675 



SOCRATES. 



SOCRATES. 



576 



seizing tho fugitive, his reluctance to do so arose probably from A 

 goodness of heart quite consistent with a general adherence to the 

 party which had selected hioi BS their instrument. That Socrates 

 favoured the aristocratic or oligarchical faction at Athens that, at 

 least, he was not well disposed to the democratic constitution of his 

 country, is proved, to a certain extent, by the fact that the indict- 

 ment on which he was condemned and executed was brought forward 

 by Anytus, one of the chief of those citizens who assisted Thrasybulus 

 in restoring the old state of things. We are of opinion (and the 

 subject is one on which many opinions have been entertained) that 

 Socrates, though a thoroughly good and virtuous man, endued with 

 great self-control, a strong sense of duty, wonderful amiability of 

 disposition, and indeed with almost all those qualities which obtain 

 for an individual the love and admiration of his fellows, was deficient 

 in the higher kind of political virtue; that in fact he was not a good 

 citizen, because with every wish to obey the laws of the state, he 

 could not refrain from broaching theories at variance with the first 

 principles of a democratic constitution, because he could not prevail 

 upon his intellectual convictions to bow before the supremacy of 

 public opinion. That in the abstract he might have been in the 

 right, while all Athens waa in the wrong, is not the question. As 

 laws, in a democratic state, are made by the majority, the voice of 

 one man, or of a small class of men, though they may be all philo- 

 sophers, will never justify the speakers in breaking through those 

 rules, to which, as members of the body politic, they are bound to 

 submit. The Athenians were justified, by every principle of law 

 which was acknowledged in those days, in the sentence which they 

 passed upon Socrates, and it is only matter of wonder that the votes 

 of the judges were so nearly divided. An opinion generally unfavour- 

 able to him had for a long time been prevalent in Athens, and it is no 

 alight evidence of this opinion being well-founded, that it was, in part 

 at least, supported by Aristophanes, who introduced Socrates into 

 his celebrated comedy, ' The Clouds,' as a mischievous speculator 

 on matters of religion, and as a corruptor of the youth of Athens as, 

 in fact, one of the class of Sophists. Although there can be no doubt 

 that the comedy just mentioned had no share in producing the con- 

 demnation of Socrates, it is at least remarkable that the two principal 

 charges brought against him on his trial constitute the leading features 

 in the satirical censure of Aristophanes. The accusers, Meletus, 

 Anytus, and Lycon, state their charges as follows : " Socrates is 

 guilty of impiety in not acknowledging the gods acknowledged by 

 the state, but on the contrary introducing new deities; and he also 

 does wrong in corrupting the youth." It would be easy to confute 

 the arguments by which Xenophon seeks to justify his master from 

 these charges, and if we only put ourselves in the place of the 

 Athenians, we cannot wonder that a small majority of judges were 

 compelled by their duty to pronounce him guilty. It does not how- 

 ever follow that he would have been put to death in consequence of 

 this conviction. But on being called up to receive his sentence, 

 ho treated the court with a contumelious disdain, which was not 

 on]y at variance with Attic law, but also eminently calculated to pro- 

 voke his judges, who were accustomed to the most humblo and abject 

 demeanour on the part of those who were brought before them, and 

 who could ill brook the irouy and ridicule of a condemned criminal. 

 He was sentenced to death by a much larger number than those who 

 had voted him guilty. The festival of the Theora gained him a 

 reprieve of thirty days, during which his friend Crito provided for 

 him the means of escaping from prison, but he would not avail him- 

 self of the opportunity. Hia sentence was carried into execution at 

 the end of the month Tbargelion, 01. 95, 1 (B.C. 399). If we may 

 believe the account given us by a friend and disciple of his, he met 

 his fate with the most heroic calmness and resignation, discoursing 

 with aud consoling his weeping friends,- even after he had drunk the 

 cup of hemlock, and expressing with his last breath his debt of 

 gratitude to ^Esculapius for having at length supplied him with a 

 cure for all earthly ills. 



The philosophical merits of Socrates are less doubtful than his 

 political character. The mere fact that he is made the chief interlo- 

 cutor in those wonderful dialogues which contain the whole system of 

 Plato, is sufficient to prove that he exerted no slight influence on that 

 great philosopher, and though he never committed any of his own 

 thoughts to writing, he has left indisputable traces of the important 

 innovations in science, of which he must be considered as the real and 

 first author. We have three authorities for the doctrines of Socrates : 

 Xenpphou's ' Memorabilia ; ' the Dialogues ' of Plato ; aud the 

 ' Strictures ' of Aristotle. With regard to the first work, too much 

 reliance has been placed upon it as a faithful delineation of the sayings 

 of Socrates. It is too much of an apologetic nature to deserve the 

 title of a just and accurate exposition of the doctrines which it 

 defends ; and even if Xenophon had wished to give a full account of 

 the philosophy of Socrates, it is not possible, from all that we know 

 of him, that he would have been able to do so. His talents, such 

 as they were, were ail of a practical nature ; he does not seem to have 

 had any toleration for philosophy ; he clearly did not understand the 

 definition of terms or ideas; and at any rate had not originality 

 enough to enable him to appreciate such a thoroughly original character 

 as Socrates. 



