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

by John Stuart Blackie

Here Achilles, every one feels, is speaking like a man; and, though all truth is not always everywhere to be proclaimed, yet on great occasions, where to strike the just mean is difficult, he who in an impulse of fearless fervour vents a little too much truth, is always more admired than the man who from a surcharge of cautious reticence speaks too little. For a lie, in fact, as Plato says in the Republic, is a thing naturally hateful both to gods and men; nor indeed could it be otherwise; for what is all nature but a manifestation in visible forms of a grand army of invisible forces? and an untruthful manifestation is no manifestation at all, but rather a concealment, as if a man should use words to say the very contrary of what he means, which words, certainly, whatever effect they might have, could not possibly be any exhibition of his real nature. It is plain therefore that a lie is on every occasion a contradiction to the essential truthfulness, and an obstacle thrown in the way to the direct purpose, of nature; and whenever lies are told, it will be found that they proceed either from a fundamental feebleness, that is, an inherent lack of assertive and demonstrative force, or from fear, that is, a comparative feebleness in respect of some external threatening force, or finally from a systematic perversion or inversion of nature in individual cases or unfavourable circumstances, which operate as an obstruction to the free expression of the essential truthfulness of things. In this way individuals whose social sympathies have been frosted in early life, may grow up into a monstrous incarnation of selfishness, living by the practice of systematic falsity, of which we have examples enough in the professional swindlers of whose achievements almost every newspaper contains some record; and whole classes of men, as slaves and helots, kept in a state of unnatural bondage and subjection, may learn, or rather must learn, to practise lies as their only safety from injustice. Every slave is naturally a liar; for his nature is a false nature, and has grown up into a contradiction to all nature, as trees by forceful artifice are made to grow downwards seeking the earth, instead of upwards to find the sun. And we may say generally, that ninety-nine out of every hundred lies that are told in society are lies of cowardice; lies of gigantic impudence and unblushing selfishness, like the lies of Alexander the false prophet in the second century, and other gross impostors, being comparatively few; though of course, when they do occur, they excite more attention and figure more largely in the newspapers. And from these considerations we see plainly how it is that the world places such a high value on the virtue of courage; for courage arises mainly from the possession of that amount of physical or moral energy which enables a man truthfully and emphatically in a real world to assert himself as an effective reality; and in fact there is no character that in the general judgment of mankind, and in a special degree to the British feeling, appears more contemptible than the man who, on the appearance of any petty danger, or the prospective emergence of a possible difficulty, forthwith sneaks out of his position, gives the open lie to his own professions, and the cold shoulder to his best friend. So deep-rooted and so wide-spread, so woven into the living fibres of the very heart of things, is the virtue of truth and truthfulness in nature and life, which again, as we have said, is the mere utterance of reason; the necessary utterance consequently of an essentially reasonable being, and not at all the artificial product of a selfish compact or calculation of any kind, as Hobbes and the other advocates of selfism, more or less modified, affirm. We speak the truth therefore, and we are bound to keep our promise, not because experience proves that society could not exist for a single day under the pervading influence of all sorts of falsehood, nor again because it can be proved by a formal induction that to speak the truth, as a general rule, is the best way to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number—though there can be no harm in a man fortifying his virtue by these very true and very philanthropic considerations, if he chooses,—but the root of the matter lies deeper and more near to the heart of the individual man, springing, as we have said, directly out of the essential truthfulness and reasonableness of nature, according to the prime postulate not of the philosophy of Socrates only, but of Plato and Aristotle also, and all the great teachers of practical wisdom amongst the Greeks.

