what evils materialism introduced into society, making the body
everything and the soul nothing, turned his attention to the world
within, and "for physics substituted morals." He knew the uncertainty of
physical speculation, but believed in the certainty of moral truths. He
knew that there was a reality in justice, in friendship, in courage.
Like Job, he reposed on consciousness. He turned his attention to what
afterwards gave immortality to Descartes. To the scepticism of the
Sophists he opposed self-evident truths. He proclaimed the sovereignty
of virtue, the universality of moral obligation. "Moral certitude was
the platform from which he would survey the universe." It was the ladder
by which he would ascend to the loftiest regions of knowledge and of
happiness. "Though he was negative in his means, he was positive in his
ends." He was the first who had glimpses of the true mission of
philosophy,--even to sit in judgment on all knowledge, whether it
pertains to art, or politics, or science; eliminating the false and
retaining the true. It was his mission to separate truth from error. He
taught the world how to weigh evidence. He would discard any doctrine
which, logically carried out, led to absurdity. Instead of turning his
attention to outward phenomena, he dwelt on the truths which either God
or consciousness reveals. Instead of the creation, he dwelt on the
Creator. It was not the body he cared for so much as the soul. Not
wealth, not power, not the appetites were the true source of pleasure,
but the peace and harmony of the soul. The inquiry should be, not what
we shall eat, but how shall we resist temptation; how shall we keep the
soul pure; how shall we arrive at virtue; how shall we best serve our
country; how shall we best educate our children; how shall we expel
worldliness and deceit and lies; how shall we walk with God?--for there
is a God, and there is immortality and eternal justice: these are the
great certitudes of human life, and it is only by these that the soul
will expand and be happy forever.
Thus there was a close connection between his philosophy and his ethics.
But it was as a moral teacher that he won his most enduring fame. The
teacher of wisdom became subordinate to the man who lived it. As a
living Christian is nobler than merely an acute theologian, so he who
practises virtue is greater than the one who preaches it. The dissection
of the passions is not so difficult as the regulation of the passions.
The moral force of the soul is superior to the utmost grasp of the
intellect. The "Thoughts" of Pascal are all the more read because the
religious life of Pascal is known to have been lofty. Augustine was the
oracle of the Middle Ages, from the radiance of his character as much as
from the brilliancy and originality of his intellect. Bernard swayed
society more by his sanctity than by his learning. The useful life of
Socrates was devoted not merely to establish the grounds of moral
obligation, in opposition to the false and worldly teaching of his day,
but to the practice of temperance, disinterestedness, and patriotism. He
found that the ideas of his contemporaries centred in the pleasure of
the body: he would make his body subservient to the welfare of the soul.
No writer of antiquity says so much of the soul as Plato, his chosen
disciple, and no other one placed so much value on pure subjective
knowledge. His longings after love were scarcely exceeded by Augustine
or St. Theresa,--not for a divine Spouse, but for the harmony of the
soul. With longings after love were, united longings after immortality,
when the mind would revel forever in the contemplation of eternal ideas
and the solution of mysteries,--a sort of Dantean heaven. Virtue became
the foundation of happiness, and almost a synonym for knowledge. He
discoursed on knowledge in its connection with virtue, after the
fashion of Solomon in his Proverbs. Happiness, virtue, knowledge: this
was the Socratic trinity, the three indissolubly connected together, and
forming the life of the soul,--the only precious thing a man has, since
it is immortal, and therefore to be guarded beyond all bodily and
mundane interests. But human nature is frail. The soul is fettered and
bewildered; hence the need of some outside influence, some illumination,
to guard, or to restrain, or guide. "This inspiration, he was persuaded,
was imparted to him from time to time, as he had need, by the monitions
of an internal voice which he called [Greek: daimonion], or daemon,--not
a personification, like an angel or devil, but a divine sign or
supernatural voice." From youth he was accustomed to obey this
prohibitory voice, and to speak of it,--a voice "which forbade him to
enter on public life," or to take any thought for a prepared defence on
his trial. The Fathers of the Church regarded this daemon as a devil,
probably from the name; but it is not far, in its real meaning, from the
"divine grace" of St. Augustine and of all men famed for Christian
experience,--that restraining grace which keeps good men from folly
or sin.
