SOCRATES
_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of
men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is
knowledge_
The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the
practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any
further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of
the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social and moral
chaos. Only by brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth
evoke a new order; only out of the moral darkness could a new
intellectual light be made to shine. The social and personal anarchy
seemed to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophy of nature; if
ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it must be through a
revision of the theory of morals. If it could be proved that the
doctrine of individualism, of isolation, which the analysis of a
Protagoras or a Gorgias had reached, was not only _unlivable_ but
unthinkable,--carried the seeds of its own destruction, theoretical as
well as practical, within {102} itself,--then the analysis of
_perception_, from which this moral individualism issued, might itself
be called to submit to revision, and a stable point of support in the
moral world might thus become a centre of stability for the
intellectual and the physical also.
By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis of philosophy
produced in Greece through the moral and social chaos of the sophistic
teaching had two issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried
out on the one side with a less, on the other side with a greater
completeness. The less complete reaction from sophistic teaching
attempted only such reconstruction of the moral point of view as should
recover a law or principle of general and universally cogent character,
whereon might be built anew a _moral_ order without attempting to
extend the inquiry as to a universal principle into the regions of
abstract truth or into physics. The more complete and logical
reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal principle in morals,
undertook a logical reconstruction on the recovered universal basis all
along the line of what was knowable.
To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the
world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to
deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the
way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended
exposition of the new point of {103} view. Those who in succession to
him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in
the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_.
Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the
knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle.
Greek philosophy then marks with the life of Socrates a parting of the
ways in two senses: _first_, inasmuch as with him came the reaction
from a physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in a moral
chaos; and _second_, inasmuch as from him the two great streams of
later philosophy issued--the one a philosophy of law or universals in
_action_, the other a philosophy of law or universals in _thought_ and
_nature_ as well.
Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and Phaenarete a midwife, was
born at Athens in or about the year 469 B.C. His parents were probably
poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too poor to pay the
fees required for instruction by the Sophists of his time. But in
whatever way acquired or assimilated, it is certain that there was
little of the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which
Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.
Among a people distinguished generally for their handsome features and
noble proportions, Socrates was a notable exception. His face was
squat and {104} round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick; he was
clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress, a thorough
'Bohemian,' as we should call him. He was, however, gifted with an
uncommon bodily vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by
temperament moderate in food and drink, yet capable on occasion of
drinking most people 'under the table.' He was of an imperturbable
humour, not to be excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein of
sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural shrewdness astonishing, all
the more astonishing because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism
and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he felt the visitation
of a mysterious internal voice, to which or to his own internal
communings he would sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted
stillness for hours. The voice within him was felt as a restraining
force, limiting his action in various ways, but leaving him free to
wander about among his fellows, to watch their doings and interpret
their thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of every class,
high and low, rich and poor, concerning righteousness and justice and
goodness and purity and truth. He did not enter on his philosophic
work with some grand general principle ready-made, to which he was
prepared to fit the facts by hook or by crook. Rather he compared
himself to his mother, the midwife; he sought to help others to {105}
express themselves; he had nothing to tell them, he wanted them to tell
him. This was the irony of Socrates, the eternal _questioning_, which
in time came to mean in people's minds what the word does now. For it
was hard, and grew every year harder, to convince people that so subtle
a questioner was as ignorant as he professed to be; or that the man who
could touch so keenly the weak point of all other men's answers, had no
answer to the problems of life himself.
In striking contrast, then, to the method of all previous philosophies,
Socrates busied himself to begin with, not with some general
intellectual _principle_, but with a multitude of different _people_,
with their notions especially on moral ideas, with the meaning or
no-meaning which they attached to particular words,--in short, with the
individual, the particular, the concrete, the every-day. He did not at
all deny that he had a purpose in all this. On the contrary, he openly
professed that he was in search of the lost universal, the lost _law_
of men's thoughts and actions. He was convinced that life was not the
chaos that the Sophists made out; that nobody really believed it to be
a chaos; that, on the contrary, everybody had a meaning and purport in
his every word and act, which could be made intelligible to himself and
others, if you could only get people to think out clearly what they
really meant. Philosophy {106} had met her destruction in the busy
haunts of men; there where had been the bane, Socrates' firm faith
sought ever and everywhere the antidote.
