SOCRATES.

{1}

AS there is no country which can boast the honour of possessing more

names of a world-wide significance than Greece, so among those who

hold this lofty position there is no name superior to Socrates,

concerning whom the Delphic oracle in ancient times, and a great

utilitarian authority in modern times, agree in testifying that he was

the wisest of the wise Greeks.[1.1] And though stout old Cato, in

ancient times, as Plutarch informs us, gruffly enough expressed his

opinion that the son of Sophroniscus was a pernicious old babbler,

whose breath was justly stopped by the cup of hemlock which he drank

for his last supper--in harmony with whom the benign old dogmatist

whom the modern utilitarians revere as their patriarch declares that

Socrates and Plato wasted their lives in talking nonsense under the

pretence of teaching philosophy,[1.2]--yet these negative utterances,

few and far between, against the fair fame of the father of moral

science, have died away almost as quickly as uttered, and are now no

more heard in the grand organ-swell of the general admiration of more

than two thousand years. {2} Unquestionably if there be any name,

after the great Founder of the Christian faith, which is entitled to

claim the title of a preacher of righteousness for all times and all

places, it is the name of Socrates; and it is with the view of

bringing his high merits in tins respect before the general public, in

as easy a way as is consistent with scholarly accuracy, that I have

undertaken to write the present paper.

The subject is one peculiarly attractive to a thinking man, not only

on its own merits, but because of the ample and thoroughly trustworthy

materials which we possess for forming a correct judgment. We are not

here, as in the case of Pythagoras, sent to fish for fragments of

truth among fanciful writers who lived several hundred years after the

death of the object of their transcendental laudations; but, as in the

gospel history, we have to deal with the intimate disciples and daily

companions of the great hero of the story. We gather our knowledge of

the life and philosophy of Socrates from Xenophon and Plato, both of

whom have reported their intercourse with the philosopher in a tone of

mingled admiration and sobriety which leaves no ground for suspicion.

Only with regard to Plato we must take with us this caution, that he

was both a poet by temperament and by mental habit a system-builder;

and, as he chose to set forth his own speculations in a series of

dramatic dialogues wherein Socrates is the chief speaker, we must

beware of accepting, as standing on one common basis, the facts with

regard to the life of Socrates brought forward in these compositions

and the doctrines which are put into his mouth. With regard to the

former, we may accept Plato’s evidence as a contemporary authority

with the {3} utmost confidence; with regard to the latter, we must be

constantly on our guard; and indeed, according to my view, it is wise

never to accept any statement of Socrates’s doctrine from Plato, of

which the germ at least does not lie plainly in Xenophon. For

Xenophon, just because he was a less original man than Plato, a

pleasing and graceful writer, somewhat on the level of our Addison,

was for that reason free from the temptation, or rather had not the

capacity, to interpolate anything into his account of the philosopher

which was not consistent with the actual fact. He was a plain man,

with no theories to support, and no pretensions to maintain; and as a

faithful contemporary recorder of what he heard and saw, a more

capable and trustworthy witness could not be desired. We shall

therefore draw our sketch of the life and sayings of the great

Athenian preacher mainly from his pleasant little book, introducing

the idealist of the Academy only where he cannot be suspected of using

his revered master as a mere dramatic engine, or where his superior

literary powers have enabled him to paint a more effective picture.

The age of Socrates was the age of Pericles, the culminating epoch of

Athenian glory; he was contemporary with Euripides, Sophocles,

Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras,

Aristophanes, Phidias; but, while he shared all the elevating

influences of this ascendant age, growing with its growth and

blossoming with its blossom, he was not spared the sorrow of quitting

the scene beneath the first dark shadows of its decay. That military

ambition which is as much the besetting sin of democracy as of

autocracy, had precipitated the Athenians, during the latter part of

the fifth century {4} before Christ, into a distant expedition which

crippled their energies and exhausted their resources; all this, and

certain violent revolutionary changes which arose out of it, Socrates

had to live through, till at last, a few years before his death, he

saw the pride of Periclean Athens laid prostrate at the feet of

Lysander and the rude oligarchy of Lacedæmon. He was born in the year

469 B.C., eleven years after the naval battle of Salamis which freed

Europe for ever from the apprehension of Asiatic servitude, exactly at

the time when the brilliant but sober policy of Pericles commenced its

long period of happy sway over the fortunes of the Athenian state. At

this time Simonides and the other great poets who had seen and sung

the glorious victories of Marathon and Salamis were swiftly departing

from the scene; but the memory of those patriotic achievements still

burned vigorously in every Athenian breast, and conspired, with the

birth of new and ambitious intellectual aspirations, to surround the

youth of the philosopher with an atmosphere the most favourable to

social and intellectual progress. The importance which the

achievements of the democracy at Marathon and Salamis gave to the

middle and lower classes of society at Athens, broke down the barriers

which ancient aristocratic exclusiveness might have raised against the

pretensions of mere character without position; so that Socrates,

though the son of a stone-cutter, and not, like Plato, drawing his

blood from the old Attic aristocracy, seems to have found free

entrance into the society of the most distinguished public and

literary men of his age. His mother, as he himself took care to inform

the world, was a “right worthy and worshipful {5} μαῖα,” or

lady-obstetrician; a “wise woman,” as the French say, in matters

where it seems most natural that women should be specially wise; her

name was Phænarete; but in social position, according to our

aristocratic way of talking, she was nobody. What Socrates’s own

profession was, or how he supported himself, a very important point in

the history of all public men, we unfortunately do not know exactly;

that he practised stone-cutting in his early years is not improbable;

and this may have given rise to the belief mentioned by Pausanias,

that a group of the Graces at the entrance of the Propylæa was his

work; but there is not the slightest indication either in Xenophon or

Plato that he continued to practise this art, or any other art, in

after life. He had therefore no profession; and, as he made no money

by his philosophy, we must believe that he had been left some small

competence by his father, or some relation, on which he was content to

live. That he was extremely poor we know, both from Xenophon and from

his own account of himself before the jury at his trial. We know also

that his habits of life were remarkably plain and frugal, that he

required little money, and coveted none. That he was in a position to

have made money if he had chosen there can be no doubt; but he

expressly states that he had relinquished all projects for increasing

his income, in order that he might devote himself without distraction

to the great work of his life. However, with his philosophical notions

about mere external grandeur, he seems to have been rich enough to

live comfortably with a wife and family. This wife was the noted

Xanthippe, not always the most pleasant companion, and, perhaps not

altogether {6} without reason, from her point of view, at variance

with a husband who showed such utter indifference to worldly

aggrandizement and domestic display; but for this touch of sharpness

in the temper only, as he argued, the better fitted to be the wife of

a philosopher, or to make a philosopher of her husband; for, as men

who wish to learn to ride do not choose the meekest and most docile

beast that they can find, but the most spirited, so the husband who

wishes to rule a wife well should have such an one as it is not easy

but difficult to control. This character of the philosopher’s wife

rests on the authority of Xenophon; Plato nowhere alludes to it; and

whatever her temper might have been, Socrates certainly did not

consider it so bad as to justify his sons in withholding from her the

usual love and reverence due from children to their parents; for

“you may be sure,” he said, “if she is a little cross sometimes,

it is for your good; and there is a reason in her objurgations which a

wise son ought to acknowledge.”

Having no special occupation or profession in life, Socrates might

perhaps have passed in Athens for an idle man, a lounger about the

streets, and public talker, had there not sprung up about this time a

class of men professing to be teachers of eloquence and of all wisdom,

with whom he was brought into connexion. These were the Sophists, a

name which means nothing more than professors or teachers of wisdom.

Like these men, Socrates was always seen in the streets and public

places of Athens, conversing with the clever young men, and publicly

debating all points of speculative and practical interest. He was

therefore in outward appearance and to the {7} general eye a mere

Sophist among Sophists. For it is not everybody who cares to know that

two men who fight with the same weapons and in the same style of fence

may be fighting for very different causes, on opposite sides, and with

altogether contrary results. But the truth behind the appearance was,

that while the majority of these Sophists taught eloquence as a trade,

and logical training as an affair of intellectual exhibition, Socrates

preached virtue as a mission, and the exercise of right reason as the

only means of obtaining virtue. We say _mission_ here not as a

fashionable phrase of the day, but with a special emphasis; for it is

quite certain, both from the speech of the philosopher at his trial,

and from not a few passages in Xenophon, that he devoted his life to

self-improvement in the first place, and to the improvement of his

fellow-citizens in the second place, with the conscientious

devotedness of a man who was strongly impressed with the conviction,

that this employment was assigned to him direct from God, whose high

injunction he was not at liberty to neglect. His language with regard

to this is in a precisely similar tone to that of St. Paul when he

writes, “_Woe is me if I preach not the gospel_.” The human source

through which he got this mission some writers have been curious to

trace, alleging that his master was Anaxagoras, and other things to

that effect; but there is no hint of this either in Xenophon or Plato;