Socrates, again, divorced happiness from pleasure,--identical things,
with most pagans. Happiness is the peace and harmony of the soul;
pleasure comes from animal sensations, or the gratification of worldly
and ambitious desires, and therefore is often demoralizing. Happiness
is an elevated joy,--a beatitude, existing with pain and disease, when
the soul is triumphant over the body; while pleasure is transient, and
comes from what is perishable. Hence but little account should be made
of pain and suffering, or even of death. The life is more than meat, and
virtue is its own reward. There is no reward of virtue in mere outward
and worldly prosperity; and, with virtue, there is no evil in adversity.
One must do right because it is right, not because it is expedient: he
must do right, whatever advantages may appear by not doing it. A good
citizen must obey the laws, because they are laws: he may not violate
them because temporal and immediate advantages are promised. A wise man,
and therefore a good man, will be temperate. He must neither eat nor
drink to excess. But temperance is not abstinence. Socrates not only
enjoined temperance as a great virtue, but he practised it. He was a
model of sobriety, and yet he drank wine at feasts,--at those glorious
symposia where he discoursed with his friends on the highest themes.
While he controlled both appetites and passions, in order to promote
true happiness,--that is, the welfare of the soul,--he was not
solicitous, as others were, for outward prosperity, which could not
extend beyond mortal life. He would show, by teaching and example, that
he valued future good beyond any transient joy. Hence he accepted
poverty and physical discomfort as very trifling evils. He did not
lacerate the body, like Brahmans and monks, to make the soul independent
of it. He was a Greek, and a practical man,--anything but
visionary,--and regarded the body as a sacred temple of the soul, to be
kept beautiful; for beauty is as much an eternal idea as friendship or
love. Hence he threw no contempt on art, since art is based on beauty.
He approved of athletic exercises, which strengthened and beautified the
body; but he would not defile the body or weaken it, either by lusts or
austerities. Passions were not to be exterminated but controlled; and
controlled by reason, the light within us,--that which guides to true
knowledge, and hence to virtue, and hence to happiness. The law of
temperance, therefore, is self-control.
Courage was another of his certitudes,--that which animated the soldier
on the battlefield with patriotic glow and lofty self-sacrifice. Life is
subordinate to patriotism. It was of but little consequence whether a
man died or not, in the discharge of duty. To do right was the main
thing, because it was right. "Like George Fox, he would do right if the
world were blotted out."
The weak point, to my mind, in the Socratic philosophy, considered in
its ethical bearings, was the confounding of virtue with knowledge, and
making them identical. Socrates could probably have explained this
difficulty away, for no one more than he appreciated the tyranny of
passion and appetite, which thus fettered the will; according to St.
Paul, "The evil that I would not, that I do." Men often commit sin when
the consequences of it and the nature of it press upon the mind. The
knowledge of good and evil does not always restrain a man from doing
what he knows will end in grief and shame. The restraint comes, not from
knowledge, but from divine aid, which was probably what Socrates meant
by his daemon,--a warning and a constraining power.
"Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo."
But this is not exactly the knowledge which Socrates meant, or Solomon.