This simple enough yet profound and far-reaching practice of Socrates
was theorised in later times as a logical method, known to us as
_Induction_, or the discovery of universal laws or principles out [195]
of an accumulation of particular facts. And thus Aristotle, with his
technical and systematising intellect, attributes two main innovations
in philosophy to Socrates; the _Inductive_ process of reasoning, and
the establishing of _General Ideas_ or Definitions upon or through this
process. This, true enough as indicating what was latent in the
Socratic method, and what was subsequently actually developed out of it
by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless probably an anachronism if one
seeks to represent it as consciously present in Socrates' mind.
Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just because he wanted to
get at the people about him, and through them at what they thought. He
was the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor; he created, so
to speak, the raw material for a theory of induction and definition; he
knew and cared nothing about such theories himself.
A story which may or may not be true in fact is put in Socrates' mouth
by Plato, as to the cause which first started him on his "search for
definitions." {107} One of his friends, he tells us, named Chaerephon,
went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and asked whether there was
anybody wiser than Socrates. The answer was given that there was none
wiser. This answer was reported to Socrates, who was much astonished,
his own impression being that he had no wisdom or knowledge at all. So
with a view to prove the oracle wrong he went in succession to various
people of eminence and reputation in the various walks of
life,--statesmen and poets and handicraftsmen and others,--in the
expectation that they would show, on being questioned, such a knowledge
of the principles on which their work was based as would prove their
superior wisdom. But to his astonishment he found one after another of
these men wanting in any apprehension of principles at all. They
seemed to work by a kind of haphazard or 'rule of thumb,' and indeed
felt annoyed that anything more should be expected of them. From which
at the last Socrates came to the conclusion that perhaps the oracle was
right in this sense at least, that, if he himself knew nothing more
than his fellows, he was at least conscious of his own ignorance,
whereas they were not.
Whether this tale may not itself be a specimen of Socrates' irony we
cannot tell, but at all events it illustrates from another point of
view the real meaning of Socrates' life. He, at least, was not content
{108} to rest in haphazard and rule of thumb; he was determined to go
on till he found out what was the law or principle of men's acts and
words. The ignorance of others as to any such law or principle in
their own case did not convince him that there was no such law or
principle; only it was there (he thought) working unconsciously, and
therefore in a way defencelessly. And so he compares himself at times
to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and irritate people out of
their easy indifference, and force them to ask themselves what they
were really driving at. Or again, he compares himself to the
torpedo-fish, because he tried to give people a shock whenever they
attempted to satisfy him with shallow and unreal explanations of their
thoughts and actions.
The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of Socrates' life, thus
devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the
enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends,
the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested
enemies, the satires of poets; and lastly, the story of the final
attack by an ungrateful people on their one great teacher, of his
unjust condemnation and heroic death--all this we must pass over here.
The story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is one of the
noblest in history. What is more to {109} the purpose for us is to
ascertain how far his search for definitions was successful; how far he
was able to
Take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them;
how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a universal principle,
out of the confused babel of common life and thought and speech, strong
enough and wide enough on which to build a new order for this world, a
new hope for the world beyond.
We have said that Socrates made the individual and the concrete the
field of his search. And not only did he look to individuals for
light, he looked to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to himself. That is to
say, if he met a carpenter, it was on his carpentering that he
questioned him; if a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor; if a
statesman, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not want general
vague theories on subjects of which his interlocutors could not be
supposed to have any special experience or knowledge; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.