and in fact it is foolish to go in search of a master for a man so

thoroughly original, so distinct and decided a protester against all

who had gone before him. We may be assured, at least, that in the

moral philosophy which was the burden of all his teaching, he had no

master but {8} himself (as indeed Xenophon makes him say in express

words) and the God to whom he habitually referred his highest

inspirations; while in regard to other matters he had enjoyed the

common training of all Athenians in music, poetry, gymnastics, and a

little mathematics to boot--a science which, since the days of Thales

(600 B.C.) and Pythagoras (550 B.C.), had occupied a conspicuous place

in the higher culture of the Athenians. Of the exact date when he

assumed a prominent position as a public teacher of wisdom and virtue

we have no exact account; it is natural however to suppose, from the

sobriety and solidity of his character, and from the long-continued

quiet search after truth which occupied him in his early years, that

he did not suddenly emerge into notoriety, but grew up step by step

into that general acknowledgment of superior wisdom, on which,

according to a well-accredited account, the Delphic oracle was not

afraid to put its seal. Certain it is that in the year 423 B.C., when

he was about forty-seven years of age, he was such a notable character

in Athens as to have been brought upon the stage by the broad license

of Attic comedy as the representative of the whole class of Sophists,

with whom, by the superficial eye, he was naturally confounded. We

must suppose therefore that his reputation as a great public talker

and debater had been gradually growing, up to that period. And no

doubt, even if he had been a man of less original talent, there was

something about his personal appearance and character that could not

fail to make him the mark of general observation among the busy-idle

community of Athens. He was no less odd in his features and in his

manner than in his doctrines; an ἄτοπος or {9} eccentric person

In the general opinion, whom no man knew exactly what to make of. His

features, the very reverse of classical, are familiar to all the

frequenters of our public museums; and are, besides, minutely

described by both his illustrious disciples. His general appearance

was that of a Silenus or Satyr, with a flat, somewhat turned-up, nose,

full prominent eyes, big lips, and in later life, as appears from the

monuments, a bald head; but these defects were of no avail, even with

the beauty-loving Athenians, to diminish the charm of his conversation

and the power of his address. For, as Alcibiades says in the Platonic

dialogue, where he is one of the chief speakers, he was a Satyr only

externally, but internally full of wonderful shapes and sights of

gods, like certain hollow figures full of pipes and tubes, seen in the

statuaries’ shops, which outwardly were shaped like Sileni, but

within contained a machinery of beautiful sacred images. So, as is

wont to happen to wise men, his loss became his gain, and his uncomely

physiognomy, to all that entered into conversation with him, was the

cause of an agreeable surprise. Very different in this from a great

modern poet, who was sensitive about his club-foot, the Athenian

philosopher made a jest of his unclassical nose, saying that if noses

were to be valued as they ought to be, by their fitness for performing

the proper functions of a nose, his olfactory organ was better than

those noses whose shape was vulgarly accounted more classical; for the

upward cast of his open nostrils made them more ready to receive

smells from all quarters, while the comparative flatness of his nasal

protuberance removed it from the possibility of interfering with the

free {10} vision of his eyes; and as to the prominency of these his

organs of vision, this was a manifest excellence even more than the

conformation of his nose, inasmuch as it enabled him to look, not only

straight before him in the way that most eyes do, bat sideways also,

and almost all round, so that he could see when no one suspected him

of looking at them.

But it was not only his general oddity, his pleasant humour, and his

wisdom seasoned with salt that made him a noticeable man amid the

brilliant society of Athens: he was moreover a thoroughly healthy man,

of great powers of endurance, a valiant soldier when his country

required his services, and a good bottle-companion when piety towards

Dionysus, or any occasion of social festivity, according to Attic

usage, demanded that men should drink largely. On these points we have

a graphic picture put by Plato into the mouth of Alcibiades, which, to

complete our personal portrait here, it will not be amiss to

translate.

“When we were together in the campaign at Potidæa, and I messed

with him every day, I found that in the power of enduring toil he

surpassed not only me but all the soldiers in the camp. For when, as

sometimes will happen on the march, we might be at a loss for a

dinner, Socrates could always fast with the least complaint; while, on

the other hand, at our banquetings and junketings he always enjoyed

everything in the most hearty way; and when he was forced to drink,

even though not willingly, he could drain cup for cup with the

stoutest bottle-companion in the camp; and, what is strangest of all,

even after our stiffest bouts no one ever saw Socrates drunk. And as

to cold and frost, I remember {11} well, one night in one of those

severe Macedonian winters, when there was a very biting frost, and

every man either stayed within or went out well encased in warm

sheepskin jackets and felt shoes, Socrates alone went about in the

open air with no other covering than his common mantle, and trod the

frosted ground with his bare feet more lightly than others did with

their warm shoes. But I must tell you something more notable of his

doings at Potidæa. One morning he went out early to indulge some

contemplations; but not succeeding, as it would appear, in his object,

whatever that might be, he remained standing and looking right out

before him till it was near mid-day; and then the soldiers began to

notice him, and said one to another that Socrates had been standing

there in a brown study from sunrise. Thereafter some of the Ionians

about the evening, after supper, took their quilts and carpets out,

for it was then mild summer weather, and, shaking them on the ground,

slept in the open air, keeping an eye at the same time on Socrates to

see whether he would remain all night standing in that reverie; and

when they awoke in the morning with the sun, lo! Socrates was standing

in the same spot; and, after saying a prayer to the sun, shortly

retired. So much for his contemplative oddities; but it is only fair

that I should tell you how he was as good a soldier as a sophist, and

could achieve no less notable things with his hand than with his head.

For when the battle took place, for my conduct in which the generals

gave me such honourable marks of distinction, I, who knew the real

state of the case, insisted that if any man had distinguished himself

in the fight it was Socrates, to whom on that occasion {12} I should

willingly resign the intended laurels. But though this was quite true,

the judges were inclined to favour me; and Socrates came forward and

asserted with the greatest emphasis that my claims were superior to

his; and so I carried off the reward of valour which none but he could

with perfect justice claim. Then again when we retreated from Delium,

after the defeat I was riding off on horseback, while Socrates and

Laches followed, as hoplites, on foot, and coming up to them I cried,

Fear not, good friends, I will keep alongside of you and defend you

from the pursuit. On that occasion I admired even more than at

Potidæa the conduct of this man; for while both were in danger of

being overtaken it was manifest that Socrates during the whole retreat

displayed far more coolness than Laches, who was by profession a

soldier. ... Instead of hurry and trepidation we saw in him only the

large full eye that with wise wariness turned to this side and to that

in a fashion that seemed to say to all comers that they would find a

steady nerve if they came within sword’s length of him. And thus he

got out of the rush safely; for so I have always observed that in a

retreat the men who are most afraid always fare the worst. And many

other things there are I might relate, which would show clearly what a

strange and truly admirable creature this Socrates is. Individual

persons, behaving in individual cases as excellently as Socrates, it

might be easy to point out; but such a compound, a thing in the shape

of a man so utterly unlike any other man, you will find nowhere,

either among famous ancients op illustrious moderns. One might make an

adequate portraiture of Achilles, or Brasidas, of Pericles, or {13}

Nestor, or Antenor, and other famous characters; but such a unique

mortal as this son of Sophroniscus no man can describe, unless,

indeed, he chooses to steal my simile, and say that he is a Silenus

superficially, both in his appearance and in his talk, but to those

who look deeper his soul is a shrine of most excellent, beautiful, and

worshipful divinities.”

This passage will make it plain that Socrates was no mere idle

speculator or subtle talker, such as might be found in ancient Athens

or in any modern German university by scores--but a practical man, and

an effective citizen of prominent merit. But if he showed courage in

the field of battle not inferior to the stoutest and coolest

professional soldier, he displayed a civic virtue on other occasions,

which only the fewest on all occasions have been able to exhibit. This

virtue was moral courage; a quality which, when exercised in critical

circumstances, raises a man high above the average of his kind,

whereas with mere physical courage he is only a more cool and

calculating rival of dogs and cocks and tigers, and other ferine

combatants. On that memorable occasion, when the whole of Athens was

fretted into a fever-fit of indignation on account of the neglect of

the dead and dying slain by the victors at Arginusæ (B.C. 406), and

in the torrent of what appeared to them most righteous wrath, were

eager to overbear all the customary forms of fair judicial trial,

Socrates happened to be serving as one of the senators whose duty it

was to put the question to the assembly of the people in the case of

great public trials; and, a motion having been made that the generals

who were guilty of the alleged neglect of pious duty should be

condemned to drink the hemlock, and have their property {14}

confiscated, it fell to the senators to perform the preparatory step

in the prosecution. But as the proceedings in the case had been

dictated by violent excitement, and were decidedly illegal, Socrates

refused, in the face of violent popular clamour, to have anything to

do with the matter, and lifted up his single protest--one amongst

fifty--against violating the sacred forms of law at the dictation of

an excited populace. On this, as on other similar occasions when he

came into collision with the public authorities, he maintained a truly

apostolic bearing, using in almost identical terms the language of the

apostles Peter and John, when they were forbidden to preach by the

Sanhedrim: “_Whether it be right in the sight of the gods to hearken

unto you rather than to the gods, judge ye; but as for me, I have

sworn to obey the laws, and I cannot forswear myself_.”

With all this faithfulness, however, in the public service, Socrates

was very far from wishing to be what we call a public man; on the

contrary, he kept himself systematically out of places which were

eagerly coveted by less able men, and refused to have anything to do

with the party politics of the day. This withdrawal from the service

of the State, to the majority of Greeks, with whom the State was

everything, could not but appear strange, and tend to increase their

prejudice against philosophy and philosophers. But Socrates acted

here, as in all other matters, with admirable good sense; he felt that

to be a politician and a preacher of righteousness was to combine two

vocations practically incompatible; for the popular measure which it

might serve the immediate need of the political man to advocate it

might not seldom be the first duty of {15} the moralist to condemn.

Besides, if he took office with men who habitually acted on principles

of which he could not but disapprove, he would be forced to waste his

strength in a fruitless opposition to measures which he could not

prevent; and in this way it came to pass that, while he utterly

disapproved, in the general case, of a good citizen, whether from the

love of selfish ease, or from false modesty, or from moral cowardice,

refusing to take part in public life, in his own particular work he

felt that political activity would be a hindrance, and that it was his

duty to abstain.

In these few paragraphs are summed up all that from indisputable

authority we know of the personal history of the greatest of heathen

preachers. The circumstances connected with his death are too closely

interwoven with the character of his teaching to be intelligible here.

We shall therefore enter now directly into a short exposition of his

ethical teaching; after which we shall be in a condition to consider

with an intelligent astonishment how it came to pass that the preacher

of the noblest doctrine that Athens ever heard, before the preaching

of Paul on the Hill of Mars, after living in high repute and

popularity for seventy years, should at last have been made to quit

the scene of his moral triumphs, publicly branded with the stigma

which was wont to be attached to the lowest of malefactors and the

vilest of traitors.