It does not seem necessary, after what has been said, to expatiate largely on the obvious deduction of the other cardinal virtues from the Socratic principle of Reason or Truth. Wherever we turn our eyes it will require little perspicacity to perceive that to do the right is on all occasions to do the true thing,—as an apostle has it, ποιεῖν τὴν ἀλήθειαν, to do the truth; or, in the words of a great son of the Porch, not to demand that things shall be as we wish, but to wish that things shall be as they are. The great virtue of Justice, for instance, which, in its widest and well-known Platonic sense, signifies giving to every person and thing that which properly belongs to it, is nothing but the assertion in act of the truth in reference to their concurrent or adverse claims; for how can a man realize in any relation of life the beautiful Stoical definition of Right given in the Institutes of Justinian—Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuendi—how can a man assign to each person that which is properly his, unless he knows truly the nature and natural claims not of that person only, but of all persons with whom his claim may come into competition? It is plain therefore that Justice is merely knowledge or reason;^[42.1] and as the claims of different parties in reference to the same thing are often very various and complicated, hence it is that to be a just judge a man does not require to have a benevolent nature—though in cases of equity the kindly feelings also must come into play—so much as to have an intellect of large range, of firm grasp, and of subtle power of discrimination. And if anybody, with special reference to legal decisions, chooses to ask not only what qualities constitute a good judge, but on what principles the idea of property is founded—how he is to know the exact boundaries of meum and tuum in particular cases,—the answer here also, on the Socratic postulate of truth and natural reasonableness, will be obvious enough. That is mine by the law of nature and truth and God, which is either a part of me, or the natural and necessary, fruit and product of that vital energy which I call me; or, more simply, the product of my labour and the issues of my activity are mine; and no man can have a right or a claim consistent with the truth of things, to appropriate the fruit of that growth whereof the root and the stem and the living branches and the vital juices are a necessary part of me.^[43.1] But it is not mere legal justice and a true apportionment of the Mine and Thine that flow as a plain corollary from the obligation of acting the truth, but the wider equities of Christian charity and toleration; yea, and the very constraining power of the Golden Rule itself is evolved unmistakeably from the same principle. For what is it that from the time of Greeks and Romans down to very recent days has tainted the whole laws of European countries with such harsh declarations of intolerant dogmatism and merciless persecution? Simply the fact that men, from defect of sympathy and defect of knowledge, had never been trained to realize the truth of things as between the natural right of a majority to profess a national creed, and the equally natural right of a minority to entertain doubts and to state objections as to the whole or any part of such a creed. Intolerance proceeds either from narrowness of view or from deficiency of sympathy; and in either case it blinds the bigot to the fact that the right which he has to his own opinions never can confer on him any right to dictate opinions to others; the moment he does that he invades a dominion that does not belong to him, and transgresses the truth of Nature; nor will this transgression be less flagrant when it is made by ten millions against one man, than if it were made by one against ten millions. In the same way all those superficial and inadequate, too often also harsh and severe, judgments which we see and read daily amongst men in the common converse of life, are the result of a habitual carelessness as to truth, of which habit only too efficiently conceals the grossness. And under the bitter inspiration of ecclesiastical and political warfare, men, when speaking of their adversaries, will not only lightly excuse themselves from using any special care in testing the facts which it suits their purpose to parade, but they will even consciously present a garbled statement constructed upon the principle of pushing into prominence everything that is bad, and keeping out of view everything that is good in the character of the person whom it may suit the use of the moment to vilify. And in this way even the sacred-sounding columns of an evangelical newspaper may become a systematic manufactory of lies, against which most gross abuse of the truth of Nature the son of Sophroniscus, if he were to appear on earth now, would assuredly lift his protest with tenfold more emphasis than he ever did against the sham knowledge of the most superficial of the Sophists.

One or two short paragraphs will enable us now to say all that remains to be said on the great principles of the Socratic philosophy of Ethics.

In the first place, nothing that has been said here in endeavouring shortly to epitomize the leading idea of Socrates with regard to practical reason and acted truth, assumes to settle definitively that much-vexed question, How far is a man at any time, from any motive, and for any object, entitled to tell or to enact a lie? In a dialogue of considerable length, which Socrates holds with Euthydemus, a raw and conceited young Athenian, who, because he possessed a great library, imagined himself to possess much wisdom, the philosopher is represented as puzzling the young gentleman with such questions as the following: Whether is it lawful for a general, with the view of raising the drooping spirits of his soldiers, to give out an unfounded report that friends are coming up to help them? Whether, if a father, whose sick son refuses to take a necessary medicine, shall disguise this medicine under the aspect of food, and by the ministry of this drugged aliment restore his son to health, this act of deceit is right or wrong? Or again, if a friend whom we love is given to fits of melancholy, and may be apt in an evil moment to meditate suicide, is it an act of culpable theft privately to purloin or forcibly to abstract the sword or other lethal instrument of which he may avail himself to commit the fatal act? In such and similar cases, though the point is rather raised than settled, Socrates plainly seems to imply that lies are both natural and beneficial, and therefore ought to be tolerated. And in truth, though the extreme dogmatism of certain of the Church Fathers lays down the doctrine that the obligation of truth-speaking and truth-doing is absolute, and admits of no exception, yet the common sense of mankind, and the universal practice of saints and sinners in all ages and in all countries, goes along with Socrates (and we may add Plato here, Rep. ii.) in the assertion, that where violence is done to Nature in one way by an unnatural overwhelming force, such as occurs in war, then Nature defends herself by a violence to her habitual principles in an opposite direction; that is to say, it will be justifiable, on certain occasions, and within certain limits, to defeat force by fraud; or, as Lysander the captor of Athens used to say, where a man may not show the lion’s hide he must wrap himself in the fox’s skin. But the very suspicion with which the general moral sentiment guards the extension of this motive, which in extreme cases it allows, shows that all deviation from truth is looked upon as the result of a force upon Nature; and, if it may in certain cases be excused or even imperatively commanded, it never brings with it the natural aliment of our better nature, which breathes freely only in the wide and pure atmosphere of truth. The general obligation of truth, therefore, according to the doctrine of Socrates, is not at all weakened by the occasional necessity of deceit; for while the one rests firmly on the foundation of the eternal constitution of things, the other is the mere shift of the moment, the sudden dictate of an expediency, which in noble natures is half ashamed of itself when it succeeds.

