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.