the rich; worldly men, who sought honor and power; frivolous men,
trifling with philosophical ideas; sceptical men, denying all certainty
in truth; men who as teachers added nothing to the realm of science, but
who yet established certain dialectical rules useful to later
philosophers. They were a wealthy, powerful, honored class, not much
esteemed by men of thought, but sought out as very successful teachers
of rhetoric, and also generally selected as ambassadors on difficult
missions. They were full of logical tricks, and contrived to throw
ridicule upon profound inquiries. They taught also mathematics,
astronomy, philology, and natural history with success. They were
polished men of society; not profound nor religious, but very brilliant
as talkers, and very ready in wit and sophistry. And some of them were
men of great learning and talent, like Democritus, Leucippus, and
Gorgias. They were not pretenders and quacks; they were sceptics who
denied subjective truths, and labored for outward advantage. They taught
the art of disputation, and sought systematic methods of proof. They
thus prepared the way for a more perfect philosophy than that taught by
the Ionians, the Pythagoreans, or the Eleatics, since they showed the
vagueness of such inquiries, conjectural rather than scientific. They
had no doctrines in common. They were the barristers of their age,
_paid_ to make the "worse appear the better reason;" yet not teachers of
immorality any more than the lawyers of our day,--men of talents, the
intellectual leaders of society. If they did not advance positive
truths, they were useful in the method they created. They had no
hostility to truth, as such; they only doubted whether it could be
reached in the realm of psychological inquiries, and sought to apply
knowledge to their own purposes, or rather to distort it in order to
gain a case. They are not a class of men whom I admire, as I do the old
sages they ridiculed, but they were not without their use in the
development of philosophy. The Sophists also rendered a service to
literature by giving definiteness to language, and creating style in
prose writing. Protagoras investigated the principles of accurate
composition; Prodicus busied himself with inquiries into the
significance of words; Gorgias, like Voltaire, gloried in a captivating
style, and gave symmetry to the structure of sentences.
The ridicule and scepticism of the Sophists brought out the great powers
of Socrates, to whom philosophy is probably more indebted than to any
man who ever lived, not so much for a perfect system as for the impulse
he gave to philosophical inquiries, and for his successful exposure of
error. He inaugurated a new era. Born in Athens in the year 470 B.C.,
the son of a poor sculptor, he devoted his life to the search after
truth for its own sake, and sought to base it on immutable foundations.
He was the mortal enemy of the Sophists, whom he encountered, as Pascal
did the Jesuits, with wit, irony, puzzling questions, and remorseless
logic. It is true that Socrates and his great successors Plato and
Aristotle were called "Sophists," but only as all philosophers or wise
men were so called. The Sophists as a class had incurred the odium of
being the first teachers who received pay for the instruction they
imparted. The philosophers generally taught for the love of truth. The
Sophists were a natural and necessary and very useful development of
their time, but they were distinctly on a lower level than the
Philosophers, or _lovers_ of wisdom.
Like the earlier philosophers, Socrates disdained wealth, ease, and
comfort,--but with greater devotion than they, since he lived in a more
corrupt age, when poverty was a disgrace and misfortune a crime, when
success was the standard of merit, and every man was supposed to be the
arbiter of his own fortune, ignoring that Providence who so often
refuses the race to the swift, and the battle to the strong. He was what
in our time would be called eccentric. He walked barefooted, meanly
clad, and withal not over cleanly, seeking public places, disputing with
everybody willing to talk with him, making everybody ridiculous,
especially if one assumed airs of wisdom or knowledge,--an exasperating
opponent, since he wove a web around a man from which he could not be
extricated, and then exposed him to ridicule in the wittiest city of the
world. He attacked everybody, and yet was generally respected, since it
was _errors_ rather than persons, _opinions_ rather than vices, that he
attacked; and this he did with bewitching eloquence and irresistible
fascination, so that though he was poor and barefooted, a Silenus in
appearance, with thick lips, upturned nose, projecting eyes, unwieldy
belly, he was sought by Alcibiades and admired by Aspasia. Even
Xanthippe, a beautiful young woman, very much younger than he, a woman
fond of the comforts and pleasures of life, was willing to marry him,
although it is said that she turned out a "scolding wife" after the _res
angusta domi_ had disenchanted her from the music of his voice and the
divinity of his nature. "I have heard Pericles," said the most
dissipated and voluptuous man in Athens, "and other excellent orators,
but was not moved by them; while this Marsyas--this Satyr--so affects me
that the life I lead is hardly worth living, and I stop my ears as from
the Sirens, and flee as fast as possible, that I may not sit down and
grow old in listening to his talk."