Another well-known dogma of the Socratic philosophy is, that not only is Science as the product of Reason the supreme legislative authority in all questions of morals, but in point of fact also, that to know what is right is to do what is good, for no man with his eyes open will perpetrate an act which demonstrably leads to his own destruction. Of this assertion, so contrary to the universal experience of mankind, and so ably refuted by Aristotle and his school in the Nicomachean ethics, it need only be said that it is one of those paradoxes in the garb of which all philosophies are apt to clothe themselves occasionally, partly for the gratification of the teacher, who delights to push his principle to an acme, partly for the benefit of the scholar, whose attention is excited and his imagination pleased by the startling novelty of the dictum. The proposition of Socrates therefore, that knowledge is virtue, and vice not only folly but ignorance, is of the same nature with the paradox of the Stoics, that the virtuous man can have no enemy, or that pain is no evil, or with the precept in the Gospel, which no man ever thinks of obeying in the letter, that when a thief takes your cloak you should thank him, like a benign Quaker, for his kindness, and give him your coat into the bargain. But it is possible to defend the paradox of Socrates taken strictly, by saying that when a man does a thing which demonstrably leads to his ruin, he either never had this demonstration vividly present to his mind, or, at the moment when the self-destroying act was committed, his knowing faculty was blinded and sopited, dosed and drugged by his passions, and so; at the time when his knowledge was most required, he was virtually ignorant of what he was about. But there is little profit in puzzling about such paradoxical maxims, as, like Berkeley’s theory about the non-existence of matter, they are constantly open to be corrected by common-sense and the daily experience of life. A Calvinist preaches Fatalism in the pulpit to-day, but to-morrow flogs his slave or his son for abusing his free-will. So a smart twitch of the toothache answers the Stoics when they assert that pain is no evil: and the lives of Solomon, King David, and Robert Burns prove that great men in all ages have, in their cool moments, been as nobly sagacious as Socrates, but not therefore at all moments as consistently virtuous.

The last point which demands notice here is the relation which virtue bears to happiness, and to the much-bespoken utilitarianism of the most recent ethical school in this country. Now the truth with regard to this stands patent on the very face of the Socratic argument, and can escape no man who goes through the Memorabilia with ordinary sympathy. The happiness of every creature consists in the free and unhindered exercise of its characteristic function; the happiness of a horse in racing well, of a dog in nosing well, of a cat in mousing well, of a man in reasoning well, that is, in thinking and acting reasonably. For the opposite state of things to this could only exist on the supposition that the Author of Nature or the Supreme Artificer (ὁ δημιουργός, as Socrates and Plato loved to phrase it) delighted in inspiring creatures with a desire, and providing them with a machinery, to do things the direct effect of which is to make them miserable; that is to say, if the demiurge were a demon; of which demoniacal government of the world, however, happily there is no sign; for not even the most tortured victim of toothache, as Dr. Paley observes, has yet found himself warranted in drawing the conclusion that teeth in general were made for no other purpose than that people might be tormented with such excruciating pangs. Happiness, therefore, and the reasonable exercise of his faculties by a reasonable creature, are identical. No creature can deliberately desire to make itself miserable, and no rational creature can escape misery except by acting reasonably. And if, in the language of the schools, any person, from this point of view, shall call Socrates a eudæmonist,^[49.1] a eudæmonist unquestionably he was. But we must bear in mind that, while he was the warm advocate of all sorts of happiness and enjoyment, and himself at the same time a living picture of vital joy and geniality, he never allowed himself to be carried away by the perverse and perilous subtlety of a certain school of philosophers, both in ancient and modern times, who thought to do honour to the eudæmonistic principle by confounding the good with the pleasurable.