Alcibiades was taught to see the loveliness of virtue and to admire it;
but _he_ had not the divine and restraining power, which Socrates called
an "inspiration," and others would call "grace." Yet Socrates himself,
with passions and appetites as great as Alcibiades, restrained
them,--was assisted to do so by that divine Power which he recognized,
and probably adored. How far he felt his personal responsibility to this
Power I do not know. The sense of personal responsibility to God is one
of the highest manifestations of Christian life, and implies a
recognition of God as a personality, as a moral governor whose eye is
everywhere, and whose commands are absolute. Many have a vague idea of
Providence as pervading and ruling the universe, without a sense of
personal responsibility to Him; in other words, without a "fear" of Him,
such as Moses taught, and which is represented by David as "the
beginning of wisdom,"--the fear to do wrong, not only because it is
wrong, but also because it is displeasing to Him who can both punish and
reward. I do not believe that Socrates had this idea of God; but I do
believe that he recognized His existence and providence. Most people in
Greece and Rome had religious instincts, and believed in supernatural
forces, who exercised an influence over their destiny,--although they
called them "gods," or divinities, and not _the_ "God Almighty" whom
Moses taught. The existence of temples, the offices of priests, and the
consultation of oracles and soothsayers, all point to this. And the
people not only believed in the existence of these supernatural powers,
to whom they erected temples and statues, but many of them believed in a
future state of rewards and punishments,--otherwise the names of Minos
and Rhadamanthus and other judges of the dead are unintelligible.
Paganism and mythology did not deny the existence and power of
gods,--yea, the immortal gods; they only multiplied their number,
representing them as avenging deities with human passions and frailties,
and offering to them gross and superstitious rites of worship. They had
imperfect and even degrading ideas of the gods, but acknowledged their
existence and their power. Socrates emancipated himself from these
degrading superstitions, and had a loftier idea of God than the people,
or he would not have been accused of impiety,--that is, a dissent from
the popular belief; although there is one thing which I cannot
understand in his life, and cannot harmonize with his general
teachings,--that in his last hours his last act was to command the
sacrifice of a cock to Aesculapius.
But whatever may have been his precise and definite ideas of God and
immortality, it is clear that he soared beyond his contemporaries in his
conceptions of Providence and of duty. He was a reformer and a
missionary, preaching a higher morality and revealing loftier truths
than any other person that we know of in pagan antiquity; although there
lived in India, about two hundred years before his day, a sage whom they
called Buddha, whom some modern scholars think approached nearer to
Christ than did Socrates or Marcus Aurelius. Very possibly. Have we any
reason to adduce that God has ever been without his witnesses on earth,
or ever will be? Why could he not have imparted wisdom both to Buddha
and Socrates, as he did to Abraham, Moses, and Paul? I look upon
Socrates as one of the witnesses and agents of Almighty power on this
earth to proclaim exalted truth and turn people from wickedness. He
himself--not indistinctly--claimed this mission.
Think what a man he was: truly was he a "moral phenomenon." You see a
man of strong animal propensities, but with a lofty soul, appearing in a
wicked and materialistic--and possibly atheistic--age, overturning all
previous systems of philosophy, and inculcating a new and higher law of
morals. You see him spending his whole life,--and a long life,--in
disinterested teachings and labors; teaching without pay, attaching
himself to youth, working in poverty and discomfort, indifferent to
wealth and honor, and even power, inculcating incessantly the worth and
dignity of the soul, and its amazing and incalculable superiority to all
the pleasures of the body and all the rewards of a worldly life. Who
gave to him this wisdom and this almost superhuman virtue? Who gave to
him this insight into the fundamental principles of morality? Who, in
this respect, made him a greater light and a clearer expounder than the
Christian Paley? Who made him, in all spiritual discernment, a wiser man
than the gifted John Stuart Mill, who seems to have been a candid
searcher after truth? In the wisdom of Socrates you see some higher
force than intellectual hardihood or intellectual clearness. How much
this pagan did to emancipate and elevate the soul! How much he did to
present the vanities and pursuits of worldly men in their true light!
