Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism

by John Stuart Blackie

But it was not only his general oddity, his pleasant humour, and his wisdom seasoned with salt that made him a noticeable man amid the brilliant society of Athens: he was moreover a thoroughly healthy man, of great powers of endurance, a valiant soldier when his country required his services, and a good bottle-companion when piety towards Dionysus, or any occasion of social festivity, according to Attic usage, demanded that men should drink largely. On these points we have a graphic picture put by Plato into the mouth of Alcibiades, which, to complete our personal portrait here, it will not be amiss to translate.

“When we were together in the campaign at Potidæa, and I messed with him every day, I found that in the power of enduring toil he surpassed not only me but all the soldiers in the camp. For when, as sometimes will happen on the march, we might be at a loss for a dinner, Socrates could always fast with the least complaint; while, on the other hand, at our banquetings and junketings he always enjoyed everything in the most hearty way; and when he was forced to drink, even though not willingly, he could drain cup for cup with the stoutest bottle-companion in the camp; and, what is strangest of all, even after our stiffest bouts no one ever saw Socrates drunk. And as to cold and frost, I remember well, one night in one of those severe Macedonian winters, when there was a very biting frost, and every man either stayed within or went out well encased in warm sheepskin jackets and felt shoes, Socrates alone went about in the open air with no other covering than his common mantle, and trod the frosted ground with his bare feet more lightly than others did with their warm shoes. But I must tell you something more notable of his doings at Potidæa. One morning he went out early to indulge some contemplations; but not succeeding, as it would appear, in his object, whatever that might be, he remained standing and looking right out before him till it was near mid-day; and then the soldiers began to notice him, and said one to another that Socrates had been standing there in a brown study from sunrise. Thereafter some of the Ionians about the evening, after supper, took their quilts and carpets out, for it was then mild summer weather, and, shaking them on the ground, slept in the open air, keeping an eye at the same time on Socrates to see whether he would remain all night standing in that reverie; and when they awoke in the morning with the sun, lo! Socrates was standing in the same spot; and, after saying a prayer to the sun, shortly retired. So much for his contemplative oddities; but it is only fair that I should tell you how he was as good a soldier as a sophist, and could achieve no less notable things with his hand than with his head. For when the battle took place, for my conduct in which the generals gave me such honourable marks of distinction, I, who knew the real state of the case, insisted that if any man had distinguished himself in the fight it was Socrates, to whom on that occasion I should willingly resign the intended laurels. But though this was quite true, the judges were inclined to favour me; and Socrates came forward and asserted with the greatest emphasis that my claims were superior to his; and so I carried off the reward of valour which none but he could with perfect justice claim. Then again when we retreated from Delium, after the defeat I was riding off on horseback, while Socrates and Laches followed, as hoplites, on foot, and coming up to them I cried, Fear not, good friends, I will keep alongside of you and defend you from the pursuit. On that occasion I admired even more than at Potidæa the conduct of this man; for while both were in danger of being overtaken it was manifest that Socrates during the whole retreat displayed far more coolness than Laches, who was by profession a soldier. ... Instead of hurry and trepidation we saw in him only the large full eye that with wise wariness turned to this side and to that in a fashion that seemed to say to all comers that they would find a steady nerve if they came within sword’s length of him. And thus he got out of the rush safely; for so I have always observed that in a retreat the men who are most afraid always fare the worst. And many other things there are I might relate, which would show clearly what a strange and truly admirable creature this Socrates is. Individual persons, behaving in individual cases as excellently as Socrates, it might be easy to point out; but such a compound, a thing in the shape of a man so utterly unlike any other man, you will find nowhere, either among famous ancients op illustrious moderns. One might make an adequate portraiture of Achilles, or Brasidas, of Pericles, or Nestor, or Antenor, and other famous characters; but such a unique mortal as this son of Sophroniscus no man can describe, unless, indeed, he chooses to steal my simile, and say that he is a Silenus superficially, both in his appearance and in his talk, but to those who look deeper his soul is a shrine of most excellent, beautiful, and worshipful divinities.”