^[49.2] For the distinction so broadly established in all languages between Pleasure as an affair of momentary excitement or titillation, and Good as the source of lasting and permanent enjoyment, is not to be obliterated by the arbitrary terminology of men who write ethical systems in books. According to the established use of language, from Socrates and St. Paul down to the present hour, Pleasure cannot be the good of man,—it may be the good of a brute; for as pleasure is momentary happiness, without reason, or it may be often in the teeth of reason, so the Good is reasonable and permanent happiness, accompanied, it may be, with a little momentary pain, but productive of lasting satisfaction. So much for eudæmonism. Then, as for utilitarianism, whether it be a different thing from eudæmonism, or only a different aspect of the same thing, there is nothing more certain than that Socrates was a utilitarian. The word useful (χρήσιμον or ὠφέλιμον) is constantly occurring in his conversations; utility in fact was the starting-point of his whole movement, and gives the key-note to all his discussions; for his grand objection, as we saw above, to the physical speculations of his predecessors, was that they were useless, as opposed to which the doctrine which he preached was recommended on the ground of its practical utility. Of this utilitarian principle he was indeed so fond, that, like his doctrine of virtue being founded on knowledge, he was inclined to push it too far, and certainly did run it, in some cases, to absolute falsity. This appears most strikingly in two dialogues in the Memoirs, where, in opposition to the idol-worship of mere beauty, so dear to the Greeks, he flatly lays down the counter proposition that nothing can be beautiful except in so far as it serves the purpose for which it was intended; in other words, that beauty consists in that suitability or fitness of an article to effect its purpose which makes it a useful article. But every one sees that there is a jump in the logic here, which, if Socrates had been as anxious to establish a scientific theory of beauty as he was to present rational morals, he certainly could not have made. For though every article, as the imperative condition of its existence, ought to answer the purpose for which it was made, and the article which answers this purpose best is the best article; and though beauty of structure is a something superadded, and which will always offend if it is plainly at war with the design, fitness, and utility of the structure—for which reason, as architects say, the ornamentation ought always to grow out of the construction,—it is quite a different thing to say that beauty and fitness or utility are identical. The railway companies in our day have thrown across not a few beautiful rivers and picturesque gorges the ugliest iron bridges that can be conceived; but no doubt they are as useful, and perhaps may be more permanent, than stone structures of a more elegant and graceful design. We shall therefore say that Socrates, in his remarks on the τὸ καλόν, pushed his utilitarian principles and the extreme practicality of his nature into the domain of the absurd and the false. But within his proper province of morals, one cannot see that he was led by his doctrine of utility into any speculative or practical mistake. For the word useful in itself is a word which really has no meaning; it is always only a stepping-stone to something beyond itself, and receives significance only when from some independent source the end is exhibited which the useful object subserves. When, therefore, Socrates talks about morality being identical with utility, he is not asserting a philosophical principle like the modern writers who use that term; he only means to say that a certain course of conduct founded on reason, or certain maxims deduced from reason, are useful to a man to enable him to obtain the end of his existence, that is, a certain happiness according to his opportunities and capacities. And if the advocates of the so-called utilitarian philosophy, finding the utter unmeaningness of their favourite shibboleth as a distinctive term, shall tell us that utility means something absolute (which however it can do only by interpolating into itself an altogether foreign idea), if, however, they shall say, as they are in the habit of doing, that that course of action is useful which tends to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” then here they say nothing which either Socrates or Plato or the apostle Paul, or Dr. Wollaston or Immanuel Kant or in fact any sane man, ever dreamt of contravening. In virtue of his faith in the innate sociabilities of man as opposed to the selfism of Hobbes, Socrates could not but believe that it was his duty, after having made his own life reasonable in the first place, to help other people to get out of the limbo of unreason as speedily as possible. This he says again and again in his conversations; in fact, his whole missionary exertions meant nothing else; and the philanthropic power of the missionary impulse which impelled him to seek the rational happiness of his fellow-men having once full sway in his heart, the wish for the greatest happiness of the greatest number followed as a matter of course. Every missionary estimates his success and feels his moral enjoyment increased by the number of his converts. The man who desires the happiness of his fellow-beings at all, whether as Epicurus or Plato, must desire that happiness to the greatest number of human beings that can comfortably enjoy it within certain given limits of space and time.