Socrates learned his philosophy from no one, and struck out an entirely
new path. He declared his own ignorance, and sought to convince other
people of theirs. He did not seek to reveal truth so much as to expose
error. And yet it was his object to attain correct ideas as to moral
obligations. He proclaimed the sovereignty of virtue and the
immutability of justice. He sought to delineate and enforce the
practical duties of life. His great object was the elucidation of
morals; and he was the first to teach ethics systematically from the
immutable principles of moral obligation. Moral certitude was the lofty
platform from which he surveyed the world, and upon which, as a rock,
he rested in the storms of life. Thus he was a reformer and a moralist.
It was his ethical doctrines which were most antagonistic to the age and
the least appreciated. He was a profoundly religious man, recognized
Providence, and believed in the immortality of the soul. He did not
presume to inquire into the Divine essence, yet he believed that the
gods were omniscient and omnipresent, that they ruled by the law of
goodness, and that in spite of their multiplicity there was unity,--a
supreme Intelligence that governed the world. Hence he was hated by the
Sophists, who denied the certainty of arriving at any knowledge of God.
From the comparative worthlessness of the body he deduced the
immortality of the soul. With him the end of life was reason and
intelligence. He deduced the existence of God from the order and harmony
of Nature, belief in which was irresistible. He endeavored to connect
the moral with the religious consciousness, and thus to promote the
practical welfare of society. In this light Socrates stands out the
grandest personage of Pagan antiquity,--as a moralist, as a teacher of
ethics, as a man who recognized the Divine.
So far as he was concerned in the development of Greek philosophy
proper, he was inferior to some of his disciples, Yet he gave a
turning-point to a new period when he awakened the _idea_ of knowledge,
and was the founder of the method of scientific inquiry, since he
pointed out the legitimate bounds of inquiry, and was thus the precursor
of Bacon and Pascal. He did not attempt to make physics explain
metaphysics, nor metaphysics the phenomena of the natural world; and he
reasoned only from what was generally assumed to be true and invariable.
He was a great pioneer of philosophy, since he resorted to inductive
methods of proof, and gave general definiteness to ideas. Although he
employed induction, it was his aim to withdraw the mind from the
contemplation of Nature, and to fix it on its own phenomena,--to look
inward rather than outward; a method carried out admirably by his pupil
Plato. The previous philosophers had given their attention to external
nature; Socrates gave up speculations about material phenomena, and
directed his inquiries solely to the nature of knowledge. And as he
considered knowledge to be identical with virtue, he speculated on
ethical questions mainly, and the method which he taught was that by
which alone man could become better and wiser. To know one's self,--in
other words, that "the proper study of mankind is man,"--he proclaimed
with Thales. Cicero said of him, "Socrates brought down philosophy from
the heavens to the earth." He did not disdain the subjects which chiefly
interested the Sophists,--astronomy, rhetoric, physics,--but he chiefly
discussed moral questions, such as, What is piety? What is the just and
the unjust? What is temperance? What is courage? What is the character
fit for a citizen?--and other ethical points, involving practical human
relationships.
These questions were discussed by Socrates in a striking manner, and by
a method peculiarly his own. "Professing ignorance, he put perhaps this
question: What is law? It was familiar, and was answered offhand.