This passage will make it plain that Socrates was no mere idle speculator or subtle talker, such as might be found in ancient Athens or in any modern German university by scores—but a practical man, and an effective citizen of prominent merit. But if he showed courage in the field of battle not inferior to the stoutest and coolest professional soldier, he displayed a civic virtue on other occasions, which only the fewest on all occasions have been able to exhibit. This virtue was moral courage; a quality which, when exercised in critical circumstances, raises a man high above the average of his kind, whereas with mere physical courage he is only a more cool and calculating rival of dogs and cocks and tigers, and other ferine combatants. On that memorable occasion, when the whole of Athens was fretted into a fever-fit of indignation on account of the neglect of the dead and dying slain by the victors at Arginusæ (B.C. 406), and in the torrent of what appeared to them most righteous wrath, were eager to overbear all the customary forms of fair judicial trial, Socrates happened to be serving as one of the senators whose duty it was to put the question to the assembly of the people in the case of great public trials; and, a motion having been made that the generals who were guilty of the alleged neglect of pious duty should be condemned to drink the hemlock, and have their property confiscated, it fell to the senators to perform the preparatory step in the prosecution. But as the proceedings in the case had been dictated by violent excitement, and were decidedly illegal, Socrates refused, in the face of violent popular clamour, to have anything to do with the matter, and lifted up his single protest—one amongst fifty—against violating the sacred forms of law at the dictation of an excited populace. On this, as on other similar occasions when he came into collision with the public authorities, he maintained a truly apostolic bearing, using in almost identical terms the language of the apostles Peter and John, when they were forbidden to preach by the Sanhedrim: “Whether it be right in the sight of the gods to hearken unto you rather than to the gods, judge ye; but as for me, I have sworn to obey the laws, and I cannot forswear myself.”

With all this faithfulness, however, in the public service, Socrates was very far from wishing to be what we call a public man; on the contrary, he kept himself systematically out of places which were eagerly coveted by less able men, and refused to have anything to do with the party politics of the day. This withdrawal from the service of the State, to the majority of Greeks, with whom the State was everything, could not but appear strange, and tend to increase their prejudice against philosophy and philosophers. But Socrates acted here, as in all other matters, with admirable good sense; he felt that to be a politician and a preacher of righteousness was to combine two vocations practically incompatible; for the popular measure which it might serve the immediate need of the political man to advocate it might not seldom be the first duty of the moralist to condemn. Besides, if he took office with men who habitually acted on principles of which he could not but disapprove, he would be forced to waste his strength in a fruitless opposition to measures which he could not prevent; and in this way it came to pass that, while he utterly disapproved, in the general case, of a good citizen, whether from the love of selfish ease, or from false modesty, or from moral cowardice, refusing to take part in public life, in his own particular work he felt that political activity would be a hindrance, and that it was his duty to abstain.

In these few paragraphs are summed up all that from indisputable authority we know of the personal history of the greatest of heathen preachers. The circumstances connected with his death are too closely interwoven with the character of his teaching to be intelligible here. We shall therefore enter now directly into a short exposition of his ethical teaching; after which we shall be in a condition to consider with an intelligent astonishment how it came to pass that the preacher of the noblest doctrine that Athens ever heard, before the preaching of Paul on the Hill of Mars, after living in high repute and popularity for seventy years, should at last have been made to quit the scene of his moral triumphs, publicly branded with the stigma which was wont to be attached to the lowest of malefactors and the vilest of traitors.

