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.