Socrates, having got the answer, then put fresh questions applicable to
specific cases, to which the respondent was compelled to give an answer
inconsistent with the first, thus showing that the definition was too
narrow or too wide, or defective in some essential condition. The
respondent then amended his answer; but this was a prelude to other
questions, which could only be answered in ways inconsistent with the
amendment; and the respondent, after many attempts to disentangle
himself, was obliged to plead guilty to his inconsistencies, with an
admission that he could make no satisfactory answer to the original
inquiry which had at first appeared so easy." Thus, by this system of
cross-examination, he showed the intimate connection between the
dialectic method and the logical distribution of particulars into
species and genera. The discussion first turns upon the meaning of some
generic term; the queries bring the answers into collision with various
particulars which it ought not to comprehend, or which it ought to
comprehend, but does not. Socrates broke up the one into many by his
analytical string of questions, which was a mode of argument by which he
separated _real_ knowledge from the _conceit_ of knowledge, and led to
precision in the use of definitions. It was thus that he exposed the
false, without aiming even to teach the true; for he generally professed
ignorance on his part, and put himself in the attitude of a learner,
while by his cross-examinations he made the man from whom he apparently
sought knowledge to appear as ignorant as himself, or, still worse,
absolutely ridiculous.
Thus Socrates pulled away all the foundations on which a false science
had been erected, and indicated the mode by which alone the true could
be established. Here he was not unlike Bacon, who pointed out the way
whereby science could be advanced, without founding any school or
advocating any system; but the Athenian was unlike Bacon in the object
of his inquiries. Bacon was disgusted with ineffective _logical_
speculations, and Socrates with ineffective _physical_ researches. He
never suffered a general term to remain undetermined, but applied it at
once to particulars, and by questions the purport of which was not
comprehended. It was not by positive teaching, but by exciting
scientific impulse in the minds of others, or stirring up the analytical
faculties, that Socrates manifested originality. It was his aim to force
the seekers after truth into the path of inductive generalization,
whereby alone trustworthy conclusions could be formed. He thus struck
out from his own and other minds that fire which sets light to original
thought and stimulates analytical inquiry. He was a religious and
intellectual missionary, preparing the way for the Platos and Aristotles
of the succeeding age by his severe dialectics. This was his mission,
and he declared it by talking. He did not lecture; he conversed. For
more than thirty years he discoursed on the principles of morality,
until he arrayed against himself enemies who caused him to be put to
death, for his teachings had undermined the popular system which the
Sophists accepted and practised. He probably might have been acquitted
if he had chosen to be, but he did not wish to live after his powers of
usefulness had passed away.
The services which Socrates rendered to philosophy, as enumerated by
Tennemann, "are twofold,--negative and positive. _Negative_, inasmuch as
he avoided all vain discussions; combated mere speculative reasoning on
substantial grounds; and had the wisdom to acknowledge ignorance when
necessary, but without attempting to determine accurately what is
capable and what is not of being accurately known. _Positive_, inasmuch
as he examined with great ability the ground directly submitted to our
understanding, and of which man is the centre."
Socrates cannot be said to have founded a school, like Xenophanes. He
did not bequeath a system of doctrines. He had however his disciples,
who followed in the path which he suggested. Among these were
Aristippus, Antisthenes, Euclid of Megara, Phaedo of Elis, and Plato,
all of whom were pupils of Socrates and founders of schools. Some only
partially adopted his method, and each differed from the other. Nor can
it be said that all of them advanced science. Aristippus, the founder of
the Cyreniac school, was a sort of philosophic voluptuary, teaching that
pleasure is the end of life. Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynics, was
both virtuous and arrogant, placing the supreme good in virtue, but
despising speculative science, and maintaining that no man can refute
the opinions of another. He made it a virtue to be ragged, hungry, and
cold, like the ancient monks; an austere, stern, bitter, reproachful
man, who affected to despise all pleasures,--like his own disciple
Diogenes, who lived in a tub, and carried on a war between the mind and
body, brutal, scornful, proud. To men who maintained that science was
impossible, philosophy is not much indebted, although they were
disciples of Socrates. Euclid--not the mathematician, who was about a
century later--merely gave a new edition of the Eleatic doctrines, and
Phaedo speculated on the oneness of "the good."