The two first questions to be asked with regard to any great moral or political reformer are—What had he to reform? and then, In the work of reform who were his antagonists? The first of these questions is answered intelligibly and plainly enough in the current knowledge of every schoolboy, that Socrates brought down philosophy from heaven to earth, or, as Cicero has it more fully in the Tusculan questions, “Socrates primus philosophiam devocavit e cœlo, et in urbibus collocavit, et in domos etiam introduxit, et coegit de vitâ et moribus, rebusque bonis et mails quœrere.” Now there cannot be any doubt that, both relatively to the time and place where he taught, and absolutely for all times and all places, Socrates by this step did one of the highest services to human progress. By a natural vice of the human imagination we are led to seek in the misty distance for some pleasant excitement to thought, while neglecting the direct lessons of familiar wisdom from things under our eyes, which appear contemptible only because they are common. We attempt ambitiously to measure the remote movement of the spheres, and to note their imagined music, before we have brought any order or harmony into the daily course of our own lives; we climb all the highest mountains in Europe for a fine prospect, when there is likely a much better one to be enjoyed not five miles from our own door. In obedience to this tendency of the human mind the early philosophy of Greece was occupied principally (not altogether certainly, for Pythagoras was a great moralist) with cosmical and metaphysical speculations which amused the fancy and raised interesting and puzzling problems for thought, without any valuable practical result. When Thales, for one, said that the first principle of all things was water, he enunciated a great truth; it is true that wherever there is life there must be humidity; with dryness dwells only dust and death and frost. But this was a truth leading to no applications; it could neither purify the wells nor improve the wines; no man would be the better in his body or his soul for formulating a cosmical generality of this kind. And if Heraclitus, the sombre sage of Ephesus, advanced a step further in a true generalization, when he said that fire or heat is the fundamental force which makes water possible, as modern chemistry has amply demonstrated, this doctrine did not advance human nature one step either towards outward comfort or inward satisfaction. And of what avail was it to tell men, as he did, that “all things are in a perpetual flux,” if he did not teach them how to regulate that flux in the flow of their own lives, and to prevent the tidal currents of their soul from getting into a plash and jabble of conflicting waters in the navigation of which no seamancraft could avail against miserable shipwreck? More useless still was it to assert, as Anaxagoras is reported to have done, that the sun is a large mass of glowing stone or metal, so many times bigger than the earth—a proposition which, if it were true, would not teach a poor cowering savage to kindle a stick fire, nor make one olive-tree brighter with blossoms that promised a purer and a richer oil; while, if it were not true, then the whole of your lofty heliacal philosophy is only a blaze of lies. The whole history of modern science, indeed, before the establishment of the close and cautious method of experiment introduced by Bacon, shows that all physical inquiry starting from unproved assumptions, and ending in sweeping speculations, is only a sublime sort of idleness, and a procreation of cloud-phantoms. Socrates therefore acted wisely for his own time and place in saying to a people fond of curious subtlety and unfruitful speculation. Let us have done with this lofty-sounding but essentially hollow talk about sun and moon and stars, and let us know something certain, and do something useful. This we shall achieve if we keep within our own lower sphere, and attend to our own work as men; let us order our houses well in the first place, and after that concern ourselves with the order of the universe; if, indeed, this does not rather belong to the gods, who may safely be left to do their cosmical work quietly, without any Anaxagoras or Archelaus to tempt with adventurous guesses the principles of their administration. Such was the thoroughly practical, and, if you will, thoroughly utilitarian tone which, taught by Xenophon, we justly view as the starting-point of the Socratic philosophy. And there can be no doubt man is so essentially a practical animal, that if even the accurate and curiously verified physical science of these latter days were as destitute of social applications and as barren of practical results as Greek science was in the days of Socrates, nine hundred and ninety-nine persons of those who now delight to dabble in chemistry and geology would leave these interesting sciences to the few men of a purely speculative character with whom mere knowledge is loved for itself. But when by geology we are enabled to unearth coals and gold, and know where to sink wells much more certainly than by the mediæval magic of the divining-rod; and when by chemistry we improve our stores, bleach our clothes, purify our infected chambers, and dye our cloth with hues of which even the most skilful of the lichen-gatherers in the Highland glens never dreamt—then, to use a bookseller’s phrase, you are sure to interest a large public. But there is another view of the case, which places the Socratic philosopher on a much more lofty and honourable pedestal. For notwithstanding all the surprising discoveries and brilliant achievements of modern physical science, it must still remain true that