The next great division of our subject leads us to consider, what is by no means a matter of secondary importance, the peculiar and characteristic manner in which Socrates inculcated the lofty principles of his ethical philosophy—the so-called Socratic method of teaching and of preaching. Now, with regard to this, in the first place, what lies on the surface is that the Socratic method of inculcating the principles of morals consists in a sort of catechising or cross-questioning such as is practised by lawyers in Westminster Hall, a method which is generally considered not the most pleasant of operations even there, and which if practised now-a-days by private persons, whether in West-end saloons or in East-end parlours, would certainly be considered extremely ill-bred. And that this should be the general feeling of all classes of mankind with regard to the matter is natural enough; for the object of the operation being generally to convince the person operated on that he knows nothing about what he professes to know, and to do this by publicly entangling him in the web of his own arguments, and forcing him into a self-contradiction, it is obvious that self-esteem and love of approbation will, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, be strong enough to stir a certain degree of resentment in the breast of the sufferer. Nay, sometimes will he not feel like a poor fish cleverly hooked by an expert angler, and played about perhaps more to show the skill of the captor than from any consideration of the feelings of the captive? All this is very true; and no doubt Socrates made not a few enemies by this extremely personal method of exposing the manifold superficialities and incompetencies of the persons with whom he conversed. But, upon the whole, that he was rather a popular man, or more correctly, an extremely popular man, in Athens, during a long lifetime, notwithstanding the catastrophe of the hemlock, seems pretty plain both from Xenophon and Plato. This popularity, in the face of what certainly was a rather odious mission, arose both from the kindly sympathetic nature of the man, and from the admirable tact which the philosopher constantly displayed in dealing with those whom he submitted to the operation of his ethical probe. Though in the majority of cases he was found to end in a direct contradiction of the original position of his adversary, he always commenced by agreeing with him; and if he saw nothing absolutely to agree with in the way of argument, he took care to launch him in a good humour by praising some excellence in him or about him. Thus, in the case of Euthydemus, mentioned above as the possessor of a large library, he gives prominence to the praiseworthy ambition shown by the young man to spend his money rather on the sentences of the wise than on the vanities of external pomp and pernicious dissipation; and thus, though the young book-fancier departs at the end of the dialogue altogether shorn of his conceit, and thinking the best thing he can do hereafter to prove his learning is to hold his tongue, yet he leaves the philosopher with no rankling ill-will, but rather disposed towards him as one feels towards a kind and considerate physician who has been forced to administer to his patient a nauseous drug. And thus the mild manner of the teacher removed, in a great measure, the offence of the lesson; for it is, as an apostle says, “the wrath of man which worketh not the righteousness of God,” in most cases, not the mere speaking of the truth, if the truth be spoken in love. Let us inquire now more particularly how the cross-examination went on. Aristotle, in a well-known passage of the Metaphysics, tells us that there were two inventions to which Socrates might justly lay claim—the defining of general terms (τὸ ὁρίζεσθαι καθόλου), and inductive reasoning (ἐπακτικοὶ λόγοι). A modern instance will enable us to understand what this means. Suppose I get into an argument with any person as to whether A. or B., or any person holding certain opinions, manifesting certain feelings, and acting in a certain way, is a Christian. I say he is; my contradictor says he is not; how, then, shall we settle the difference? Following the example of Socrates, the best procedure certainly will be to ask him to define what he means by a Christian. Suppose then he answers, A Christian is a religious person who believes in the Nicene Creed, I immediately reply, The Nicene Creed was not sent forth till the year 325 after Christ; what then do you make of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Christians who lived before that? To this objection the answer of course will be that the Nicene Creed, though not set forth in express articles, did virtually exist as a part of the living faith of all true Christians. Then, if I doubt this, I say, Was Origen a Christian, was Justin Martyr a Christian? are you sure these two Fathers believed every article of that Creed? My opponent now, in all likelihood, not being profoundly versed in patristic lore, is staggered; and I proceed, we shall suppose, to cite some passages from some one of the ante-Nicene Fathers, which imply dissent from some of the articles of the orthodox symbol. He is then reduced to the dilemma of either denying that this Father was a Christian, or (as that will scarcely be allowable) widening his original definition so as to include a variety of cases which, by the narrowness of the terms, were excluded. I then go on to test the comprehensiveness of the new definition in the same way; and if I find that it contains any elements which belong to the species and not to the genus, any peculiarities say of modern Calvinism, or of mediæval Popery, that do not belong to the general term “Christianity,” I push him into a corner in the same way as before, till