It was not till Plato arose that a more complete system of philosophy
was founded. He was born of noble Athenian parents, 429 B.C., the year
that Pericles died, and the second year of the Peloponnesian War,--the
most active period of Grecian thought. He had a severe education,
studying mathematics, poetry, music, rhetoric, and blending these with
philosophy. He was only twenty when he found out Socrates, with whom he
remained ten years, and from whom he was separated only by death. He
then went on his travels, visiting everything worth seeing in his day,
especially in Egypt. When he returned he began to teach the doctrines of
his master, which he did, like him, gratuitously, in a garden near
Athens, planted with lofty plane-trees and adorned with temples and
statues. This was called the Academy, and gave a name to his system of
philosophy. It is this only with which we have to do. It is not the
calm, serious, meditative, isolated man that I would present, but _his
contribution_ to the developments of philosophy on the principles of his
master. Surely no man ever made a richer contribution to this department
of human inquiry than Plato. He may not have had the originality or
keenness of Socrates, but he was more profound. He was pre-eminently a
great thinker, a great logician, skilled in dialectics; and his
"Dialogues" are such perfect exercises of dialectical method that the
ancients were divided as to whether he was a sceptic or a dogmatist. He
adopted the Socratic method and enlarged it. Says Lewes:--
"Analysis, as insisted on by Plato, is the decomposition of the whole
into its separate parts,--is seeing the one in many.... The individual
thing was transitory; the abstract idea was eternal. Only concerning the
latter could philosophy occupy itself. Socrates, insisting on proper
definitions, had no conception of the classification of those
definitions which must constitute philosophy. Plato, by the introduction
of this process, shifted philosophy from the ground of inquiries into
man and society, which exclusively occupied Socrates, to that of
dialectics."
Plato was also distinguished for skill in composition. Dionysius of
Halicarnassus classes him with Herodotus and Demosthenes in the
perfection of his style, which is characterized by great harmony and
rhythm, as well as by a rich variety of elegant metaphors.
Plato made philosophy to consist in the discussion of general terms, or
abstract ideas. General terms were synonymous with real existences, and
these were the only objects of philosophy. These were called _Ideas_;
and ideas are the basis of his system, or rather the subject-matter of
dialectics. He maintained that every general term, or abstract idea, has
a real and independent existence; nay, that the mental power of
conceiving and combining ideas, as contrasted with the mere impressions
received from matter and external phenomena, is the only real and
permanent existence. Hence his writings became the great fountain-head
of the Ideal philosophy. In his assertion of the real existence of so
abstract and supersensuous a thing as an idea, he probably was indebted
to Pythagoras, for Plato was a master of the whole realm of
philosophical speculation; but his conception of _ideas_ as the essence
of being is a great advance on that philosopher's conception of
_numbers_. He was taught by Socrates that beyond this world of sense
there is the world of eternal truth, and that there are certain
principles concerning which there can be no dispute. The soul apprehends
the idea of goodness, greatness, etc. It is in the celestial world that
we are to find the realm of ideas. Now, God is the supreme idea. To know
God, then, should be the great aim of life. We know him through the
desire which like feels for like. The divinity within feels its affinity
with the divinity revealed in beauty, or any other abstract idea. The
longing of the soul for beauty is _love_. Love, then, is the bond which
unites the human with the divine. Beauty is not revealed by harmonious
outlines that appeal to the senses, but is _truth_; it is divinity.
Beauty, truth, love, these are God, whom it is the supreme desire of the
soul to comprehend, and by the contemplation of whom the mortal soul
sustains itself. Knowledge of God is the great end of life; and this
knowledge is effected by dialectics, for only out of dialectics can
correct knowledge come. But man, immersed in the flux of sensualities,
can never fully attain this knowledge of God, the object of all rational
inquiry. Hence the imperfection of all human knowledge. The supreme good
is attainable; it is not attained. God is the immutable good, and
justice the rule of the universe. "The vital principle of Plato's
philosophy," says Ritter, "is to show that true science is the knowledge
of the good, is the eternal contemplation of truth, or ideas; and though
man may not be able to apprehend it in its unity, because he is subject
to the restraints of the body, he is nevertheless permitted to recognize
it imperfectly by calling to mind the eternal measure of existence by
which he is in his origin connected." To quote from Ritter again:--
"When we review the doctrines of Plato, it is impossible to deny that
they are pervaded with a grand view of life and the universe. This is
the noble thought which inspired him to say that God is the constant and
immutable good; the world is good in a state of becoming, and the human
soul that in and through which the good in the world is to be
consummated. In his sublimer conception he shows himself the worthy
disciple of Socrates.... While he adopted many of the opinions of his
predecessors, and gave due consideration to the results of the earlier
philosophy, he did not allow himself to be disturbed by the mass of
conflicting theories, but breathed into them the life-giving breath of
unity. He may have erred in his attempts to determine the nature of
good; still he pointed out to all who aspire to a knowledge of the
divine nature an excellent road by which they may arrive at it."