What a rebuke were his life and doctrines to the Epicureanism which was
pervading all classes of society, and preparing the way for ruin! Who
cannot see in him a forerunner of that greater Teacher who was the
friend of publicans and sinners; who rejected the leaven of the
Pharisees and the speculations of the Sadducees; who scorned the riches
and glories of the world; who rebuked everything pretentious and
arrogant; who enjoined humility and self-abnegation; who exposed the
ignorance and sophistries of ordinary teachers; and who propounded to
_his_ disciples no such "miserable interrogatory" as "Who shall show us
any good?" but a higher question for their solution and that of all
pleasure-seeking and money-hunting people to the end of time,--"What
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
It very rarely happens that a great benefactor escapes persecution,
especially if he is persistent in denouncing false opinions which are
popular, or prevailing follies and sins. As the Scribes and Pharisees,
who had been so severely and openly exposed in all their hypocrisies by
our Lord, took the lead in causing his crucifixion, so the Sophists and
tyrants of Athens headed the fanatical persecution of Socrates because
he exposed their shallowness and worldliness, and stung them to the
quick by his sarcasms and ridicule. His elevated morality and lofty
spiritual life do not alone account for the persecution. If he had let
persons alone, and had not ridiculed their opinions and pretensions,
they would probably have let him alone. Galileo aroused the wrath of
the Inquisition not for his scientific discoveries, but because he
ridiculed the Dominican and Jesuit guardians of the philosophy of the
Middle Ages, and because he seemed to undermine the authority of the
Scriptures and of the Church: his boldness, his sarcasms, and his
mocking spirit were more offensive than his doctrines. The Church did
not persecute Kepler or Pascal. The Athenians may have condemned
Xenophanes and Anaxagoras, yet not the other Ionian philosophers, nor
the lofty speculations of Plato; but they murdered Socrates because they
hated him. It was not pleasant to the gay leaders of Athenian society to
hear the utter vanity of their worldly lives painted with such unsparing
severity, nor was it pleasant to the Sophists and rhetoricians to see
their idols overthrown, and they themselves exposed as false teachers
and shallow pretenders. No one likes to see himself held up to scorn and
mockery; nobody is willing to be shown up as ignorant and conceited. The
people of Athens did not like to see their gods ridiculed, for the
logical sequence of the teachings of Socrates was to undermine the
popular religion. It was very offensive to rich and worldly people to be
told that their riches and pleasures were transient and worthless. It
was impossible that those rhetoricians who gloried in words, those
Sophists who covered up the truth, those pedants who prided themselves
on their technicalities, those politicians who lived by corruption,
those worldly fathers who thought only of pushing the fortunes of their
children, should not see in Socrates their uncompromising foe; and when
he added mockery and ridicule to contempt, and piqued their vanity, and
offended their pride, they bitterly hated him and wished him out of the
way. My wonder is that he should have been tolerated until he was
seventy years of age. Men less offensive than he have been burned alive,
and stoned to death, and tortured on the rack, and devoured by lions in
the amphitheatre. It is the fate of prophets to be exiled, or slandered,
or jeered at, or stigmatized, or banished from society,--to be subjected
to some sort of persecution; but when prophets denounce woes, and utter
invectives, and provoke by stinging sarcasms, they have generally been
killed. No matter how enlightened society is, or tolerant the age, he
who utters offensive truths will be disliked, and in some way punished.
So Socrates must meet the fate of all benefactors who make themselves
disliked and hated. First the great comic poet Aristophanes, in his
comedy called the "Clouds," held him up to ridicule and reproach, and
thus prepared the way for his arraignment and trial. He is made to utter
a thousand impieties and impertinences. He is made to talk like a man
of the greatest vanity and conceit, and to throw contempt and scorn on
everybody else. It is not probable that the poet entered into any formal
conspiracy against him, but found him a good subject of raillery and
mockery, since Socrates was then very unpopular, aside from his moral
teachings, for being declared by the oracle of Delphi the wisest man in
the world, and for having been intimate with the two men whom the
Athenians above all men justly execrated,--Critias, the chief of the
Thirty Tyrants whom Lysander had imposed, or at least consented to,
after the Peloponnesian war; and Alcibiades, whose evil counsels had led
to an unfortunate expedition, and who in addition had proved himself a
traitor to his country.
