms gathered at the centre, forming successively
air and water and the solid earth. Not that there was only one such
{78} system or world, but rather multitudes of them, all varying one
from the other; some without sun or moon, others with greater
luminaries than those of our system, others with a greater number.
All, however, had necessarily a centre; all as systems were necessarily
spherical.
[152]
As regards the atoms he conceived that when they differed in weight
this must be in respect of a difference in their essential size. In
this he was no doubt combating the notion that the atoms say of lead or
gold were in their substance, taking equal quantities, of greater
weight than atoms of water or air. The difference of weight in objects
depended on the proportion which the atoms in them bore to the amount
of empty space which was interlaced with them. On the other hand, a
piece of iron was lighter yet harder than a piece of lead of equal
size, because of the special way in which the atoms in it were linked
together. There were fewer atoms in it, but they were, in consequence
of their structure and arrangement, more tightly strung.
[153]
In all this Democritus was with great resolution working out what we
may call a strictly mechanical theory of the universe. Even the soul
or life-principle in living creatures was simply a structure of the
finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he
compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their
never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room.
This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of
the motion characteristic of living creatures, and provided that
elastic counteracting force to the inward-pressing nimble air, whereby
were produced the phenomena of respiration. Every object, in fact,
whether living or not, kept its form and distinctive existence by its
possession in degree of a kind of soul or spirit of resistance in its
structure, adequate to counteract the pressure of external forces upon
its particles.
[155]
Sensation and perception were forms in which these external forces
acted upon the more nimble and lively existences, more particularly on
living creatures. For every body was continually sending forth
emanations or images resembling itself sufficiently in form and
structure to affect perceptive bodies with an apprehension of that form
and structure. These images travelled by a process of successive
transmission, similar to that by which wave-motions are propagated in
water. They were, in other words, not movements of the _particles_ of
the objects, which latter must otherwise in time grow less and fade
away, but a modification in the arrangement of the particles
immediately next the object, which modification reproduced itself in
the next following, and so on right through the medium to the
perceptive body.
{80}
[156]
These images tended by extension in all directions to reach vast
dimensions at times, and to influence the minds of men in sleep and on
other occasions in strange ways. Hence men imagined gods, and
attributed those mighty phenomena of nature--earthquakes, tempests,
lightning and thunder, and dire eclipses of sun and moon, to the
vaguely visible powers which they imagined they saw. There was indeed
a soul or spirit of the universe, as there was a soul or spirit of
every individual thing that constituted it. But this was only a finer
system of atoms after all. All else is convention or dream; the only
realities are Atoms and Emptiness, Matter and Space.
[157]
Of absolute verity through the senses we know nothing; our perceptions
are only conventional interpretations of we know not what. For to
other living creatures these same sensations have other meanings than
they have to us, and even the same person is not always affected alike
by the same thing; which then is the true of two differing perceptions
we cannot say. And therefore either there is no such thing as truth,
or, at all events, we know through the senses nothing of it. The only
genuine knowledge is that which transcends appearances, and reasons out
what is, irrespective of appearances,--in other words, the only genuine
knowledge is that of the (atomic) philosopher. And his knowledge is
{81} the result of the happy mixture of his atoms whereby all is in
equal balance, neither too hot nor too cold. Such a man seeing in the
mind's eye the whole universe a tissue of whirling and interlacing
atoms, with no real mystery or terror before or after, will live a life
of cheerful fearlessness, undisturbed by terrors of a world to come or
of powers unseen. His happiness is not in feastings or in gold, but in
a mind at peace. And three human perfections he will seek to attain:
to reason rightly, to speak graciously, to do his duty.
{82}
CHAPTER IX
THE SOPHISTS
_Anarchic philosophy--Success not truth--Man the measure--All opinions
true--Reductio ad absurdum_
A certain analogy may perhaps be discerned between the progression of
philosophic thought in Greece as we have traced it, and the political
development which had its course in almost every Greek state during the
same period. The Ionic philosophy may be regarded as corresponding
with the _kingly_ era in Greek politics. Philosophy sits upon the
heights and utters its authoritative dicta for the resolution of the
seeming contradictions of things. One principle is master, but the
testimony of the senses is not denied; a harmony of thought and
sensation is sought in the interpretation of appearances by the light
of a ruling idea. In Pythagoras and his order we have an
_aristocratic_ organisation of philosophy. Its truths are for the few,
the best men are the teachers, equal as initiated partakers in the
mysteries, supreme over all outside their society. A reasoned and
reasonable order and method are {83} symbolised by their theory of
Number; their philosophy is political, their politics oligarchic. In
the Eleatic school we have a succession of personal attempts to
construct a _domination_ in the theory of Nature; some ideal conception
is attempted to be so elevated above the data of sensation as to
override them altogether, and the general result we are now to see
throughout the philosophic world, as it was seen also throughout the
world of politics, in a total collapse of the principle of forced
authority, and a development, of successively nearer approaches to
anarchic individualism and doubt. The notion of an ultimately true and
real, whatever form it might assume in various theorists' hands, being
in its essence apart from and even antagonistic to the perceptions of
sense, was at last definitely cast aside as a delusion; what remained
were the individual perceptions, admittedly separate, unreasoned,
unrelated; Reason was dethroned, Chaos was king. In other words, what
_seemed_ to any individual sentient being at any moment to be, that for
him was, and nothing else was. The distinction between the real and
the apparent was definitely attempted to be abolished, not as hitherto
by rejecting the sensually apparent in favour of the rationally
conceived real, but by the denial of any such real altogether.