The two first questions to be asked with regard to any great moral or

political reformer are--What had he to reform? and then, In the work

of reform who were his antagonists? The first of these questions is

answered intelligibly and plainly enough in {16} the current knowledge

of every schoolboy, that Socrates brought down philosophy from heaven

to earth, or, as Cicero has it more fully in the Tusculan questions,

“_Socrates primus philosophiam devocavit e cœlo, et in urbibus

collocavit, et in domos etiam introduxit, et coegit de vitâ et

moribus, rebusque bonis et mails quœrere_.” Now there cannot be any

doubt that, both relatively to the time and place where he taught, and

absolutely for all times and all places, Socrates by this step did one

of the highest services to human progress. By a natural vice of the

human imagination we are led to seek in the misty distance for some

pleasant excitement to thought, while neglecting the direct lessons of

familiar wisdom from things under our eyes, which appear contemptible

only because they are common. We attempt ambitiously to measure the

remote movement of the spheres, and to note their imagined music,

before we have brought any order or harmony into the daily course of

our own lives; we climb all the highest mountains in Europe for a fine

prospect, when there is likely a much better one to be enjoyed not

five miles from our own door. In obedience to this tendency of the

human mind the early philosophy of Greece was occupied principally

(not altogether certainly, for Pythagoras was a great moralist) with

cosmical and metaphysical speculations which amused the fancy and

raised interesting and puzzling problems for thought, without any

valuable practical result. When Thales, for one, said that the first

principle of all things was water, he enunciated a great truth; it is

true that wherever there is life there must be humidity; with dryness

dwells only dust and death and frost. But this was a truth {17}

leading to no applications; it could neither purify the wells nor

improve the wines; no man would be the better in his body or his soul

for formulating a cosmical generality of this kind. And if Heraclitus,

the sombre sage of Ephesus, advanced a step further in a true

generalization, when he said that fire or heat is the fundamental

force which makes water possible, as modern chemistry has amply

demonstrated, this doctrine did not advance human nature one step

either towards outward comfort or inward satisfaction. And of what

avail was it to tell men, as he did, that “all things are in a

perpetual flux,” if he did not teach them how to regulate that flux

in the flow of their own lives, and to prevent the tidal currents of

their soul from getting into a plash and jabble of conflicting waters

in the navigation of which no seamancraft could avail against

miserable shipwreck? More useless still was it to assert, as

Anaxagoras is reported to have done, that the sun is a large mass of

glowing stone or metal, so many times bigger than the earth--a

proposition which, if it were true, would not teach a poor cowering

savage to kindle a stick fire, nor make one olive-tree brighter with

blossoms that promised a purer and a richer oil; while, if it were not

true, then the whole of your lofty heliacal philosophy is only a blaze

of lies. The whole history of modern science, indeed, before the

establishment of the close and cautious method of experiment

introduced by Bacon, shows that all physical inquiry starting from

unproved assumptions, and ending in sweeping speculations, is only a

sublime sort of idleness, and a procreation of cloud-phantoms.

Socrates therefore acted wisely for his own time and place in saying

to a people fond of {18} curious subtlety and unfruitful speculation.

Let us have done with this lofty-sounding but essentially hollow talk

about sun and moon and stars, and let us know something certain, and

do something useful. This we shall achieve if we keep within our own

lower sphere, and attend to our own work as men; let us order our

houses well in the first place, and after that concern ourselves with

the order of the universe; if, indeed, this does not rather belong to

the gods, who may safely be left to do their cosmical work quietly,

without any Anaxagoras or Archelaus to tempt with adventurous guesses

the principles of their administration. Such was the thoroughly

practical, and, if you will, thoroughly utilitarian tone which, taught

by Xenophon, we justly view as the starting-point of the Socratic

philosophy. And there can be no doubt man is so essentially a

practical animal, that if even the accurate and curiously verified

physical science of these latter days were as destitute of social

applications and as barren of practical results as Greek science was

in the days of Socrates, nine hundred and ninety-nine persons of those

who now delight to dabble in chemistry and geology would leave these

interesting sciences to the few men of a purely speculative character

with whom mere knowledge is loved for itself. But when by geology we

are enabled to unearth coals and gold, and know where to sink wells

much more certainly than by the mediæval magic of the divining-rod;

and when by chemistry we improve our stores, bleach our clothes,

purify our infected chambers, and dye our cloth with hues of which

even the most skilful of the lichen-gatherers in the Highland glens

never dreamt--then, to use a bookseller’s phrase, you are {19} sure

to interest a large public. But there is another view of the case,

which places the Socratic philosopher on a much more lofty and

honourable pedestal. For notwithstanding all the surprising

discoveries and brilliant achievements of modern physical science, it

must still remain true that

“The proper study of mankind is man,”

and that no kind of knowledge ever can surpass either in interest or

importance the knowledge of man as a social being, as the member of a

Family, of a Church, and of a State. The depreciation of moral science

which we have lately heard from Mr. Buckle and other members of that

school is a transitional phenomenon arising out of the one-sided

culture of the understanding, and a defective emotional, volitional,

and imaginative organization. If new discoveries are not every day

trumpeted in the domain of moral philosophy, it is just because this

science, like Euclid, is too certain, too fundamental, and too

indispensable to have been left to the happy chance of being found out

after the lapse of long centuries. Morals are as necessary to the

acting man as the sun’s light to the growing plant; they are not

discovered, because they always have been and always must be; and the

only great result that we have to look for then in them is that they

shall be more universally recognised, more scientifically handled, and

more practically applied. Socrates therefore was right, not only for

Greece in the fifth century before Christ, but for England at the

present moment, and for all times and places, when he proclaimed on

the house-tops that the first and most necessary wisdom for all men is

not to measure the stars, or {20} to weigh the dust, or to analyse the

air, but, according to the old Delphic sentence, to know themselves,

and to realize in all the breadth and depth of its significance what

it is to be a man, and not a pig or a god. And in attaining this

knowledge, while he would certainly find that, though a stable

physical platform to stand on and a healthy physical atmosphere to

breathe are necessary for the production of a normal humanity, yet in

general the measure of a man’s manhood is to be taken not so much

from what he attaches to himself from without as from what he brings

with him from within.

“The kingdom of heaven is within you” is a pregnant Socratic maxim

as well as a profound evangelic text, and, in reference to our present

subject, simply means that, while the most brilliant discoveries of

physical science only minister to our comforts, our conveniences, and

our furnishings, moral science alone can teach us to be men; for we

are men by what we are, not by what we have. Gas-pipes, and

water-pipes, spinning-jennies, steamboats, steam-coaches, submarine

telegraphs, photographs, oleographs, oxyhydrogen, blowpipes, and the

thousand and one devices for using and controlling nature which we owe

to advanced physical science, may adorn and improve life in many ways,

may multiply production of all kinds infinitely, and facilitate the

diffusion of intellectual as well as material benefits; but they have

no originating power in what is highest; they can create neither

thought nor character; they are the most useful of ministers, but the

most unmeaning of masters. And there can be little doubt that, if

Socrates were to rise from the grave at the present moment, while,

with his, strong {21} common sense and keen eye for the practical, he

would joyfully recognise all the wonderful material progress of which

England and America make their boast, he would not the less feel

himself constrained to utter an emphatic warning against the danger of

estimating our national grandeur by the visible pomp of gigantic

machinery and complex apparatus rather than by the invisible power of

noble purpose and lofty design.

Such was the attitude of Socrates to the great teachers who since

Thales downwards had preceded him in leading the intellectual advance

of the most intellectual people of the ancient world. He stood forward

as a teacher of moral science, as a preacher and philosophical

missionary also; for in morals, the separation of theory from practice

is an inconsistency of which only a feeble and imperfect nature is

capable. Who, then, and of what quality, were his antagonists in the

great regenerative work which he undertook? Not so much the physical

philosophers, who might still pursue their researches or pamper their

imaginations in their own speculative corners without disturbing the

busy world, except in so far as they now and then might come into

collision with theological orthodoxy, but the great untrained mass of

the people themselves, and the pretentious array of a class of men who

put themselves forward as their instructors,--the famous SOPHISTS.

The word Sophists signifies professors of wisdom, in which sense

Lucian calls our Saviour τὸν ἀνεσκολοπισμένον ἐκεῖνον σοφιστήν--_that

crucified Sophist_--because He came forward as a public instructor

professing to teach men wisdom. But as wisdom is a vague word (in fact

σοφός in Greek signifies _clever_, and even {22} _cunning_ as

often as _wise_), we must consult the circumstances of time and place

to know what it exactly meant in any particular instance. The

generation immediately preceding Socrates, when the Sophists first

became prominent, was the era of the great Persian wars, and of the

notable uprising of national spirit and of popular power which that

memorable struggle called forth. How fiercely the strife between the

old aristocratic and the new democratic element in Greek society had

been raging in the immediately preceding epoch, the poems of Theognis

may serve sufficiently to indicate; and now that by the battle of

Salamis the political importance of the middle and sub-middle classes

had been blazoned forth before universal Greece in glowing characters,

the democracy in great commercial cities like Athens at once started

into an attitude of hitherto unsuspected significance. New aspirations

had been created, new pretensions were put forth, and new guides were

required for a large class of people who felt themselves as it were

suddenly shooting up from pupilage into majority. Now what guides had

a people, circumstanced as the Athenians then, were, to look to for

direction? The Church in those days--if we may call it a Church--was

not a teaching body; its moral efficacy was exercised through sacred

ceremonial and pious hymns; its intellectual agency was almost null.

