Empire, when it came to Athens, came almost unsought. The Persian invasions had made her a great naval power; the free choice of her allies placed her at the head of a great maritime confederacy. The sudden command of vast resources and the tension accumulated during ages of repose, stimulated all her faculties into preternatural activity. Her spirit was steeled almost to the Dorian temper, and entered into victorious rivalry with the Dorian Muse. Not only did her fleet sweep the sea, but her army, for once, defeated Theban hoplites in the field. The grand choral harmonies of Sicilian song, the Sicyonian recitals of epic adventure, were rolled back into a framework for the spectacle of individual souls meeting one another in argument, expostulation, entreaty, and defiance; a nobler Doric edifice rose to confront the Aeginetan temple of Athênê; the strained energy of Aeginetan combatants was relaxed into attitudes of reposing power, and the eternal smile on their faces was deepened into the sadness of unfathomable thought. But to the violet-crowned city, Athênê was a giver of wealth and wisdom rather than of prowess; her empire rested on the contributions of unwilling allies, and on a technical proficiency which others were sure to equal in time; so that the Corinthian orators could say with justice that Athenian skill was more easily acquired than Dorian valour. At once receptive and communicative, Athens absorbed all that Greece could teach her, and then returned it in a more elaborate form, but without the freshness of its earliest inspiration. Yet there was one field that still afforded scope for creative originality. Habits of analysis, though fatal to spontaneous production, were favourable, or rather were necessary, to the growth of a new philosophy. After the exhaustion of every limited idealism, there remained that highest idealisation which is the reduction of all past experience to a method available for the guidance of all future action. To accomplish this last enterprise it was necessary that a single individual should gather up in himself the spirit diffused through a whole people, bestowing on it by that very concentration the capability of an infinitely wider extension when its provisional representative should have passed away from the scene.
Socrates represents the popular Athenian character much as Richardson, in a different sphere, represents the English middle-class character—represents it, that is to say, elevated into transcendent genius. Except this elevation, there was nothing anomalous about him. If he was exclusively critical, rationalising, unadventurous, prosaic; in a word, as the German historians say, something of a Philistine; so, we may suspect, were the mass of his countrymen. His illustrations were taken from such plebeian employments as cattle-breeding, cobbling, weaving, and sailoring. These were his ‘touches of things common’ which at last ‘rose to touch the spheres.’ He both practised and inculcated virtues, the value of which is especially evident in humble life—frugality and endurance. But he also represents the Dêmos in its sovereign capacity as legislator and judge. Without aspiring to be an orator or statesman, he reserves the ultimate power of arbitration and election. He submits candidates for office to a severe scrutiny, and demands from all men an even stricter account of their lives than retiring magistrates had to give of their conduct, when in power, to the people. He applies the judicial method of cross-examination to the detection of error, and the parliamentary method of joint deliberation to the discovery of truth. He follows out the democratic principles of free speech and self-government, by submitting every question that arises to public discussion, and insisting on no conclusion that does not command the willing assent of his audience. Finally, his conversation, popular in form, was popular also in this respect, that everybody who chose to listen might have the benefit of it gratuitously. Here we have a great change from the scornful dogmatism of Heracleitus, and the virtually oligarchic exclusiveness of the teachers who demanded high fees for their instruction.
To be free and to rule over freemen were, with Socrates, as with every Athenian, the goals of ambition, only his freedom meant absolute immunity from the control of passion or habit; government meant superior knowledge, and government of freemen meant the power of producing intellectual conviction. In his eyes, the possessor of any art was, so far, a ruler, and the only true ruler, being obeyed under severe penalties by all who stood in need of his skill. But the royal art which he himself exercised, without expressly laying claim to it, was that which assigns its proper sphere to every other art, and provides each individual with the employment which his peculiar faculties demand. This is Athenian liberty and Athenian imperialism carried into education, but so idealised and purified that they can hardly be recognised at first sight.
