42 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



but every part both of his conversation and his conduct was such, as 

 might be expected from a man, deeply sensible of the truth and im- 

 portance of religion. Upon these subjects, however, he found it 

 necessary to speak with a certain degree of caution and reserve ; and 

 even with all his care he did not escape the charge of impiety. It 

 need hardly be proved that he disbelieved the popular mythology of 

 his time ; and he appears to have admitted the existence of an inter- 

 mediate race of spiritual beings, between the Supreme Deity and men. 

 It is, however, not unreasonable to suspect, that when Socrates 

 * referred to his friends, in questions not to be resolved by human 

 sagacity, to auguries and divinations, he complied with what he con- 

 sidered to be a harmless superstition, without intending to assert his 

 own belief in it. At the same time that he maintained the purity and 

 spirituality of the Supreme God, and strongly denied the weaknesses 

 and vices imputed by the poets to the deities of the Pantheon, he 

 practised himself, and recommended to others, a regular compliance 

 with the established forms of worship, and even consulted oracles. At 

 the same time he seems to have intimated his sense of the impropriety 

 of addressing the Deity by any particular name, by his custom of in- 

 troducing into his colloquial asseverations sometimes the name of Here 

 (Juno) and sometimes that of a dog or a goose. The last words 

 which Socrates uttered before his death, were to put his friends in 

 mind, that he was indebted to JEsculapius a cock, which he had vowed, 

 but never sacrificed. Such an expression, used at a moment when he 

 was perfectly aware of his approaching dissolution, might seem to in- 

 dicate an actual belief in the existence of the inferior gods. But it 

 has been conjectured, and not improbably, that when those words were 

 uttered, the poison which he had taken had affected his reason. 

 Whatever may have been the language which he held in his public 

 discourses, the sagacity of Aristophanes did not fail to perceive, that 

 he rejected in fact the popular superstitions of his country. 

 His moral His firmness of mind, in refusing to act contrary to the dictates of 

 character, j^g consc j ence . n j s temperance and frugality, have been already men- 

 tioned. The concurrent testimony of all antiquity proves him to have 

 been one of the most irreproachable characters of the heathen world. 

 And the virtues, for which he was most remarkable, will appear more 

 worthy of admiration, if we reflect that he was destitute of those 

 lights and helps which are possessed by the Christian moralist. " The 

 singular merit of Socrates," observes Mr. Mitford, " lay in the purity 

 and usefulness of his manners and conversation ; the clearness with 

 which he saw, and the steadiness with which he practised, in a blind 

 and corrupt age, all moral duties ; the disinterestedness and the zeal 

 with which he devoted himself to the benefit .of others ; and the en- 

 larged and warm benevolence, whence his supreme and only pleasure 

 seems to have consisted in doing good. The purity of Christian mo- 

 rality, little enough indeed seen in practice, nevertheless is become so 

 familiar in theory that it passes almost for obvious and even congenial 