“The proper study of mankind is man,”

and that no kind of knowledge ever can surpass either in interest or importance the knowledge of man as a social being, as the member of a Family, of a Church, and of a State. The depreciation of moral science which we have lately heard from Mr. Buckle and other members of that school is a transitional phenomenon arising out of the one-sided culture of the understanding, and a defective emotional, volitional, and imaginative organization. If new discoveries are not every day trumpeted in the domain of moral philosophy, it is just because this science, like Euclid, is too certain, too fundamental, and too indispensable to have been left to the happy chance of being found out after the lapse of long centuries. Morals are as necessary to the acting man as the sun’s light to the growing plant; they are not discovered, because they always have been and always must be; and the only great result that we have to look for then in them is that they shall be more universally recognised, more scientifically handled, and more practically applied. Socrates therefore was right, not only for Greece in the fifth century before Christ, but for England at the present moment, and for all times and places, when he proclaimed on the house-tops that the first and most necessary wisdom for all men is not to measure the stars, or to weigh the dust, or to analyse the air, but, according to the old Delphic sentence, to know themselves, and to realize in all the breadth and depth of its significance what it is to be a man, and not a pig or a god. And in attaining this knowledge, while he would certainly find that, though a stable physical platform to stand on and a healthy physical atmosphere to breathe are necessary for the production of a normal humanity, yet in general the measure of a man’s manhood is to be taken not so much from what he attaches to himself from without as from what he brings with him from within.

“The kingdom of heaven is within you” is a pregnant Socratic maxim as well as a profound evangelic text, and, in reference to our present subject, simply means that, while the most brilliant discoveries of physical science only minister to our comforts, our conveniences, and our furnishings, moral science alone can teach us to be men; for we are men by what we are, not by what we have. Gas-pipes, and water-pipes, spinning-jennies, steamboats, steam-coaches, submarine telegraphs, photographs, oleographs, oxyhydrogen, blowpipes, and the thousand and one devices for using and controlling nature which we owe to advanced physical science, may adorn and improve life in many ways, may multiply production of all kinds infinitely, and facilitate the diffusion of intellectual as well as material benefits; but they have no originating power in what is highest; they can create neither thought nor character; they are the most useful of ministers, but the most unmeaning of masters. And there can be little doubt that, if Socrates were to rise from the grave at the present moment, while, with his, strong common sense and keen eye for the practical, he would joyfully recognise all the wonderful material progress of which England and America make their boast, he would not the less feel himself constrained to utter an emphatic warning against the danger of estimating our national grandeur by the visible pomp of gigantic machinery and complex apparatus rather than by the invisible power of noble purpose and lofty design.