I bring out from his own admissions a pure and broad definition of the designation Christian, as opposed to Heathen, Jew, or any other sort of religious professor. Now the example here given was purposely chosen, to make manifest by a familiar example, what everyday experience must teach us, that the principal cause of difference of opinion amongst men is, that people start in argument with some general term, with respect to which they do not know, and have in fact never thought of seriously inquiring, what extent of ground it covers. So that when the inadequate notions with which the minds of untrained persons are possessed have to be replaced by adequate ones, the process always resolves itself into a making of definitions, and a strict scrutiny of some general term, which had hitherto passed current without special interrogation. A teacher therefore, who would be practically useful to mankind, and not merely make brilliant oratorical displays to tickle and to amuse, must before all things make it his business to see that they have clear ideas, not on matters of profound and remote speculation, but on the common currency of general terms which the necessities of social life require. Such a teacher was Socrates; and hence the logical form which his practical teaching by cross-examination, among a people passionately fond of arguing, naturally assumed. A less argumentative people than the Greeks, such as ourselves,—English and Scotch and Irish,—will often look on a Socratic dialogue in Plato, or even Xenophon, as curiously pedantic, which to the Athenians was only amusingly subtle. Even Socrates, the most practical, and, in the sense explained above, the most utilitarian of men, loved to have his little logical play out of the discussion, in a fashion which to a broad practical Briton, unaccustomed to speculation, and impatient, often incapable of grappling with a principle, would appear impertinent. So much for the Socratic hunt after definitions. As to the other point mentioned by Aristotle, that Socrates deserves praise as the inventor of inductive reasoning, there is really no cause for surprise in the matter. Lord Bacon was not the inventor of this method of dealing with facts; neither indeed, if we look beneath the surface, was Socrates; both induction and deduction exist in a state of constant action and reaction in every normally developed human mind; but the praise which belongs to Bacon is that of having pressed the inductive method, with strong adjurations and a special machinery, into the service of physical science; while the praise, no less important, belongs to Socrates, of having taught men four hundred years before Christ, to be as scrupulously exact in testing by experience their moral ideas, as they now are in proving by experiment their physical theories. Let us take a well-known instance of induction in physical science, and then see how, under certain obvious modifications, the same method of procedure must be adopted in the successful cultivation of the moral sciences. We know, for instance, that there exists a marvellous, almost miraculous, force pervading the universe, called Electricity; this is now one of the widest of general terms in the vocabulary of physical science, and arrived at, like all other such terms, by the carefully weighed steps of a long induction. Certain phenomena of attraction are first observed, in reference to amber, wax, and other bodies, when rubbed, free from the influence of humidity; the same phenomena are then observed in other bodies, and accompanied with the emission of sparks of light and tiny explosions; by an ingeniously contrived apparatus the force which causes these sparks and these explosions is accumulated, and the effects produced by this higher potency of the same force become of course more noticeable, and some of these experiments lead a thinking man irresistibly to the notion that what we call electricity, as elicited by us from our electrical machines, is only a sort of mimic thunder and lightning, as crackers with which boys play on the Queen’s birthday are in principle the same as big cannons and Lancaster guns. This idea, once entertained, is tested in many different ways, till the conclusion is certainly arrived at that electricity and lightning are identical. By and by other forces, such as magnetism and galvanism, being considered more carefully, and compared with the electricity of the electric machines, are found to possess many points of resemblance, and are in time concluded to be fundamentally the same; and now our general term electricity is widened into a cosmical power, which if we fail to define, the failure will arise not from building on partial facts, but because our generalization has clearly mounted so high into the domain of the Infinite that the finite understanding staggers, and perhaps is doomed for ever to stagger, at the attempt to hold it in firm grasp. Thus the progress of physical science is a continual process of the giving up of inadequate general terms, and supplying them by something either exactly adequate, or approximating to adequacy, as high as the human intellect can hope to ascend. Now to this process the discovery of the true significance of general terms in morals forms an exact parallel. Suppose, for instance, a young Englishman emerging out of the merely physical delights of cricket and boat-racing, and beginning to occupy himself seriously with some of the great social questions of the day. To him morality first presents itself, not in the form of logical analysis, the characteristic engine of Socrates, but in the concrete form of the Christian Church. He starts therefore with an idea of ethical science as a part of Christianity, and of Christianity as he knows it, formulated in certain articles of