And though gymnastics and music, including a certain amount of the

most popular literary culture, were common, there were no institutions

like our Universities, for the severe and systematic discipline of the

thinking faculties. A cry went up from the heart of the people for

prophets to enlighten them; but there were no schools {23} of the

prophets. This state of things was the natural soil from which a class

of self-constituted popular teachers would grow up; and these teachers

were the Sophists. And if we ask further in detail what they taught,

the answer will be furnished from the same sources that explain their

existence. As the democracy brought them into existence, the demand of

the democracy would be the measure of the kind and quality of the

article which they were expected to supply; and the article which a

democracy demands for the use of its public spokesmen is always the

same,--a certain practical knowledge and shrewdness in the conduct of

affairs, a certain ready sympathy with, popular prejudices and

passions, a certain superficial dexterity in argument, and above all,

a fluent and effective style of popular oratory. To supply these wants

the acceptable teachers of the people would require to profess a

knowledge of the great leading principles of law, a familiarity with

political forms and the best methods of controlling masses of men into

habits or fits of co-operation, a practical command of logic, so as to

be able to turn the point of an argument, or entangle in a net of

subtleties an inexperienced jury, and, as the crowning accomplishment,

a faculty of speech, alert and unscrupulous, which might never lack a

shift to give plausibility to a bad case, and should ever be ready to

confound, overwhelm, and dazzle where it was hopeless to refute. Now

it is easy to perceive that the lessons delivered by the professors of

this wisdom, however acceptable to clever and ambitious young

gentlemen eager to enter upon the arena of public life, could not, in

the nature of the case, be conceived in any very exalted tone of

morals or be framed so as to inculcate the formation {24} of any

strictly honourable rules of conduct. The Sophists were mere

tradesmen; they were paid for the furnishing of a certain article, and

they had to supply that article, of the quality and in the way and

manner which might be most agreeable to those on whose patronage they

depended. They were therefore, as Socrates constantly pointed out, the

slaves of the parties by whom they were paid; and if what their

employers wanted was the show of wisdom rather than the substance, a

ready command of words and arguments in preference to an earnest and

severe search after truth, it was not to be expected that the majority

of them would give themselves much concern to inculcate a severer

wisdom. Tradesmen are seldom found acting upon principles which have a

direct tendency to frighten customers from their shops. Not that there

was anything necessarily bad or immoral in the profession or teaching

of a Sophist; some of them, evidently, such as Protagoras and

Prodicus, even on the witness of their great adversary Plato, were

very proper and respectable gentlemen; few of them, perhaps, grossly

immoral; and with those of them who, like Gorgias of Leontium,

confined themselves strictly to the teaching of the rules of pure

rhetoric and elocution, no fault could justly be found any more than

with Quinctilian among the later Romans, or Principal Campbell of

Aberdeen among ourselves. But it is plain, from the very nature of the

case, that the Sophists, so far as they went a step beyond the

province of strict rhetoric, were placed in a position which rendered

their moral and philosophical teaching a matter of just concern to all

who were interested in the education of the youth of Athens, and in

the {25} character of her public men. Besides, among an impressible

and excitable people like the Athenians, fond of display, and

ambitious of popularity, the mere methodized art of talking, apart

from any solid knowledge, and without any high moral inspiration, was

a very dangerous engine to put into the hand of ambitious young

politicians. And the fact unquestionably is, according to the

concurrent testimony of Xenophon, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle,--in

fact, of all antiquity,--that these public teachers generally did

dispense very shallow and often very dangerous doctrine. They were the

natural birth of an age of movement and innovation; and in such an

age, along with much that may operate as a healthy stimulant to

progressive thought, there is always present a drastic admixture of

the merely analytic, sceptical, and destructive element, a negative

force, strong to impugn the validity of ancient foundations, but weak

to establish anything equally stable and effective in their place. By

the negative and sceptical teachings of these men, Socrates found the

youth of Athens shaken from their old moorings, and tossing about amid

seas of perplexing doubt on the one hand, and unprincipled libertinism

on the other. Every great principle of social order and human right

that formerly had been received from venerated tradition, and believed

by the co-operation of a healthy instinct with a hoary authority, was

now denied; and the field was waiting for the appearance of a great

constructive prophet, who should bring people back through steps of

scientific reasoning to a living faith in those maxims of immutable

morality which they had originally inherited with the blood from their

fathers’ veins and the milk from their mothers’ breasts. {26} Such

a great prophet now appeared, and his name was Socrates.[26.1]

We have now clearly before us the battle-field in which Socrates had

to appear, and the opponents with whom he had to contend; we see also

the cause for which he had to fight. This was nothing {27} less than

the establishment of a firm philosophy of human life, a sure guide for

human conduct, and a strong regulator of society. The way now lies

open to inquire what special doctrine he taught in order to achieve

victory in this struggle; and a careful perusal of Xenophon’s book,

which we regard as the {28} only safe authority in the matter, leads

to a generalized statement of the Socratic moral philosophy, comprised

in the following two propositions:--

(I.) Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no

doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing

instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead

to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but

these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger

instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of

which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and

spiderhood consists.

(II.) Man is naturally a reasoning animal, and is only then truly a

man when his passions are tempered and his conduct regulated by

reason. The function of reason is the recognition and the realization

of truth; truth recognised in speculation is science; {29} truth

realized in action is a moral life and a well-ordered society.

These two propositions may appear to many persons now-a-days to

contain nothing that is not very vague and very cheap; nevertheless,

when looked into accurately and followed out unconditionally, they

lead to most important practical consequences; in fact, while their

consistent assertion under all circumstances necessarily leads up to a

noble and a heroic life, their habitual denial as necessarily leads

down to a base and a brutish life. Let us look at them therefore

sharply in detail.

The first proposition, as the reader will readily perceive, is

levelled directly against the selfish theory of morals which was

advocated with more or less openness by many of the Greek Sophists,

and was prominently put forth in this country, as is generally known,

at the time of the great Civil War, by the celebrated Thomas Hobbes of

Malmesbury. That stout speculator, in his treatise on “the

Philosophical Elements of a True Citizen,” lays it down with a

distinctness which admits of no qualification, that “all society is

either for gain or for glory; that is, not so much for love of our

fellows as for love of ourselves;” and again, a few pages further on

in the same treatise, he puts forth the famous dictum that “the

natural state of man is a war of all men against all men.” Against

such a one-sided, unhuman, unworthy, and altogether false assertion,

Socrates comes armed, not only with the whole force of a sympathetic,

a social, and a benevolent nature, but with that healthy instinct and

practical good sense, which in him was prophetic not so much of his

immediate disciple Plato as of his great successor Aristotle. {30} In

one of the conversations of the _Memorabilia_ of which the subject is

φιλία--a much wider word, let it be well noted, than the English

“friendship,”--Critobulus, one of the young followers of the

philosopher, is introduced as lamenting over the difficulty of making

friends; and the views of Socrates follow in reply. We extract the

whole passage:--

“What perplexes you, my young friend, said Socrates, seems to be

that you have frequently seen even the best men, and of the most noble

quality, quarrelling with one another, and fanning themselves into

hostility, even more fierce than that which divides the most worthless

members of society. Just so, said Critobulus, and not only this, but

the best-ordered societies, and those States which seem to possess the

most delicate sense of public honour, are often found to plunge into

the most unjustifiable wars. Where, then, shall we find a place for

social sympathy and true friendship? If the bad by their very nature

cannot know what love means, if betwixt the bad and the good there can

be no fellowship any more than betwixt fire and water, and if finally

the good, who practise virtue most severely, in the ambitious contests

of human life are still found for the most part envying one another

and hating one another, among what class of men, I ask, are fellowship

and good faith possible? But, said Socrates, this is by no means such

a simple matter as you seem to think. Nature here as elsewhere has two

sides. There is naturally implanted in men a social and sympathetic

element; for they naturally need one another, and feel for one

another, and help one another by co-operation; and alongside of this

there exists also an element of hostility; for wherever a {31} great

number of persons find their affections fixed on the same object,

which they cannot all enjoy, opposition and war in reference to that

object will naturally ensue. Hence strife and wrath and the passion

for aggrandizement, and feelings of envy and dislike toward those who

in the great competition of life are more successful than ourselves.

Nevertheless, so strong is the sympathetic principle in nature, that

it penetrates through all these barriers, and joins in bonds of

brotherhood all the noble and the good.”

This passage deserves special prominence in every estimate of the

philosophy of Socrates, not only on account of its own strong

practical good sense--a leading quality of the philosopher’s

mind--but on account of the complement which it supplies to the other

part of his doctrine, that virtue is practical reason. How true this

doctrine of rational morality is, and how comprehensive, we shall

endeavour to show immediately; but in the first place, before applying

reason to the actions of a social being, we must postulate the

existence of a sympathetic instinct, without whose impulsive and

attractive power reason could never be induced to exercise itself in

any social direction. To prove to a man who has no love in his nature

that he ought to love his neighbour, and that without such love no

society is possible (a proof by the way which Hobbes leads very

triumphantly), is all very well as a piece of reasoning; but it could

lead to no practical consequences if the person to whom it was

addressed was root and branch made up of pure selfishness. It would be

like arguing to a tiger that it should become a lamb. In all moral

questions, therefore, the motive powers must be supposed {32} as a

fact; they belong to the nature of a moral being as steam belongs to a

steam-engine; and therefore Socrates, whose whole teaching breathes

the earnest conviction of the great truth that moral philosophy has no

meaning as a theory, but exists only as a fact, is everywhere

exhibited as a great lover of men. Love of his kind, indeed, was the

main inspiration of his life, as in fact it must be that of all men

who aspire to the noble position of social reformation in any shape;

therefore it was that he was seen constantly in the streets and in the

market-places, and in the public shops, and the _ateliers_ of the

sculptors, and in festal and convivial celebrations of all kinds;

therefore it was that he professed himself on all occasions μάλα

ἐρωτικός--a passionate admirer of everything beautiful and

excellent whether in man or woman; and from this quick and ready

sympathy with all human excellence it was that, while he spoke the

truth on all occasions without fear, there was so little generally of

harshness in his reproof; nay, he would carry his human forbearance

and sympathetic complaisance so far on occasions as to visit a

beautiful ἑταῖρα, and converse with her on the philosophy of

dress, and the most scientific manner of spreading the net and baiting

the hook for her admirers.[32.1] How incongruous would it not be to

figure John Calvin or any modern theological doctor relaxing his

gravity in this region so far; and yet Socrates was as veritable a

saint as Calvin, only the men were constitutionally not only

different, but adverse; besides, Socrates was a Greek, and, so far as

impressibility by mere physical beauty is concerned, this {33} implies

much. What the modern Protestant theologian would have thought it a

sin to look at in the ancient philosopher might have excited an

innocent and pious admiration. But the tolerant universality of large

human sympathy in Socrates, however difficult it may be for some men

to understand, was in fact much less an anomaly in a severe moralist

than the selfish theory of Hobbes is in a man pretending to be a man

at all. To explain such a perverse phenomenon we must bear in mind

that the love of singularity in some minds is greater than the love of

truth; that some men of great intellectual capacity are deficient in

some of the finer instincts that stir heroic breasts, and fail to

recognise in others what they have no experience of in themselves;

that in the common characters whom one meets in daily life an

essentially selfish motive can often be traced beneath the gracious

surface, where to the public eye only benevolence, philanthropy,

humility, and self-denial shine out with genial radiance; that the

scientific mind has a peculiar pleasure in tracking out such

inconsistencies; that the speculative mind in its eagerness to embrace

various phenomena under one law is apt to run a-muck against Nature,

delighting, as she does sometimes, more in the compromise of various

principles than in the triumph of one; and finally, that men trained

principally in the political and legal world often have a tendency to

transfer the selfish principles which are most considered in their

domain to other spheres of the social system, where more free scope is

given to the exercise of the benevolent and unselfish propensities.