And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty and
isolation of the sophistic teaching 'in the air,' was that when you get
a man to talk on his own trade, which he _knows_, as is proved by the
actual work he produces, you find invariably two {110} things--_first_,
that the skill is the man's _individual_ possession no doubt, the
result of inborn capacity and continuous training and practice; but
_second_, that just in proportion to that individual skill is the man's
conviction that his skill has reference to a _law_ higher than himself,
outside himself. If the man whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful
statesman, he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to _law_ or
right among the citizens; if he was a skilful sculptor, he produced
_beautiful_ things; if he was a skilful handicraftsman, he produced
_useful_ things. Justice, beauty, utility; these three words in
different ways illustrated the existence of something always realising
itself no doubt in individuals and their works, but nevertheless
exercising a governing influence upon these to such a degree that this
ideal something might be conceived as _prior_ to the individual or his
work; or secondly, as _inherent_ in them and giving value to them; or
thirdly, as coming in at the end as the _perfection_ or completion of
them. This law or ideal then had a threefold aspect in its own nature,
being conceivable as Justice, as Beauty, as Utility; it had a threefold
aspect in relation to the works produced in accordance with it, as the
cause _producing_, the cause _inhering_, the cause completing or
_perfecting_.
We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing thus: "You clever
Sophists, when we let you take {111} us into the region of abstract
talk, have a knack of so playing with words that in the end we don't
seem to know anything for certain, especially on such subjects as we
have hitherto thought the most important, such as God and right and
truth and justice and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless
against you; and what is more, any smart youth, whose opinion on any
practical matter no one would think of taking, can very soon pick up
the trick from you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than
himself by his clever argumentation; all going to prove that there is
nothing certain, nothing real, nothing binding; nothing but opinions
and conventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in the universe.
"But when I go and have a quiet talk with any man who really is a known
master of some craft or skill, about that craft or skill, I find no
doubt whatever existing in his mind about there being a law, a
something absolutely real and beautiful and true in connection with it.
He, on the contrary, lives with no other purpose or hope or desire but
as far as he can to realise in what he works at something of this real
and beautiful and true, which was before him, will be after him, is the
only valuable thing in him, but yet which honours him with the function
of, in his day and generation, expressing it before the eyes of men."
{112} "Have we not here a key to the great secret? If each man, in
respect of that which he knows best because he lives by it and for it,
knows with intimate knowledge and certainty that there at least there
is a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater than he,--have we
not here a hint of the truth for the universe as a whole; that there
also and in all its operations, great as well as small, there must be a
Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before all things, works
in and gives value to all things, will be the consummation of all
things? Is not this what we mean by the Divine?"
Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things of life, but bending
from the airy speculations of the proud to the realities which true
labour showed him, laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of
nature, and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.
"Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his new vision of things.
Knowledge, yes; but _real_ knowledge; not mere head-knowledge or
lip-knowledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the man who by
obedience and teachableness and self-restraint has come to a knowledge
evidencing itself in _works_ expressive of the law that is in him, as
he is in it. _Virtue is knowledge_; on the one hand, therefore, not
something in the air, unreal, intangible; but something in me, in you,
in each man, something which you cannot handle except as individual and
{113} in individuals; on the other hand, something more than individual
or capricious or uncertain,--something which is absolute, over-ruling,
eternal.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And so if a man is virtuous, he is realising
what is best and truest in himself, he is fulfilling also what is best
and truest without himself. He is free, for only the truth makes free;
he is obedient to law, but it is at once a law eternally valid, and a
law which he dictates to himself. And therefore virtue is teachable,
inasmuch as the law in the teacher, perfected in him, is also the law
in the taught, latent in him, by both individually possessed, but
possessed by both in virtue of its being greater than both, of its
being something more than individual.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore the law of virtuous growth is
expressed in the maxim engraved on the Delphic temple, 'Know thyself.'
Know thyself, that is, realise thyself; by obedience and self-control
come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility;
satisfy yourself, in the only way in which true self-satisfaction is
possible, by realising in yourself the law which constitutes your real
being.
_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore all the manifold relations of
life,--the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform
activities of life,--labour and speech and art and literature and {114}
law; all the sentiments of life,--friendship and love and reverence and
courage and hope,--all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are
expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through
individuals, and in the same process realising them.
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