belief, represented dramatically in certain liturgic services, and held together by a certain hierarchy of office-bearers. In this condition it is not to be expected that the idea either of Morals, or of Church, or of Religion, or of Christianity, will exist in his mind so purified from adventitious and accidental matter as to stand the test of strict reasoning. What then is to be done with him, if he is not to remain contented with that purely local conception of moral and religious truth which belongs to him like his cylindrical hat or his swallow-tail coat, as an affair of accepted tradition rather than of reasoned truth? Plainly there is only one course: you must convince him of the insufficiency of his premises for warranting any general conclusion at all; and, then leading him through the whole moral and ecclesiastical experience of the Christian Church, open to him a wide and a sure field of observation from which legitimate inductions with regard to moral and religious ideas comprised in the term Christianity can be made. So that the cross-examination, of which we gave a specimen above, is in reality a process of induction as much as the processes in physical science by which electricity is identified with galvanism, and both with magnetism. But if the ethical idea is to emerge perfectly pure from such an investigation, our young Episcopal philosopher will require to broaden his conception of morality and religion yet further, so as to embrace moral phenomena of an important kind beyond the pale of the term Christianity altogether. No doubt Christianity is to us, and has been to the most favoured races of humanity, for nearly two thousand years, the grand bearer of the deepest moral truth; but the religion of Christ does not exist everywhere,—did not exist certainly when a Pythagoras, a Socrates, and a Plato founded their great schools of moral teaching and training among the Greeks; and thus to bring out the ethical idea strong in the internal identity of all its various Avatars, our young inquirer must launch out into the wide, and in a great measure hitherto unexplored, sea of comparative ethics and comparative theology. A type of this sort of procedure will be found in the late admirable Baron Bunsen’s book entitled God in History, a work with regard to which even those who do not accept all its conclusions must admit that it is constructed upon the only scheme on which a large and adequate philosophy of ethical and religious truth can be raised.

We have said that moral investigation, when conducted on the Socratic method, is as truly inductive as any process in physical science. But there is a distinction, and that a very vital one. In moral inquiries we can often start directly with deduction from some inward principle, implanted in the human mind by the Author of our being. The love of truth, for instance, as above set forth, is one of those principles; our general term in this case we bring with us; and any induction which we may require is not to prove the existence of such an instinct, but to verify, to extend, and to correct our notions of its applicability, or perhaps merely to confirm us in our original sacred faith, by showing in detail that society never has existed, and in fact never can exist, without that regard to truth in all dealings of man with man, the necessity of which we had asserted originally from the constraining power of the inborn moral imperative decree. And if our moral principles always existed in a vivid and healthy state, there might be little need for the slow retrogressive process of induction in ethics; but as these instincts are peculiarly liable to be enfeebled, curtailed, and perverted by individual neglect, as well as social constraint, the corrective and cathartic process by induction on a more extended basis becomes necessary for the worst men, and not without utility for the best. At the same time, of the noblest minds in the moral world it may always be asserted that their whole life has been rather a practical deduction from lofty truths given by original inspiration from the Divine Source of all vitality than the product of any induction from an acquired survey of facts. The work of a great moral teacher or reformer, such as the apostle Paul or Thomas Chalmers, is in fact a creation as much as the poems of a Shakespeare or the paintings of a Raphael; and has a manifest affinity also with the grand deductions of mathematical genius, which, from the postulated form of a triangle, a circle, or other figure of which the conditions are dictated by the mind, not gathered from observation, evolves an array of the most curious relations, of which no one had hitherto dreamed, and which are each one as necessary and absolutely true as the postulate from which they came forth. Exactly so with Morals. An admitted postulate—say of truthfulness, of love, or whatever inborn original principle you please,—may be worked out as the world advances into ever new and more noble practical applications, which shall be as unconditionally right as the original diving force out of which they grew. And as the propositions of Euclid can be proved a posteriori by empirical measurements, though they do not depend on these measurements, in the same way the great truths of ethical science may be proved from induction, though in the case at least of great moral teachers they are the direct and pure products of an inspired deduction. And both with respect to mathematical and moral truths, it may be said that, while the a posteriori inductive method forces assent upon the lowest class of minds, the a priori or deductive method is the spontaneous evolution of the highest class of minds, whose dictates are sympathetically accepted by all whom Divine grace may have disposed to be touched by the noble contagion.