These considerations may perhaps account for the genesis of such an

incomplete moralist as Hobbes,--it is only {34} the common instance of

a meagre plant growing up in a bad climate. Socrates, on the other

hand, surprises and puzzles us by his sheer redundancy of ethical

sensibility; as a tropical vegetation seems sometimes to smother with

the exuberance of green life the sober demands of an eye educated in a

temperate climate.

Let us now turn to the second proposition: MAN IS A REASONING

ANIMAL;--trite enough, but what does this imply? and how far does it

bring us when we attempt to answer the question started by Dr. Paley,

_Why am I bound to keep my word?_ Let us see how Socrates would have

answered this question. Through the memoirs he stands forward in no

character so strongly as in that of the exposer of unrealities.

Himself the most truthful of all men, throughout a long life he can

find nothing better to do than to help others, first to draw the real

truth out of themselves, and then, by the touchstone thus acquired, to

distinguish the true man in the actual course of life from the fake

pretender. Truth therefore, unadulterated truth in thought and in act,

was the pole-star of his navigation. But the recognition and

realization of truth is the distinctive function of reason; therefore

truthfulness under every form of thought or action is the grand law of

reasonableness, and in virtue of this the grand rule of human conduct.

For no creature can be called upon to act at variance with its own

nature; and if it should attempt to do so, it will either fail

utterly--as if a worm should essay to fly--or, succeeding so far in

the experiment, as when a bear dances or a man speaks lies habitually,

the creature will make itself either ridiculous or contemptible. As

therefore you expect {35} your dog to nose well, your cat to mouse

well, your horse to race well, and your cow, when well grassed, to

give good milk, so expect yourself on all occasions to think and to

act reasonably, that is truthfully or in conformity with the reality

of things; and know for certain on each occasion that your thought or

your act deviates from right reason, that thus far you are not your

proper self, you are not, in the full sense of the word, a man; you

are, in fact, in reference to this matter, acting like a madman. For,

as Socrates in his familiar way puts it, if a man, imagining himself

twelve feet high, should bow his head whenever he entered a door eight

feet high, in order to avoid fracture of the skull, would we not call

such a person mad? And if he is justly esteemed insane who in such an

exorbitant way takes a false measure of his bodily height, why should

one be esteemed sane who habitually makes an equally false estimate of

his mental stature? If a person were to imagine that he knew Greek,

but whenever he opened his mouth poured forth a mere swallow-twitter

of inarticulate jargon, could he possibly be held to be of sound mind?

or if a man should push himself forward into the van of any great

undertaking, such as the building of bridges or the cutting of

tunnels, conceiving himself to be able to do these things, when he was

known to be ignorant of the simplest practical elements of

architecture and engineering, should we not say truly that such a

person is labouring under a delusion, which, if not madness, is

something very closely allied to it? From such considerations as these

Socrates deduced, with all the certainty of mathematical

demonstration, that the most imperative duty, and the most binding

{36} obligation of every man--the postulate, in fact, of all

reasonable and fruitful activity in life--is γνῶθι σεαυτόν, KNOW

THYSELF! and this maxim does not mean, of course, that a man is to go

into a corner, and by a series of probings to take the measure of his

own capacity; it means rather that we shall know our relation to that

outer world in which our active powers are to be spent; it means that

we shall know the world by free intercourse and by cautious trial, and

that we shall make it our business with conscientious care to discover

what we are fit for on this stage of things on which the drama of our

life is enacted, and what we are not fit for. And always in every

work, reasonably undertaken, if the execution is to be enduringly

successful, let the reasonable and true man study, as the one thing

needful, TO BE THE THING THAT HE WOULD SEEM TO BE.

From this statement, taken directly from the report of Xenophon, the

reader will perceive that we have got in Socrates fundamentally only a

very modern Scotch friend with a very ancient Greek face, viz., the

excellent laird of Craigenputtoch and venerable prophet of Chelsea on

the Thames, the burden of whose preaching has always been the

unveiling of SHAMS. Mr. Ruskin’s Lamp of Truth in Architecture

shines also manifestly with a kindred light; and in fact it is quite

certain, and the most important of all truths to be implanted in the

youthful mind when starting on the career of life, that we live in a

world of most grave and earnest and stiff realities, that must be

dealt with in a real and honest way--that is, neither in a superficial

nor in a false way, nor in an absurd way, nor with any sort of random

strokes, but only in a calculated and a reasonable {37} way, and

according to the unchangeable nature of things--if not, the penalty is

sure. If we will mistake a granite rock for a gigot of mutton, we

shall find that we have dined on something that no culinary art can

make at all digestible. Let us examine in rapid detail how far the

general Socratic principle of acting, reasonably and truthfully will

bring out the individual virtues which are the most necessary and the

most esteemed, whether in the common concerns of life or in those

seasons of rare culmination when manhood rises into heroism. Now, here

we see plainly enough, in the first place, that all the so-called

intellectual virtues--that is, those that depend on the vigorous and

well-directed use of the intellectual faculties--are, by the Socratic

principle, at once provided for in the most effective way. These

virtues are foresight, calculation, prudence in every shape, trained

talent, professional expertness, and substantial work on scientific

principles in all trades and occupations. The man who does any kind of

work in a careless, bungling, or superficial way is not acting as a

reasonable being; for the first demand of reason, as the truthful

faculty in the world of action, is to realize its idea completely and

thoroughly; and this no hasty and superficial handiwork can pretend to

do. Again, if a man, as happens only too often, undertakes a long

walk, and having miscalculated the distance, or carried with him

confused ideas of north and south, finds himself under the veil of

night wandering about in a boggy waste when he ought to have been snug

in his bed, he has himself to blame: he acted unreasonably in

undertaking an unknown expedition without exact information or wise

calculation; and it is only reasonable {38} that he should be

overtaken by the necessary consequences of all unreasoning procedure

in a world where Reason is the only law and Truth the unerring judge.

In the same way, from want of accurate knowledge, wise foresight, and

comprehensive survey, Crimean campaigns are bungled, and Reform Bills

of most serious consequence are huddled or juggled through a house of

fretful or feverish senators, and Acts of Parliament are patched up

with clauses that contradict one another, and make the preamble look

like a bridegroom who finds he has promised eternal fidelity to a

mistaken bride. All this is unreasonable work, and the men who did it

were not exercising their reason at the time of the perpetration; for

any practical purpose they might as well have been blind, furious,

fatuous, or asleep. ’Tis plain, therefore, that all the efficiency

of every kind of work done in the world depends on its reasonableness,

that is, on its truthfulness; and in full view, so to speak, of the

importance of this intellectual virtue Nature has furnished man with a

moral excellence closely akin to it. The recognition of truth in the

strictly intellectual world becomes, in the world of propulsive

passions and inspiring emotions, the love of truth. This virtue shows

itself in frankness, openness, and simplicity of character, and in an

imperious disdain of all sorts of equivocation, dissembling,

falsehood, and disguise, according to the well-known type of the

heroic character in Homer:

“That man within my soul I hate, even as the gates of hell,

Who speaks fair words, but in his heart dark lies and treachery dwell.”

Here Achilles, every one feels, is speaking like a man; and, though

all truth is not always everywhere {39} to be proclaimed, yet on great

occasions, where to strike the just mean is difficult, he who in an

impulse of fearless fervour vents a little too much truth, is always

more admired than the man who from a surcharge of cautious reticence

speaks too little. For a lie, in fact, as Plato says in the

_Republic_, is a thing naturally hateful both to gods and men; nor

indeed could it be otherwise; for what is all nature but a

manifestation in visible forms of a grand army of invisible forces?

and an untruthful manifestation is no manifestation at all, but rather

a concealment, as if a man should use words to say the very contrary

of what he means, which words, certainly, whatever effect they might

have, could not possibly be any exhibition of his real nature. It is

plain therefore that a lie is on every occasion a contradiction to the

essential truthfulness, and an obstacle thrown in the way to the

direct purpose, of nature; and whenever lies are told, it will be

found that they proceed either from a fundamental feebleness, that is,

an inherent lack of assertive and demonstrative force, or from fear,

that is, a comparative feebleness in respect of some external

threatening force, or finally from a systematic perversion or

inversion of nature in individual cases or unfavourable circumstances,

which operate as an obstruction to the free expression of the

essential truthfulness of things. In this way individuals whose social

sympathies have been frosted in early life, may grow up into a

monstrous incarnation of selfishness, living by the practice of

systematic falsity, of which we have examples enough in the

professional swindlers of whose achievements almost every newspaper

contains some record; and whole classes of men, as slaves and helots,

kept in a {40} state of unnatural bondage and subjection, may learn,

or rather must learn, to practise lies as their only safety from

injustice. Every slave is naturally a liar; for his nature is a false

nature, and has grown up into a contradiction to all nature, as trees

by forceful artifice are made to grow downwards seeking the earth,

instead of upwards to find the sun. And we may say generally, that

ninety-nine out of every hundred lies that are told in society are

lies of cowardice; lies of gigantic impudence and unblushing

selfishness, like the lies of Alexander the false prophet in the

second century, and other gross impostors, being comparatively few;