Public opinion being now against him, on various grounds he is brought
to trial before the Dikastery,--a board of some five hundred judges,
leading citizens of Athens. One of his chief accusers was Anytus,--a
rich tradesman, of very narrow mind, personally hostile to Socrates
because of the influence the philosopher had exerted over his son, yet
who then had considerable influence from the active part he had taken in
the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants. The more formidable accuser was
Meletus,--a poet and a rhetorician, who had been irritated by Socrates'
terrible cross-examinations. The principal charges against him were,
that he did not admit the gods acknowledged by the republic, and that he
corrupted the youth of Athens.
In regard to the first charge, it could not be technically proved that
he had assailed the gods, for he was exact in his legal worship; but
really and virtually there was some foundation for the accusation, since
Socrates was a religious innovator if ever there was one. His lofty
realism _was_ subversive of popular superstitions, when logically
carried out. As to the second charge, of corrupting youth, this was
utterly groundless; for he had uniformly enjoined courage, and
temperance, and obedience to the laws, and patriotism, and the control
of the passions, and all the higher sentiments of the soul But the
tendency of his teachings was to create in young men contempt for all
institutions based on falsehood or superstition or tyranny, and he
openly disapproved some of the existing laws,--such as choosing
magistrates by lot,--and freely expressed his opinions. In a narrow and
technical sense there was some reason for this charge; for if a young
man came to combat his father's business or habits of life or general
opinions, in consequence of his own superior enlightenment, it might be
made out that he had not sufficient respect for his father, and thus was
failing in the virtues of reverence and filial obedience.
Considering the genius and innocence of the accused, he did not make an
able defence; he might have done better. It appeared as if he did not
wish to be acquitted. He took no thought of what he should say; he made
no preparation for so great an occasion. He made no appeal to the
passions and feelings of his judges. He refused the assistance of
Lysias, the greatest orator of the day. He brought neither his wife nor
children to incline the judges in his favor by their sighs and tears.
His discourse was manly, bold, noble, dignified, but without passion and
without art. His unpremeditated replies seemed to scorn an elaborate
defence. He even seemed to rebuke his judges, rather than to conciliate
them. On the culprit's bench he assumed the manners of a teacher. He
might easily have saved himself, for there was but a small majority
(only five or six at the first vote) for his condemnation. And then he
irritated his judges unnecessarily. According to the laws he had the
privilege of proposing a substitution for his punishment, which would
have been accepted,--exile for instance; but, with a provoking and yet
amusing irony, he asked to be supported at the public expense in the
Prytaneum: that is, he asked for the highest honor of the republic. For
a condemned criminal to ask this was audacity and defiance.
We cannot otherwise suppose than that he did not wish to be acquitted.
He wished to die. The time had come; he had fulfilled his mission; he
was old and poor; his condemnation would bring his truths before the
world in a more impressive form. He knew the moral greatness of a
martyr's death. He reposed in the calm consciousness of having rendered
great services, of having made important revelations. He never had an
ignoble love of life; death had no terrors to him at any time. So he was
perfectly resigned to his fate. Most willingly he accepted the penalty
of plain speaking, and presented no serious remonstrances and no
indignant denials. Had he pleaded eloquently for his life, he would not
have fulfilled his mission. He acted with amazing foresight; he took the
only course which would secure a lasting influence. He knew that his
death would evoke a new spirit of inquiry, which would spread over the
civilized world. It was a public disappointment that he did not defend
himself with more earnestness. But he was not seeking applause for his
genius,--simply the final triumph of his cause, best secured by
martyrdom.
So he received his sentence with evident satisfaction; and in the
interval between it and his execution he spent his time in cheerful but
lofty conversations with his disciples. He unhesitatingly refused to
escape from his prison when the means would have been provided. His last
hours were of immortal beauty. His friends were dissolved in tears, but
he was calm, composed, triumphant; and when he lay down to die he
prayed that his migration to the unknown land might be propitious. He
died without pain, as the hemlock produced only torpor.