That Plato was one of the greatest lights of the ancient world there can
be no reasonable doubt. Nor is it probable that as a dialectician he has
ever been surpassed, while his purity of life and his lofty inquiries
and his belief in God and immortality make him, in an ethical point of
view, the most worthy of the disciples of Socrates. He was to the Greeks
what Kant was to the Germans; and these two great thinkers resemble each
other in the structure of their minds and their relations to society.
The ablest part of the lectures of Archer Butler, of Dublin, is devoted
to the Platonic philosophy. It is at once a criticism and a eulogium. No
modern writer has written more enthusiastically of what he considers the
crowning excellence of the Greek philosophy. The dialectics of Plato,
his ideal theory, his physics, his psychology, and his ethics are most
ably discussed, and in the spirit of a loving and eloquent disciple.
Butler represents the philosophy which he so much admires as a
contemplation of, and a tendency to, the absolute and eternal good. As
the admirers of Ralph Waldo Emerson claim that he, more than any other
man of our times, entered into the spirit of the Platonic philosophy, I
introduce some of his most striking paragraphs of subdued but earnest
admiration of the greatest intellect of the ancient Pagan world, hoping
that they may be clearer to others than they are to me:--
These sentences [of Plato] contain the culture of nations; these are
the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures.
A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry,
language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There never
was such a range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are
still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he
among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift-bowlders were detached.... Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern
pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are
absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe, the infinitude of
the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making,
surface-seeking, opera-going Europe Plato came to join, and by contact
to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia is in
his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of
Europe; he substricts the religion of Asia as the base. In short, a
balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements.... The physical
philosophers had sketched each his theory of the world; the theory of
atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit,--theories mechanical and chemical in
their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural
laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the
world, but bare inventories and lists. To the study of Nature he
therefore prefixes the dogma,--'Let us declare the cause which led the
Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; ...
he wished that all things should be as much as possible like
himself.'...
Plato ... represents the privilege of the intellect,--the power,
namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms, and so
disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion.... These expansions, or
extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon
falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight discovering the
long lines of law which shoot in every direction.... His definition of
ideas as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever
discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era
in the world.
The great disciple of Plato was Aristotle, and he carried on the
philosophical movement which Socrates had started to the highest limit
that it ever reached in the ancient world. He was born at Stagira, 384
B.C., and early evinced an insatiable thirst for knowledge. When Plato
returned from Sicily Aristotle joined his disciples at Athens, and was
his pupil for seventeen years. On the death of Plato, he went on his
travels and became the tutor of Alexander the Great, and in 335 B.C.
returned to Athens after an absence of twelve years, and set up a school
in the Lyceum. He taught while walking up and down the shady paths which
surrounded it, from which habit he obtained the name of the Peripatetic,
which has clung to his name and philosophy. His school had a great
celebrity, and from it proceeded illustrious philosophers, statesmen,
historians, and orators. Aristotle taught for thirteen years, during
which time he composed most of his greater works. He not only wrote on
dialectics and logic, but also on physics in its various departments.
His work on "The History of Animals" was deemed so important that his
royal pupil Alexander presented him with eight hundred talents--an
enormous sum--for the collection of materials. He also wrote on ethics
and politics, history and rhetoric,--pouring out letters, poems, and
speeches, three-fourths of which are lost. He was one of the most
voluminous writers of antiquity, and probably is the most learned man
whose writings have come down to us. Nor has any one of the ancients
exercised upon the thinking of succeeding ages so wide an influence. He
was an oracle until the revival of learning. Hegel says:--
"Aristotle penetrated into the whole mass, into every department of the
universe of things, and subjected to the comprehension its scattered
wealth; and the greater number of the philosophical sciences owe to him
their separation and commencement."