though of course, when they do occur, they excite more attention and

figure more largely in the newspapers. And from these considerations

we see plainly how it is that the world places such a high value on

the virtue of courage; for courage arises mainly from the possession

of that amount of physical or moral energy which enables a man

truthfully and emphatically in a real world to assert himself as an

effective reality; and in fact there is no character that in the

general judgment of mankind, and in a special degree to the British

feeling, appears more contemptible than the man who, on the appearance

of any petty danger, or the prospective emergence of a possible

difficulty, forthwith sneaks out of his position, gives the open lie

to his own professions, and the cold shoulder to his best friend. So

deep-rooted and so wide-spread, so woven into the living fibres of the

very heart of things, is the virtue of truth and truthfulness in

nature and life, which again, as we have said, is the mere utterance

of reason; the necessary utterance consequently of an essentially

reasonable being, and not at all the artificial product of a selfish

compact {41} or calculation of any kind, as Hobbes and the other

advocates of selfism, more or less modified, affirm. We speak the

truth therefore, and we are bound to keep our promise, not because

experience proves that society could not exist for a single day under

the pervading influence of all sorts of falsehood, nor again because

it can be proved by a formal induction that to speak the truth, as a

general rule, is the best way to secure the greatest happiness of the

greatest number--though there can be no harm in a man fortifying his

virtue by these very true and very philanthropic considerations, if he

chooses,--but the root of the matter lies deeper and more near to the

heart of the individual man, springing, as we have said, directly out

of the essential truthfulness and reasonableness of nature, according

to the prime postulate not of the philosophy of Socrates only, but of

Plato and Aristotle also, and all the great teachers of practical

wisdom amongst the Greeks.

It does not seem necessary, after what has been said, to expatiate

largely on the obvious deduction of the other cardinal virtues from

the Socratic principle of Reason or Truth. Wherever we turn our eyes

it will require little perspicacity to perceive that to do the right

is on all occasions to do the true thing,--as an apostle has it,

ποιεῖν τὴν ἀλήθειαν, _to do the truth_; or, in the words of a great

son of the Porch, _not to demand that things shall be as we wish,

but to wish that things shall be as they are_. The great virtue of

Justice, for instance, which, in its widest and well-known Platonic

sense, signifies giving to every person and thing that which

properly belongs to it, is nothing but the assertion in act of the

truth in reference to their concurrent or adverse claims; for how

can a man realize in any {42} relation of life the beautiful Stoical

definition of Right given in the Institutes of Justinian--_Justitia

est constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuendi_--how can a

man assign to each person that which is properly his, unless he knows

truly the nature and natural claims not of that person only, but of

all persons with whom his claim may come into competition? It is plain

therefore that Justice is merely knowledge or reason;[42.1] and as the

claims of different parties in reference to the same thing are often

very various and complicated, hence it is that to be a just judge a

man does not require to have a benevolent nature--though in cases of

equity the kindly feelings also must come into play--so much as to

have an intellect of large range, of firm grasp, and of subtle power

of discrimination. And if anybody, with special reference to legal

decisions, chooses to ask not only what qualities constitute a good

judge, but on what principles the idea of property is founded--how he

is to know the exact boundaries of MEUM and TUUM in particular

cases,--the answer here also, on the Socratic postulate of truth and

natural reasonableness, will be obvious enough. That is mine by the

law of nature and truth and God, which is either a part of me, or the

natural and necessary, fruit and product of that vital energy which I

call ME; or, more simply, the product of my labour and the issues of

my activity are mine; and no man can have a right or a claim

consistent with the truth of things, to appropriate the fruit of that

growth whereof the root and the stem and the living branches {43} and

the vital juices are a necessary part of me.[43.1] But it is not mere

legal justice and a true apportionment of the Mine and Thine that flow

as a plain corollary from the obligation of acting the truth, but the

wider equities of Christian charity and toleration; yea, and the very

constraining power of the Golden Rule itself is evolved unmistakeably

from the same principle. For what is it that from the time of Greeks

and Romans down to very recent days has tainted the whole laws of

European countries with such harsh declarations of intolerant

dogmatism and merciless persecution? Simply the fact that men, from

defect of sympathy and defect of knowledge, had never been trained to

realize the truth of things as between the natural right of a majority

to profess a national creed, and the equally natural right of a

minority to entertain doubts and to state objections as to the whole

or any part of such a creed. Intolerance proceeds either from

narrowness of view or from deficiency of sympathy; and in either case

it blinds the bigot to the fact that the right which he has to his own

opinions never can confer on him any right to dictate opinions to

others; the moment he does that he invades a dominion that does not

belong to him, and transgresses the truth of Nature; nor will this

transgression be less flagrant when it is made by ten millions against

one man, than if it {44} were made by one against ten millions. In the

same way all those superficial and inadequate, too often also harsh

and severe, judgments which we see and read daily amongst men in the

common converse of life, are the result of a habitual carelessness as

to truth, of which habit only too efficiently conceals the grossness.

And under the bitter inspiration of ecclesiastical and political

warfare, men, when speaking of their adversaries, will not only

lightly excuse themselves from using any special care in testing the

facts which it suits their purpose to parade, but they will even

consciously present a garbled statement constructed upon the principle

of pushing into prominence everything that is bad, and keeping out of

view everything that is good in the character of the person whom it

may suit the use of the moment to vilify. And in this way even the

sacred-sounding columns of an evangelical newspaper may become a

systematic manufactory of lies, against which most gross abuse of the

truth of Nature the son of Sophroniscus, if he were to appear on earth

now, would assuredly lift his protest with tenfold more emphasis than

he ever did against the sham knowledge of the most superficial of the

Sophists.

One or two short paragraphs will enable us now to say all that remains

to be said on the great principles of the Socratic philosophy of

Ethics.

In the first place, nothing that has been said here in endeavouring

shortly to epitomize the leading idea of Socrates with regard to

practical reason and acted truth, assumes to settle definitively that

much-vexed question, _How far is a man at any time, from any motive,

and for any object, entitled to tell or to enact {45} a lie?_ In a

dialogue of considerable length, which Socrates holds with Euthydemus,

a raw and conceited young Athenian, who, because he possessed a great

library, imagined himself to possess much wisdom, the philosopher is

represented as puzzling the young gentleman with such questions as the

following: Whether is it lawful for a general, with the view of

raising the drooping spirits of his soldiers, to give out an unfounded

report that friends are coming up to help them? Whether, if a father,

whose sick son refuses to take a necessary medicine, shall disguise

this medicine under the aspect of food, and by the ministry of this

drugged aliment restore his son to health, this act of deceit is right

or wrong? Or again, if a friend whom we love is given to fits of

melancholy, and may be apt in an evil moment to meditate suicide, is

it an act of culpable theft privately to purloin or forcibly to

abstract the sword or other lethal instrument of which he may avail

himself to commit the fatal act? In such and similar cases, though the

point is rather raised than settled, Socrates plainly seems to imply

that lies are both natural and beneficial, and therefore ought to be

tolerated. And in truth, though the extreme dogmatism of certain of

the Church Fathers lays down the doctrine that the obligation of

truth-speaking and truth-doing is absolute, and admits of no

exception, yet the common sense of mankind, and the universal practice

of saints and sinners in all ages and in all countries, goes along

with Socrates (and we may add Plato here, _Rep_. ii.) in the

assertion, that where violence is done to Nature in one way by an

unnatural overwhelming force, such as occurs in war, then Nature

defends herself by a {46} violence to her habitual principles in an

opposite direction; that is to say, it will be justifiable, on certain

occasions, and within certain limits, to defeat force by fraud; or, as

Lysander the captor of Athens used to say, where a man may not show

the lion’s hide he must wrap himself in the fox’s skin. But the

very suspicion with which the general moral sentiment guards the

extension of this motive, which in extreme cases it allows, shows that

all deviation from truth is looked upon as the result of a force upon

Nature; and, if it may in certain cases be excused or even

imperatively commanded, it never brings with it the natural aliment of

our better nature, which breathes freely only in the wide and pure

atmosphere of truth. The general obligation of truth, therefore,

according to the doctrine of Socrates, is not at all weakened by the

occasional necessity of deceit; for while the one rests firmly on the

foundation of the eternal constitution of things, the other is the

mere shift of the moment, the sudden dictate of an expediency, which

in noble natures is half ashamed of itself when it succeeds.

Another well-known dogma of the Socratic philosophy is, that not only

is Science as the product of Reason the supreme legislative authority

in all questions of morals, but in point of fact also, that to know

what is right is to do what is good, for no man with his eyes open

will perpetrate an act which demonstrably leads to his own

destruction. Of this assertion, so contrary to the universal

experience of mankind, and so ably refuted by Aristotle and his school

in the Nicomachean ethics, it need only be said that it is one of

those paradoxes in the garb of {47} which all philosophies are apt to

clothe themselves occasionally, partly for the gratification of the

teacher, who delights to push his principle to an acme, partly for the

benefit of the scholar, whose attention is excited and his imagination

pleased by the startling novelty of the dictum. The proposition of

Socrates therefore, that knowledge is virtue, and vice not only folly

but ignorance, is of the same nature with the paradox of the Stoics,

that _the virtuous man can have no enemy_, or that _pain is no evil_,

or with the precept in the Gospel, which no man ever thinks of obeying

in the letter, that when a thief takes your cloak you should thank

him, like a benign Quaker, for his kindness, and give him your coat

into the bargain. But it is possible to defend the paradox of Socrates

taken strictly, by saying that when a man does a thing which

demonstrably leads to his ruin, he either never had this demonstration

vividly present to his mind, or, at the moment when the

self-destroying act was committed, his knowing faculty was blinded and

sopited, dosed and drugged by his passions, and so; at the time when

his knowledge was most required, he was virtually ignorant of what he

was about. But there is little profit in puzzling about such

paradoxical maxims, as, like Berkeley’s theory about the

non-existence of matter, they are constantly open to be corrected by

common-sense and the daily experience of life. A Calvinist preaches

Fatalism in the pulpit to-day, but to-morrow flogs his slave or his

son for abusing his free-will. So a smart twitch of the toothache

answers the Stoics when they assert that pain is no evil: and the

lives of Solomon, King David, and Robert Burns prove that great men in

all ages have, in {48} their cool moments, been as nobly sagacious as

Socrates, but not therefore at all moments as consistently virtuous.