The philosophy of Socrates is more obviously related to the practical and religious tendencies of his countrymen. Neither he nor they had any sympathy with the cosmological speculations which seemed to be unconnected with human interests, and to trench on matters beyond the reach of human knowledge. The old Attic sentiment was averse from adventures of any kind, whether political or intellectual. Yet the new spirit of enquiry awakened by Ionian thought could not fail to react powerfully on the most intelligent man among the most intelligent people of Hellas. Above all, one paramount idea which went beyond the confines of the old philosophy had been evolved by the differentiation of knowledge from its object, and had been presented, although under a materialising form, by Anaxagoras to the Athenian public. Socrates took up this idea, which expressed what was highest and most distinctive in the national character, and applied it to the development of ethical speculation. We have seen, in the last chapter, how an attempt was made to base moral truth on the results of natural philosophy, and how that attempt was combated by the Humanistic school. It could not be doubtful which side Socrates would take in this controversy. That he paid any attention to the teaching of Protagoras and Gorgias is, indeed, highly problematic, for their names are never mentioned by Xenophon, and the Platonic dialogues in which they figure are evidently fictitious. Nevertheless, he had to a certain extent arrived at the same conclusion with them, although by a different path. He was opposed, on religious grounds, to the theories which an acute psychological analysis had led them to reject. Accordingly, the idea of Nature is almost entirely absent from his conversation, and, like Protagoras, he is guided solely by regard for human interests. To the objection that positive laws were always changing, he victoriously replied that it was because they were undergoing an incessant adaptation to varying needs.[88] Like Protagoras, again, he was a habitual student of old Greek literature, and sedulously sought out the practical lessons in which it abounded. To him, as to the early poets and sages, Sôphrosynê, or self-knowledge and self-command taken together, was the first and most necessary of all virtues. Unlike them, however, he does not simply accept it from tradition, but gives it a philosophical foundation—the newly-established distinction between mind and body; a distinction not to be confounded with the old Psychism, although Plato, for his reforming purposes, shortly afterwards linked the two together. The disembodied spirit of mythology was a mere shadow or memory, equally destitute of solidity and of understanding; with Socrates, mind meant the personal consciousness which retains its continuous identity through every change, and as against every passing impulse. Like the Humanists, he made it the seat of knowledge—more than the Humanists, he gave it the control of appetite. In other words, he adds the idea of will to that of intellect; but instead of treating them as distinct faculties or functions, he absolutely identifies them. Mind having come to be first recognised as a knowing power, carried over its association with knowledge into the volitional sphere, and the two were first disentangled by Aristotle, though very imperfectly even by him. Yet no thinker helped so much to make the confusion apparent as the one to whom it was due. Socrates deliberately insisted that those who knew the good must necessarily be good themselves. He taught that every virtue was a science; courage, for example, was a knowledge of the things which should or should not be feared; temperance, a knowledge of what should or should not be desired, and so forth. Such an account of virtue would, perhaps, be sufficient if all men did what, in their opinion, they ought to do; and, however strange it may seem, Socrates assumed that such was actually the case.[89] The paradox, even if accepted at the moment by his youthful friends, was sure to be rejected, on examination, by cooler heads, and its rejection would prove that the whole doctrine was essentially unsound. Various causes prevented Socrates from perceiving what seemed so clear to duller intelligences than his. First of all, he did not separate duty from personal interest. A true Athenian, he recommended temperance and righteousness very largely on account of the material advantages they secured. That the agreeable and the honourable, the expedient and the just, frequently came into collision, was at that time a rhetorical commonplace; and it might be supposed that, if they were shown to coincide, no motive to misconduct but ignorance could exist. Then, again, being accustomed to compare conduct of every kind with the practice of such arts as flute-playing, he had come to take knowledge in a rather extended sense, just as we do when we say, indifferently, that a man knows geometry and that he knows how to draw. Aristotle himself did not see more clearly than Socrates that moral habits are only to be acquired by incessant practice; only the earlier thinker would have observed that knowledge of every kind is gained by the same laborious repetition of particular actions. To the obvious objection that, in this case, morality cannot, like theoretical truth, be imparted by the teacher to his pupils, but must be won by the learner for himself, he would probably have replied that all truth is really evolved by the mind from itself, and that he, for that very reason, disclaimed the name of a teacher, and limited himself to the seemingly humbler task of awakening dormant capacities in others.