Such was the attitude of Socrates to the great teachers who since Thales downwards had preceded him in leading the intellectual advance of the most intellectual people of the ancient world. He stood forward as a teacher of moral science, as a preacher and philosophical missionary also; for in morals, the separation of theory from practice is an inconsistency of which only a feeble and imperfect nature is capable. Who, then, and of what quality, were his antagonists in the great regenerative work which he undertook? Not so much the physical philosophers, who might still pursue their researches or pamper their imaginations in their own speculative corners without disturbing the busy world, except in so far as they now and then might come into collision with theological orthodoxy, but the great untrained mass of the people themselves, and the pretentious array of a class of men who put themselves forward as their instructors,—the famous Sophists. The word Sophists signifies professors of wisdom, in which sense Lucian calls our Saviour τὸν ἀνεσκολοπισμένον ἐκεῖνον σοφιστήν—that crucified Sophist—because He came forward as a public instructor professing to teach men wisdom. But as wisdom is a vague word (in fact σοφός in Greek signifies clever, and even cunning as often as wise), we must consult the circumstances of time and place to know what it exactly meant in any particular instance. The generation immediately preceding Socrates, when the Sophists first became prominent, was the era of the great Persian wars, and of the notable uprising of national spirit and of popular power which that memorable struggle called forth. How fiercely the strife between the old aristocratic and the new democratic element in Greek society had been raging in the immediately preceding epoch, the poems of Theognis may serve sufficiently to indicate; and now that by the battle of Salamis the political importance of the middle and sub-middle classes had been blazoned forth before universal Greece in glowing characters, the democracy in great commercial cities like Athens at once started into an attitude of hitherto unsuspected significance. New aspirations had been created, new pretensions were put forth, and new guides were required for a large class of people who felt themselves as it were suddenly shooting up from pupilage into majority. Now what guides had a people, circumstanced as the Athenians then, were, to look to for direction? The Church in those days—if we may call it a Church—was not a teaching body; its moral efficacy was exercised through sacred ceremonial and pious hymns; its intellectual agency was almost null. And though gymnastics and music, including a certain amount of the most popular literary culture, were common, there were no institutions like our Universities, for the severe and systematic discipline of the thinking faculties. A cry went up from the heart of the people for prophets to enlighten them; but there were no schools of the prophets. This state of things was the natural soil from which a class of self-constituted popular teachers would grow up; and these teachers were the Sophists. And if we ask further in detail what they taught, the answer will be furnished from the same sources that explain their existence. As the democracy brought them into existence, the demand of the democracy would be the measure of the kind and quality of the article which they were expected to supply; and the article which a democracy demands for the use of its public spokesmen is always the same,—a certain practical knowledge and shrewdness in the conduct of affairs, a certain ready sympathy with, popular prejudices and passions, a certain superficial dexterity in argument, and above all, a fluent and effective style of popular oratory. To supply these wants the acceptable teachers of the people would require to profess a knowledge of the great leading principles of law, a familiarity with political forms and the best methods of controlling masses of men into habits or fits of co-operation, a practical command of logic, so as to be able to turn the point of an argument, or entangle in a net of subtleties an inexperienced jury, and, as the crowning accomplishment, a faculty of speech, alert and unscrupulous, which might never lack a shift to give plausibility to a bad case, and should ever be ready to confound, overwhelm, and dazzle where it was hopeless to refute. Now it is easy to perceive that the lessons delivered by the professors of this wisdom, however acceptable to clever and ambitious young gentlemen eager to enter upon the arena of public life, could not, in the nature of the case, be conceived in any very exalted tone of morals or be framed so as to inculcate the formation of any strictly honourable rules of conduct. The Sophists were mere tradesmen; they were paid for the furnishing of a certain article, and they had to supply that article, of the quality and in the way and manner which might be most agreeable to those on whose patronage they depended. They were therefore, as Socrates constantly pointed out, the slaves of the parties by whom they were paid; and if what their employers wanted was the show of wisdom rather than the substance, a ready command of words and arguments in preference to an earnest and severe search after truth, it was not to be expected that the majority of them would give themselves much concern to inculcate a severer wisdom. Tradesmen are seldom found acting upon principles which have a direct tendency to frighten customers from their shops. Not that there was anything necessarily bad or immoral in the profession or teaching of a Sophist; some of them, evidently, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, even on the witness of their great adversary Plato, were very proper and respectable gentlemen; few of them, perhaps, grossly immoral; and with those of them who, like Gorgias of Leontium, confined themselves strictly to the teaching of the rules of pure rhetoric and elocution, no fault could justly be found any more than with Quinctilian among the later Romans, or Principal Campbell of Aberdeen among ourselves. But it is plain, from the very nature of the case, that the Sophists, so far as they went a step beyond the province of strict rhetoric, were placed in a position which rendered their moral and philosophical teaching a matter of just concern to all who were interested in the education of the youth of Athens, and in the character of her public men. Besides, among an impressible and excitable people like the Athenians, fond of display, and ambitious of popularity, the mere methodized art of talking, apart from any solid knowledge, and without any high moral inspiration, was a very dangerous engine to put into the hand of ambitious young politicians. And the fact unquestionably is, according to the concurrent testimony of Xenophon, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle,—in fact, of all antiquity,—that these public teachers generally did dispense very shallow and often very dangerous doctrine. They were the natural birth of an age of movement and innovation; and in such an age, along with much that may operate as a healthy stimulant to progressive thought, there is always present a drastic admixture of the merely analytic, sceptical, and destructive element, a negative force, strong to impugn the validity of ancient foundations, but weak to establish anything equally stable and effective in their place. By the negative and sceptical teachings of these men, Socrates found the youth of Athens shaken from their old moorings, and tossing about amid seas of perplexing doubt on the one hand, and unprincipled libertinism on the other. Every great principle of social order and human right that formerly had been received from venerated tradition, and believed by the co-operation of a healthy instinct with a hoary authority, was now denied; and the field was waiting for the appearance of a great constructive prophet, who should bring people back through steps of scientific reasoning to a living faith in those maxims of immutable morality which they had originally inherited with the blood from their fathers’ veins and the milk from their mothers’ breasts. Such a great prophet now appeared, and his name was Socrates.^[26.1]