The last point which demands notice here is the relation which virtue

bears to happiness, and to the much-bespoken utilitarianism of the

most recent ethical school in this country. Now the truth with regard

to this stands patent on the very face of the Socratic argument, and

can escape no man who goes through the _Memorabilia_ with ordinary

sympathy. The happiness of every creature consists in the free and

unhindered exercise of its characteristic function; the happiness of a

horse in racing well, of a dog in nosing well, of a cat in mousing

well, of a man in reasoning well, that is, in thinking and acting

reasonably. For the opposite state of things to this could only exist

on the supposition that the Author of Nature or the Supreme Artificer

(ὁ δημιουργός, as Socrates and Plato loved to phrase it)

delighted in inspiring creatures with a desire, and providing them

with a machinery, to do things the direct effect of which is to make

them miserable; that is to say, if the demiurge were a demon; of which

demoniacal government of the world, however, happily there is no sign;

for not even the most tortured victim of toothache, as Dr. Paley

observes, has yet found himself warranted in drawing the conclusion

that teeth in general were made for no other purpose than that people

might be tormented with such excruciating pangs. Happiness, therefore,

and the reasonable exercise of his faculties by a reasonable creature,

are identical. No creature can deliberately desire to make itself

miserable, and no rational creature can escape misery except by acting

reasonably. And if, {49} in the language of the schools, any person,

from this point of view, shall call Socrates a eudæmonist,[49.1] a

eudæmonist unquestionably he was. But we must bear in mind that,

while he was the warm advocate of all sorts of happiness and

enjoyment, and himself at the same time a living picture of vital joy

and geniality, he never allowed himself to be carried away by the

perverse and perilous subtlety of a certain school of philosophers,

both in ancient and modern times, who thought to do honour to the

eudæmonistic principle by confounding the good with the

pleasurable.[49.2] For the distinction so broadly established in all

languages between Pleasure as an affair of momentary excitement or

titillation, and Good as the source of lasting and permanent

enjoyment, is not to be obliterated by the arbitrary terminology of

men who write ethical systems in books. According to the established

use of language, from Socrates and St. Paul down to the present hour,

Pleasure cannot be the good of man,--it may be the good of a brute;

for as pleasure is momentary happiness, without reason, or it may be

often in the teeth of reason, so the Good is reasonable and permanent

happiness, accompanied, it may be, with a little momentary pain, but

productive of lasting satisfaction. So much for eudæmonism. Then, as

for utilitarianism, whether it be a different thing from eudæmonism,

or only a different aspect of the same thing, {50} there is nothing

more certain than that Socrates was a utilitarian. The word _useful_

(χρήσιμον or ὠφέλιμον) is constantly occurring in his conversations;

utility in fact was the starting-point of his whole movement, and

gives the key-note to all his discussions; for his grand objection, as

we saw above, to the physical speculations of his predecessors, was

that they were useless, as opposed to which the doctrine which he

preached was recommended on the ground of its practical utility. Of

this utilitarian principle he was indeed so fond, that, like his

doctrine of virtue being founded on knowledge, he was inclined to push

it too far, and certainly did run it, in some cases, to absolute

falsity. This appears most strikingly in two dialogues in the Memoirs,

where, in opposition to the idol-worship of mere beauty, so dear to

the Greeks, he flatly lays down the counter proposition that nothing

can be beautiful except in so far as it serves the purpose for which

it was intended; in other words, that beauty consists in that

suitability or fitness of an article to effect its purpose which makes

it a useful article. But every one sees that there is a jump in the

logic here, which, if Socrates had been as anxious to establish a

scientific theory of beauty as he was to present rational morals, he

certainly could not have made. For though every article, as the

imperative condition of its existence, ought to answer the purpose for

which it was made, and the article which answers this purpose best is

the best article; and though beauty of structure is a something

superadded, and which will always offend if it is plainly at war with

the design, fitness, and utility of the structure--for which reason,

as architects say, the ornamentation {51} ought always to grow out of

the construction,--it is quite a different thing to say that beauty

and fitness or utility are identical. The railway companies in our day

have thrown across not a few beautiful rivers and picturesque gorges

the ugliest iron bridges that can be conceived; but no doubt they are

as useful, and perhaps may be more permanent, than stone structures of

a more elegant and graceful design. We shall therefore say that

Socrates, in his remarks on the τὸ καλόν, pushed his utilitarian

principles and the extreme practicality of his nature into

the domain of the absurd and the false. But within his proper province

of morals, one cannot see that he was led by his doctrine of utility

into any speculative or practical mistake. For the word _useful_ in

itself is a word which really has no meaning; it is always only a

stepping-stone to something beyond itself, and receives significance

only when from some independent source the end is exhibited which the

useful object subserves. When, therefore, Socrates talks about

morality being identical with utility, he is not asserting a

philosophical principle like the modern writers who use that term; he

only means to say that a certain course of conduct founded on reason,

or certain maxims deduced from reason, are useful to a man to enable

him to obtain the end of his existence, that is, a certain happiness

according to his opportunities and capacities. And if the advocates of

the so-called utilitarian philosophy, finding the utter unmeaningness

of their favourite shibboleth as a distinctive term, shall tell us

that utility means something absolute (which however it can do only by

interpolating into itself an altogether foreign idea), if, however,

they shall say, as they are {52} in the habit of doing, that that

course of action is useful which tends to promote “the greatest

happiness of the greatest number,” then here they say nothing which

either Socrates or Plato or the apostle Paul, or Dr. Wollaston or

Immanuel Kant or in fact any sane man, ever dreamt of contravening. In

virtue of his faith in the innate sociabilities of man as opposed to

the selfism of Hobbes, Socrates could not but believe that it was his

duty, after having made his own life reasonable in the first place, to

help other people to get out of the limbo of unreason as speedily as

possible. This he says again and again in his conversations; in fact,

his whole missionary exertions meant nothing else; and the

philanthropic power of the missionary impulse which impelled him to

seek the rational happiness of his fellow-men having once full sway in

his heart, the wish for the greatest happiness of the greatest number

followed as a matter of course. Every missionary estimates his success

and feels his moral enjoyment increased by the number of his converts.

The man who desires the happiness of his fellow-beings at all, whether

as Epicurus or Plato, must desire that happiness to the greatest

number of human beings that can comfortably enjoy it within certain

given limits of space and time.

The next great division of our subject leads us to consider, what is

by no means a matter of secondary importance, the peculiar and

characteristic manner in which Socrates inculcated the lofty

principles of his ethical philosophy--the so-called Socratic method of

teaching and of preaching. Now, with regard to this, in the first

place, what lies on the surface is that the Socratic method of

inculcating the principles of morals consists in a sort of catechising

or cross-questioning {53} such as is practised by lawyers in

Westminster Hall, a method which is generally considered not the most

pleasant of operations even there, and which if practised now-a-days

by private persons, whether in West-end saloons or in East-end

parlours, would certainly be considered extremely ill-bred. And that

this should be the general feeling of all classes of mankind with

regard to the matter is natural enough; for the object of the

operation being generally to convince the person operated on that he

knows nothing about what he professes to know, and to do this by

publicly entangling him in the web of his own arguments, and forcing

him into a self-contradiction, it is obvious that self-esteem and love

of approbation will, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, be

strong enough to stir a certain degree of resentment in the breast of

the sufferer. Nay, sometimes will he not feel like a poor fish

cleverly hooked by an expert angler, and played about perhaps more to

show the skill of the captor than from any consideration of the

feelings of the captive? All this is very true; and no doubt Socrates

made not a few enemies by this extremely personal method of exposing

the manifold superficialities and incompetencies of the persons with

whom he conversed. But, upon the whole, that he was rather a popular

man, or more correctly, an extremely popular man, in Athens, during a

long lifetime, notwithstanding the catastrophe of the hemlock, seems

pretty plain both from Xenophon and Plato. This popularity, in the

face of what certainly was a rather odious mission, arose both from

the kindly sympathetic nature of the man, and from the admirable tact

which the philosopher constantly displayed in dealing {54} with those

whom he submitted to the operation of his ethical probe. Though in the

majority of cases he was found to end in a direct contradiction of the

original position of his adversary, he always commenced by agreeing

with him; and if he saw nothing absolutely to agree with in the way of

argument, he took care to launch him in a good humour by praising some

excellence in him or about him. Thus, in the case of Euthydemus,

mentioned above as the possessor of a large library, he gives

prominence to the praiseworthy ambition shown by the young man to

spend his money rather on the sentences of the wise than on the

vanities of external pomp and pernicious dissipation; and thus, though

the young book-fancier departs at the end of the dialogue altogether

shorn of his conceit, and thinking the best thing he can do hereafter

to prove his learning is to hold his tongue, yet he leaves the

philosopher with no rankling ill-will, but rather disposed towards him

as one feels towards a kind and considerate physician who has been

forced to administer to his patient a nauseous drug. And thus the mild

manner of the teacher removed, in a great measure, the offence of the

lesson; for it is, as an apostle says, “the wrath of man which

worketh not the righteousness of God,” in most cases, not the mere

speaking of the truth, if the truth be spoken in love. Let us inquire

now more particularly how the cross-examination went on. Aristotle, in

a well-known passage of the Metaphysics, tells us that there were two

inventions to which Socrates might justly lay claim--the defining of

general terms (τὸ ὁρίζεσθαι καθόλου), and inductive reasoning

(ἐπακτικοὶ λόγοι). A modern instance will enable us to understand {55}

what this means. Suppose I get into an argument with any person as to

whether A. or B., or any person holding certain opinions, manifesting

certain feelings, and acting in a certain way, is a Christian. I say

he is; my contradictor says he is not; how, then, shall we settle the

difference? Following the example of Socrates, the best procedure

certainly will be to ask him to define what he means by a Christian.