An additional influence, not the less potent because unacknowledged, was the same craving for a principle of unity that had impelled early Greek thought to seek for the sole substance or cause of physical phenomena in some single material element, whether water, air, or fire; and just as these various principles were finally decomposed into the multitudinous atoms of Leucippus, so also, but much more speedily, did the general principle of knowledge tend to decompose itself into innumerable cognitions of the partial ends or utilities which action was directed to achieve. The need of a comprehensive generalisation again made itself felt, and all good was summed up under the head of happiness. The same difficulties recurred under another form. To define happiness proved not less difficult than to define use or practical knowledge. Three points of view offered themselves, and all three had been more or less anticipated by Socrates. Happiness might mean unmixed pleasure, or the exclusive cultivation of man’s higher nature, or voluntary subordination to a larger whole. The founder of Athenian philosophy used to present each of these, in turn, as an end, without recognising the possibility of a conflict between them; and it certainly would be a mistake to represent them as constantly opposed. Yet a truly scientific principle must either prove their identity, or make its choice among them, or discover something better. Plato seems to have taken up the three methods, one after the other, without coming to any very satisfactory conclusion. Aristotle identified the first two, but failed, or rather did not attempt to harmonise them with the third. Succeeding schools tried various combinations, laying more or less stress on different principles at different periods, till the will of an omnipotent Creator was substituted for every human standard. With the decline of dogmatic theology we have seen them all come to life again, and the old battle is still being fought out under our eyes. Speaking broadly, it may be said that the method which we have placed first on the list is more particularly represented in England, the second in France, and the last in Germany. Yet they refuse to be separated by any rigid line of demarcation, and each tends either to combine with or to pass into one or both of the rival theories. Modern utilitarianism, as constituted by John Stuart Mill, although avowedly based on the paramount value of pleasure, in admitting qualitative differences among enjoyments, and in subordinating individual to social good, introduces principles of action which are not, properly speaking, hedonistic. Neither is the idea of the whole by any means free from ambiguity. We have party, church, nation, order, progress, race, humanity, and the sum total of sensitive beings, all putting in their claims to figure as that entity. Where the pursuit of any single end gives rise to conflicting pretensions, a wise man will check them by reference to the other accredited standards, and will cherish a not unreasonable expectation that the evolution of life is tending to bring them all into ultimate agreement.
Returning to Socrates, we must further note that his identification of virtue with science, though it does not express the whole truth, expresses a considerable part of it, especially as to him conduct was a much more complex problem than it is to some modern teachers. Only those who believe in the existence of intuitive and infallible moral perceptions can consistently maintain that nothing is easier than to know our duty, and nothing harder than to do it. Even then, the intuitions must extend beyond general principles, and also inform us how and where to apply them. That no such inward illumination exists is sufficiently shown by experience; so much so that the mischief done by foolish people with good intentions has become proverbial. Modern casuists have, indeed, drawn a distinction between the intention and the act, making us responsible for the purity of the former, not for the consequences of the latter. Though based on the Socratic division between mind and body, this distinction would not have commended itself to Socrates. His object was not to save souls from sin, but to save individuals, families, and states from the ruin which ignorance of fact entails.
If we enlarge our point of view so as to cover the moral influence of knowledge on society taken collectively, its relative importance will be vastly increased. When Auguste Comte assigns the supreme direction of progress to advancing science, and when Buckle, following Fichte, makes the totality of human action depend on the totality of human knowledge, they are virtually attributing to intellectual education an even more decisive part than it played in the Socratic ethics. Even those who reject the theory, when pushed to such an extreme, will admit that the same quantity of self-devotion must produce a far greater effect when it is guided by deeper insight into the conditions of existence.