As to Plato, there can be no doubt that ho never meant to pass off 



aa his own the doctrines and speculations which he puts into the 

 mouth of Socrates; but we caunot help feeling that tho Socrates, 

 whom he represents with such dramatic truth, must have been a real 

 person, and no creature of the imagination, and that Socrates must 

 have been the philosophical as he is the formal basis of all that Plato 

 has done for science. If then we seek to make up for the deficiencies 

 of Plato and Xenophon, aa exponents of the doctrines which their 

 master actually promulgated, by turning to the criticisms of Aristotle, 

 we shall find that Plato gives us a much truer conception of what 

 he effected by his scientific labours, than we could have derived 

 from Xenophon. Aristotle distinctly tells us that Socrates philoso- 

 phised about virtue, and made some real discoveries with regard to 

 the first principles of science. Now this is just the philosophical 

 basis which we discern in the Socrates of Plato. We find him always 

 endeavouring to reduce things to their first elements, stripping realities 

 of their pompous garb of words, and striving to arrive at certainty as 

 the standard of truth ; and we al. o find that his philosophy is generally 

 applied to ethics rather than to physics. He seems to have been con- 

 vinced of the unity of virtue, and to have believed that it was 

 teachable as a matter of science. In fact, with him the scientific and 

 the moral run into one another, for knowledge is the final cause of the 

 will, and good is the final cause of knowledge; hence he who knows 

 what justice is, must needs be just, since no one wittingly departs 

 from that which he knows to be good. 



Socrates considered it to be his particular vocation to arouse the 

 idea of science in the minds of men. This is clear from the manner in 

 which he is said to have insisted upon the consciou>ness of ignorance, 

 aud also from the use which he made of the Delphic response yvwdi 

 tTa.vT6v, ' Know thyself.' " For," says Schleiermacher (in his valuable 

 paper ou the ' Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher '] "if he went about 

 in the service of the god, to justify the celebrated oracle, it is im- 

 possible that the utmost point he reached could have been simply to 

 know that he knew nothing; there was a step beyond this which he 

 must have taken, that of knowing what knowledge is. For by what 

 other means could he have been enabled to declare that which others 

 believed themselves to know, to be rto knowledge, than by a more correct 

 conception of knowledge, and by a more correct method founded upon 

 that conception? And everywhere, when he is explaining the nature 

 of non-science (a.veiri<nr}[j.offvvri), one sees that he sets out from two 

 tests : one, that science is the same in all true thoughts, and con- 

 sequently must manifest its peculiar form in every such thought ; the 

 other, that all science forms one whole. For his proofs always hinge 

 on this assumption that it is impossible to start from one true 

 thought and to be entangled in a contradiction with any other, aud 

 also that knowledge derived from any one point, and obtained by 

 correct combination, cannot contradict that which has been deduced 

 in like manner from any other point : aud while he exposed such con- 

 tradictions iu the current conceptions of mankind, he strove to rouse 

 those leading ideas in all who were capable of understanding or even 

 of divining his meaning." In all the isolated particulars which are 

 recorded of Socrates, this one object is everywhere discernible. His 

 antagonistic opposition to the Sophists is one very strong feature of 

 this. They professed to know everything, without the idea of science, 

 or knowledge of what knowledge is, aud as he had that idea without 

 the mass of acquirements on which they prided themselves, he was 

 naturally their opponent, and his strife with them is carried on 

 entirely in this way, that he endeavours to nullify the effects of their 

 acquired knowledge by shifting the ground from the objects to the 

 idea of science, whereby he generally succeeds in proving their 

 deficiency in the one thing needful to the philosopher. His irony, as 

 it is called, is another remarkable proof of his devotion to hia vocation 

 as an awakener of the idea of science. The irony of Socrates has 

 been well-described as the co-existence of the idea of scieuce in him, 

 with the want of clear and complete views on any objects of science 

 in a word, as the knowledge of his ignorance. With this is intimately 

 connected the indirect dialogical method which he invariably adopted, 

 and which may be considered as his method of extracting scientific 

 truth from the mass of semblances and contradictions by which it waa 

 surrounded. His dcsmonion^ or secret monitor, which was a great 

 puzzle to his contemporaries, ao it has been to many of the moderns, 

 seems to have been little more than a name which he gave to those 

 convictions on practical subjects which sprung up spontaneously iu 

 his mind, and for which he could not find any satisfactory means of 

 accounting, though he felt himself constrained to follow in the course 

 which they prescribed, as whea he felt convinced of the issue of an 

 undertaking, or was restrained by some secret misgiving from taking a 

 certain route on his retreat from a disastrous battle. 



Such are the leading outlines of the philosophy of Socrates, so far 

 as they are capable of being established with any certainty. The im- 

 portance of his doctrines is most clearly perceived when we consider 

 them as they were developed and applied by the various schools which 

 acknowledged him as their founder, and especially as they were carried 

 out by Plato. In all these schools, we find, along with the purely 

 Socratic element, some foreign admixture which constitutes the 

 diagnosis of the different systems, and it is not a matter of wonder 

 that no school of Socratic philosophy merely adopted the principles 

 and method of its great founder. A thoroughly original man like 

 Socrates would naturally gather around him all the original and 