Suppose then he answers, _A Christian is a religious person who

believes in the Nicene Creed_, I immediately reply, The Nicene Creed

was not sent forth till the year 325 after Christ; what then do you

make of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Christians who

lived before that? To this objection the answer of course will be that

the Nicene Creed, though not set forth in express articles, did

virtually exist as a part of the living faith of all true Christians.

Then, if I doubt this, I say, Was Origen a Christian, was Justin

Martyr a Christian? are you sure these two Fathers believed every

article of that Creed? My opponent now, in all likelihood, not being

profoundly versed in patristic lore, is staggered; and I proceed, we

shall suppose, to cite some passages from some one of the ante-Nicene

Fathers, which imply dissent from some of the articles of the orthodox

symbol. He is then reduced to the dilemma of either denying that this

Father was a Christian, or (as that will scarcely be allowable)

widening his original definition so as to include a variety of cases

which, by the narrowness of the terms, were excluded. I then go on to

test the comprehensiveness of the new definition in the same way; and

if I find that it contains any elements which belong to the species

and not to {56} the genus, any peculiarities say of modern Calvinism,

or of mediæval Popery, that do not belong to the general term

“Christianity,” I push him into a corner in the same way as

before, till I bring out from his own admissions a pure and broad

definition of the designation Christian, as opposed to Heathen, Jew,

or any other sort of religious professor. Now the example here given

was purposely chosen, to make manifest by a familiar example, what

everyday experience must teach us, that the principal cause of

difference of opinion amongst men is, that people start in argument

with some general term, with respect to which they do not know, and

have in fact never thought of seriously inquiring, what extent of

ground it covers. So that when the inadequate notions with which the

minds of untrained persons are possessed have to be replaced by

adequate ones, the process always resolves itself into a making of

definitions, and a strict scrutiny of some general term, which had

hitherto passed current without special interrogation. A teacher

therefore, who would be practically useful to mankind, and not merely

make brilliant oratorical displays to tickle and to amuse, must before

all things make it his business to see that they have clear ideas, not

on matters of profound and remote speculation, but on the common

currency of general terms which the necessities of social life

require. Such a teacher was Socrates; and hence the logical form which

his practical teaching by cross-examination, among a people

passionately fond of arguing, naturally assumed. A less argumentative

people than the Greeks, such as ourselves,--English and Scotch and

Irish,--will often look on a Socratic dialogue in Plato, or even

Xenophon, {57} as curiously pedantic, which to the Athenians was only

amusingly subtle. Even Socrates, the most practical, and, in the sense

explained above, the most utilitarian of men, loved to have his little

logical play out of the discussion, in a fashion which to a broad

practical Briton, unaccustomed to speculation, and impatient, often

incapable of grappling with a principle, would appear impertinent. So

much for the Socratic hunt after definitions. As to the other point

mentioned by Aristotle, that Socrates deserves praise as the inventor

of inductive reasoning, there is really no cause for surprise in the

matter. Lord Bacon was not the inventor of this method of dealing with

facts; neither indeed, if we look beneath the surface, was Socrates;

both induction and deduction exist in a state of constant action and

reaction in every normally developed human mind; but the praise which

belongs to Bacon is that of having pressed the inductive method, with

strong adjurations and a special machinery, into the service of

physical science; while the praise, no less important, belongs to

Socrates, of having taught men four hundred years before Christ, to be

as scrupulously exact in testing by experience their moral ideas, as

they now are in proving by experiment their physical theories. Let us

take a well-known instance of induction in physical science, and then

see how, under certain obvious modifications, the same method of

procedure must be adopted in the successful cultivation of the moral

sciences. We know, for instance, that there exists a marvellous,

almost miraculous, force pervading the universe, called Electricity;

this is now one of the widest of general terms in the vocabulary of

physical science, and arrived at, like {58} all other such terms, by

the carefully weighed steps of a long induction. Certain phenomena of

attraction are first observed, in reference to amber, wax, and other

bodies, when rubbed, free from the influence of humidity; the same

phenomena are then observed in other bodies, and accompanied with the

emission of sparks of light and tiny explosions; by an ingeniously

contrived apparatus the force which causes these sparks and these

explosions is accumulated, and the effects produced by this higher

potency of the same force become of course more noticeable, and some

of these experiments lead a thinking man irresistibly to the notion

that what we call electricity, as elicited by us from our electrical

machines, is only a sort of mimic thunder and lightning, as crackers

with which boys play on the Queen’s birthday are in principle the

same as big cannons and Lancaster guns. This idea, once entertained,

is tested in many different ways, till the conclusion is certainly

arrived at that electricity and lightning are identical. By and by

other forces, such as magnetism and galvanism, being considered more

carefully, and compared with the electricity of the electric machines,

are found to possess many points of resemblance, and are in time

concluded to be fundamentally the same; and now our general term

electricity is widened into a cosmical power, which if we fail to

define, the failure will arise not from building on partial facts, but

because our generalization has clearly mounted so high into the domain

of the Infinite that the finite understanding staggers, and perhaps is

doomed for ever to stagger, at the attempt to hold it in firm grasp.

Thus the progress of physical science is a continual process of the

giving up of inadequate {59} general terms, and supplying them by

something either exactly adequate, or approximating to adequacy, as

high as the human intellect can hope to ascend. Now to this process

the discovery of the true significance of general terms in morals

forms an exact parallel. Suppose, for instance, a young Englishman

emerging out of the merely physical delights of cricket and

boat-racing, and beginning to occupy himself seriously with some of

the great social questions of the day. To him morality first presents

itself, not in the form of logical analysis, the characteristic engine

of Socrates, but in the concrete form of the Christian Church. He

starts therefore with an idea of ethical science as a part of

Christianity, and of Christianity as he knows it, formulated in

certain articles of belief, represented dramatically in certain

liturgic services, and held together by a certain hierarchy of

office-bearers. In this condition it is not to be expected that the

idea either of Morals, or of Church, or of Religion, or of

Christianity, will exist in his mind so purified from adventitious and

accidental matter as to stand the test of strict reasoning. What then

is to be done with him, if he is not to remain contented with that

purely local conception of moral and religious truth which belongs to

him like his cylindrical hat or his swallow-tail coat, as an affair of

accepted tradition rather than of reasoned truth? Plainly there is

only one course: you must convince him of the insufficiency of his

premises for warranting any general conclusion at all; and, then

leading him through the whole moral and ecclesiastical experience of

the Christian Church, open to him a wide and a sure field of

observation from which legitimate inductions {60} with regard to moral

and religious ideas comprised in the term Christianity can be made. So

that the cross-examination, of which we gave a specimen above, is in

reality a process of induction as much as the processes in physical

science by which electricity is identified with galvanism, and both

with magnetism. But if the ethical idea is to emerge perfectly pure

from such an investigation, our young Episcopal philosopher will

require to broaden his conception of morality and religion yet

further, so as to embrace moral phenomena of an important kind beyond

the pale of the term Christianity altogether. No doubt Christianity is

to us, and has been to the most favoured races of humanity, for nearly

two thousand years, the grand bearer of the deepest moral truth; but

the religion of Christ does not exist everywhere,--did not exist

certainly when a Pythagoras, a Socrates, and a Plato founded their

great schools of moral teaching and training among the Greeks; and

thus to bring out the ethical idea strong in the internal identity of

all its various Avatars, our young inquirer must launch out into the

wide, and in a great measure hitherto unexplored, sea of comparative

ethics and comparative theology. A type of this sort of procedure will

be found in the late admirable Baron Bunsen’s book entitled _God in

History_, a work with regard to which even those who do not accept all

its conclusions must admit that it is constructed upon the only scheme

on which a large and adequate philosophy of ethical and religious

truth can be raised.

We have said that moral investigation, when conducted on the Socratic

method, is as truly inductive as any process in physical science. But

there is a {61} distinction, and that a very vital one. In moral

inquiries we can often start directly with deduction from some inward

principle, implanted in the human mind by the Author of our being. The

love of truth, for instance, as above set forth, is one of those

principles; our general term in this case we bring with us; and any

induction which we may require is not to prove the existence of such

an instinct, but to verify, to extend, and to correct our notions of

its applicability, or perhaps merely to confirm us in our original

sacred faith, by showing in detail that society never has existed, and

in fact never can exist, without that regard to truth in all dealings

of man with man, the necessity of which we had asserted originally

from the constraining power of the inborn moral imperative decree. And

if our moral principles always existed in a vivid and healthy state,

there might be little need for the slow retrogressive process of

induction in ethics; but as these instincts are peculiarly liable to

be enfeebled, curtailed, and perverted by individual neglect, as well

as social constraint, the corrective and cathartic process by

induction on a more extended basis becomes necessary for the worst

men, and not without utility for the best. At the same time, of the

noblest minds in the moral world it may always be asserted that their

whole life has been rather a practical deduction from lofty truths

given by original inspiration from the Divine Source of all vitality

than the product of any induction from an acquired survey of facts.

The work of a great moral teacher or reformer, such as the apostle

Paul or Thomas Chalmers, is in fact a creation as much as the poems of

a Shakespeare or the paintings of a Raphael; and has a {62} manifest

affinity also with the grand deductions of mathematical genius, which,

from the postulated form of a triangle, a circle, or other figure of

which the conditions are dictated by the mind, not gathered from

observation, evolves an array of the most curious relations, of which

no one had hitherto dreamed, and which are each one as necessary and

absolutely true as the postulate from which they came forth. Exactly

so with Morals. An admitted postulate--say of truthfulness, of love,

or whatever inborn original principle you please,--may be worked out

as the world advances into ever new and more noble practical

applications, which shall be as unconditionally right as the original

diving force out of which they grew. And as the propositions of Euclid

can be proved _a posteriori_ by empirical measurements, though they do

not depend on these measurements, in the same way the great truths of

ethical science may be proved from induction, though in the case at

least of great moral teachers they are the direct and pure products of

an inspired deduction. And both with respect to mathematical and moral

truths, it may be said that, while the _a posteriori_ inductive method

forces assent upon the lowest class of minds, the _a priori_ or

deductive method is the spontaneous evolution of the highest class of

minds, whose dictates are sympathetically accepted by all whom Divine

grace may have disposed to be touched by the noble contagion.