The same principle may be extended in a different direction if we substitute for knowledge, in its narrower significance, the more general conception of associated feeling. We shall then see that belief, habit, emotion, and instinct are only different stages of the same process—the process by which experience is organised and made subservient to vital activity. The simplest reflex and the highest intellectual conviction are alike based on sensori-motor mechanism, and, so far, differ only through the relative complexity and instability of the nervous connexions involved. Knowledge is life in the making, and when it fails to control practice fails only by coming into conflict with passion—that is to say, with the consolidated results of an earlier experience. Physiology offers another analogy to the Socratic method which must not be overlooked. Socrates recommended the formation of definite conceptions because, among other advantages, they facilitated the diffusion of useful knowledge. So, also, the organised associations of feelings are not only serviceable to individuals, but may be transmitted to offspring with a regularity proportioned to their definiteness. How naturally these deductions follow from the doctrine under consideration, is evident from their having been, to a certain extent, already drawn by Plato. His plan for the systematic education of feeling under scientific supervision answers to the first; his plan for breeding an improved race of citizens by placing marriage under State control answers to the second. Yet it is doubtful whether Plato’s predecessor would have sanctioned any scheme tending to substitute an external compulsion, whether felt or not, for freedom and individual initiative, and a blind instinct for the self-consciousness which can give an account of its procedure at every step. He would bring us back from social physics and physiology to psychology, and from psychology to dialectic philosophy.
IV.
To Socrates himself the strongest reason for believing in the identity of conviction and practice was, perhaps, that he had made it a living reality. With him to know the right and to do it were the same. In this sense we have already said that his life was the first verification of his philosophy. And just as the results of his ethical teaching can only be ideally separated from their application to his conduct, so also these results themselves cannot be kept apart from the method by which they were reached; nor is the process by which he reached them for himself distinguishable from the process by which he communicated them to his friends. In touching on this point, we touch on that which is greatest and most distinctively original in the Socratic system, or rather in the Socratic impulse to systematisation of every kind. What it was will be made clearer by reverting to the central conception of mind. With Protagoras mind meant an ever-changing stream of feeling; with Gorgias it was a principle of hopeless isolation, the interchange of thoughts between one consciousness and another, by means of signs, being an illusion. Socrates, on the contrary, attributed to it a steadfast control over passion, and a unifying function in society through its essentially synthetic activity, its need of co-operation and responsive assurance. He saw that the reason which overcomes animal desire tends to draw men together just as sensuality tends to drive them into hostile collision. If he recommended temperance on account of the increased egoistic pleasure which it secures, he recommended it also as making the individual a more efficient instrument for serving the community. If he inculcated obedience to the established laws, it was no doubt partly on grounds of enlightened self-interest, but also because union and harmony among citizens were thereby secured. And if he insisted on the necessity of forming definite conceptions, it was with the same twofold reference to personal and public advantage. Along with the diffusive, social character of mind he recognised its essential spontaneity. In a commonwealth where all citizens were free and equal, there must also be freedom and equality of reason. Having worked out a theory of life for himself, he desired that all other men should, so far as possible, pass through the same bracing discipline. Here we have the secret of his famous erotetic method. He did not, like the Sophists, give continuous lectures, nor profess, like some of them, to answer every question that might be put to him. On the contrary, he put a series of questions to all who came in his way, generally in the form of an alternative, one side of which seemed self-evidently true and the other self-evidently false, arranged so as to lead the respondent, step by step, to the conclusion which it was desired that he should accept. Socrates did not invent this method. It had long been practised in the Athenian law-courts as a means for extracting from the opposite party admissions which could not be otherwise obtained, whence it had passed into the tragic drama, and into the discussion of philosophical problems. Nowhere else was the analytical power of Greek thought so brilliantly displayed; for before a contested proposition could be subjected to this mode of treatment, it had to be carefully discriminated from confusing adjuncts, considered under all the various meanings which it might possibly be made to bear, subdivided, if it was complex, into two or more distinct assertions, and linked by a minute chain of demonstration to the admission by which its validity was established or overthrown.