The individualistic revolution in philosophy not {84} only, however,
had analogies with the similar revolution contemporaneously going on in
Greek politics, it was greatly facilitated by it. Each, in short,
acted and reacted on the other. Just as the sceptical philosophy of
the Encyclopaedists in France promoted the Revolution, and the
Revolution in its turn developed and confirmed the philosophic
scepticism, so also the collapse of contending philosophies in Greece
promoted the collapse of contending systems of political authority, and
the collapse of political authority facilitated the growth of that
individualism in thought with which the name of the Sophists is
associated.
[178]
Cicero (_Brut_. 12) definitely connects the rise of these teachers with
the expulsion of the tyrants and the establishment of democratic
republics in Sicily. From 466 to 406 B. C. Syracuse was democratically
governed, and a 'free career to talents,' as in revolutionary France,
so also in revolutionary Greece, began to be promoted by the
elaboration of a system of persuasive argument. Devices of method
called 'commonplaces' were constructed, whereby, irrespective of the
truth or falsehood of the subject-matter, a favourable vote in the
public assemblies, a successful verdict in the public courts, might
more readily be procured. Thus by skill of verbal rhetoric, the worse
might be made to appear the better reason; and philosophy, so far as it
continued its functions, {85} became a search, not for the real amidst
the confusions of the seeming and unreal, but a search for the seeming
and the plausible, to the detriment, or at least to the ignoring, of
any reality at all.
The end of philosophy then was no longer universal truth, but
individual success; and consistently enough, the philosopher himself
professed the individualism of his own point of view, by teaching only
those who were prepared to pay him for his teaching. All over Greece,
with the growth of democracy, this philosophy of persuasion became
popular; but it was to Athens, under Pericles at this time the centre
of all that was most vivid and splendid in Greek life and thought, that
the chief teachers of the new philosophy flocked from every part of the
Greek world.
[177]
The first great leader of the Sophists was _Protagoras_. He, it is
said, was the first to teach for pay; he also was the first to adopt
the name of Sophist. In the word Sophist there was indeed latent the
idea which subsequently attached to it, but as first used it seems to
have implied this only, that _skill_ was the object of the teaching
rather than _truth_; the new teachers professed themselves 'practical
men,' not mere theorists.
The Greek word, in short, meant an able cultivated man in any branch of
the arts; and the development of practical capacity was doubtless what
Protagoras {86} intended to indicate as the purpose of his teaching,
when he called himself a Sophist. But the ability he really undertook
to cultivate was ability to _persuade_, for Greece at this time was
nothing if not political; and persuasive oratory was the one road to
political success. And as Athens was the great centre of Greek
politics, as well as of Greek intellect, to Athens Protagoras came as a
teacher.
He was born at Abdera, in Thrace (birthplace also of Democritus), in
480 B. C. , began to teach at Athens about 451 B. C. , and soon acquired
great influence with Pericles, the distinguished leader of the Athenian
democracy at this time. It is even alleged that when in 445 the
Athenians were preparing to establish a colony at Thurii in Italy,
Protagoras was requested to draw up a code of laws for the new state,
and personally to superintend its execution.
After spending some time in Italy he returned to Athens, and taught
there with great success for a number of years. Afterwards he taught
for some time in Sicily, and died at the age of seventy, after [178]
about forty years of professional activity. He does not seem to have
contented himself with the merely practical task of teaching rhetoric,
but in a work which he, perhaps ironically, entitled _Truth_, he
enunciated the principles on which he based his teaching. Those
principles were summed up in the sentence, "Man (by which he meant
_each_ man) is {87} the measure of all things, whether of their
existence when they do exist, or of their non-existence when [179] they
do not. " In the development of this doctrine Protagoras starts from a
somewhat similar analysis of things to that of Heraclitus and others.
Everything is in continual flux, and the apparently real objects in
nature are the mere temporary and illusory result of the in themselves
invisible movements and minglings of the elements of which they are
composed; and not only is it a delusion to attempt to give a factitious
reality to the things which appear, it is equally a delusion to attempt
to separate the (supposed) thing perceived from the perception itself.
A thing is only as and when it is perceived. And a third delusion is
to attempt to separate a supposed perceiving mind from the perception;
all three exist only in and through the momentary perception; the
supposed reality behind this, whether external in the object or
internal in the mind, is a mere imagination. Thus the Heraclitean flux
in Nature was extended to Mind also; only the sensation exists, and
that only at the moment of its occurrence; this alone is truth, this
alone is reality; all else is delusion.
[180]
It followed from this that as a man felt a thing to be, so for him it
veritably was. Thus abstract truth or falsity could not be; the same
statements could be indifferently true or false--to different {88}
individuals at the same time, to the same individual at different
times. It followed that all appearances were equally true: what seemed
to be to any man, that was alone the true for him. The relation of
such a doctrine as this to politics and to morals is not far to seek.
Every man's opinion was as good as another's; if by persuasion you
succeeded in altering a man's opinion, you had not deceived the man,
his new opinion was as true (to him) as the old one. Persuasiveness,
therefore, was the only wisdom. Thus if a man is ill what he eats and
drinks seems bitter to him, and it is so; when he is well it seems the
opposite, and is so. He is not a wiser man in the second state than in
the first, but the second state is pleasanter. If then you can
persuade him that what he thinks bitter is really sweet, you have done
him good. 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.