So much for the logical element in the Socratic method. But as his logic was merely the dexterous weapon of a great moral apostleship, we must look on him also from this aspect, and contrast the method of his teaching with that of a modern sermon. A sermon is either the most rousing and effective, or the tamest and most ineffective of all moral addresses, according to the character and power of the man who delivers it. If the speaker has a real vocation to address his fellow-men on moral subjects, and if he does not deal in vague and trivial generalities, sounding very pious on Sunday, but having no distinct and recognisable reference to the secular business of Monday, then a good sermon may be compared to a discharge of moral electricity, which will arouse many sleepers, or to the setting up of a sure finger-post, which will direct many wanderers. But if he is tame, and a mere professional dealer in certain routine articles of piety, which religious people wear as a sort of amulet rather than use as a weapon—in this case no species of moral address can be looked on as less effective; for it neither rouses nor guides, and instead of ending in any work in the life of the hearer (and all moral teaching that does not end in a work is vanity), the hearing of it is rather looked on as a sort of work in itself, which, however short, is generally considered as having been a little too long when it is ended. Now, as distinguished from both these styles of pulpit address, the Socratic sermon was addressed to the individual man, and could not fail to produce a distinct and tangible effect; for it ended always by saying to the hearer, as Nathan said to David, Thou art the man! There was no escape from the appeal; it might not hover about the ears with a pious hum for half an hour, and then be forgotten; it must either be indignantly rejected, or graciously accepted. And herein precisely lay the great distinction between Socrates and the Sophists, a distinction which Mr. Grote has so perversely done his best to obliterate. Socrates was a preacher; the Sophists were not. Socrates was a patriot fighting and dying earnestly for a great cause; the Sophists were cunning masters of fence, who had no cause to fight for except themselves and their own pockets. But Socrates, though in a very different way, was as earnestly a moral reformer in Athens as Calvin was in Geneva. When the stern Genevese disciplinarian set himself with all the resolution of a manly nature to put some checks and hindrances in the way of the loose practices of the “Libertines” of Lake Leman, these respectable people protested strongly against the attempt, saying to the unflinching preacher, “It is your place to explain the Scriptures; what right have you to meddle with other things—to talk about morals and find fault?” And even so in Athens there were certain Libertines who used exactly the same language to Socrates. Had you been a mere talker like the other Sophists, you might have been allowed to talk; talking is a very innocent affair; but your talk is not a mere exhibition of lingual dexterity; it means something; it means perhaps danger to the State,—certainly it means danger to us; it means that we may be called to account for our deeds by any man who assumes to have a more scrupulous conscience or a more enlightened reason than ourselves; and this is what we will not tolerate.

One of the oddities of Socrates which seems to have offended the nice taste of the χαρίεντες, or men of elegant culture in Athens, was the homeliness of his style and the familiarity of his illustrations. This is particularly alluded to by Alcibiades in the humorous speech in Plato’s Banquet; from which an extract has been already made. In the peroration of that speech Alcibiades is made to say that not only the personal appearance, but the whole style and language of Socrates, had a close affinity to the Sileni and Satyrs; for instead of using elegantly turned sentences and studiously selected illustrations, like the Sophists, he was always talking about “smiths and tanners and shoemakers, and asses with pack-saddles,” and a whole host of such vulgarities, which to the hearer at first seemed to make him ridiculous; but by and by they discovered that behind all this rough Satyr’s hide of uncouth expression there lurked a truly divine meaning, and the faces of gods peeped out through the holes of the beggar’s coat. And the same language is used in Xenophon by Critias and Charicles when, in the exercise of a tyrannical authority, they called upon the philosopher to cease from his dangerous business of talking sedition to the young men. Now, any man who considers this matter will perceive that the peculiarity of style here noted lay partly in the natural character of the man, partly was the best style which he could possibly have adopted, if he really wished to do good as a moral missionary, and not merely to parade himself before men as a clever talker. The dignity of the pulpit in modern times is one of the great causes of its comparative inefficiency; it will not condescend to familiar subjects; it rejects familiar illustrations as bad taste, and the consequence too frequently is that it is not received into the confidence of every-day life, and stands apart on too lofty a pedestal to be useful. But as a sensible and acute ethical writer remarks, “if moral questions disdain to walk the streets, the philosophy of them must remain in the clouds;”^[66.1] and so Socrates is justified in his method of testing every lofty principle by a familiar example, and, like Wordsworth, the thoughtful poet of the Lakes, teaching us that philosophy is then most profound when it points out what is uncommon in common things, and that he is a wiser man who plucks a lesson from the daisy at his feet than he who wanders for it to the stars above his head.