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

by John Stuart Blackie

Another notable peculiarity of the Socratic method is, that, while in the majority of cases the discussion seems to end in unveiling the ignorance of pretenders to knowledge, and, as we express it, taking the conceit out of them, in other cases the young examinee, instead of being convicted of ignorance, is pleasantly surprised at finding that he knows more than he suspected, and goes home with the comfortable assurance that he needs not to sink his bucket into any foreign shaft, but really possesses a well of living waters in his own soul, if he will only work it faithfully, and be careful to remove obstructions. The unveiling of this hidden fountain of knowledge to the humble and thoughtful inquirer is the famous obstetric process of which Socrates humorously boasted himself a practiser. As his mother’s profession was to help nature to bring her physical births easily and happily to the light, so her son’s business was to practise intellectual obstetrics, and help people to deliver themselves of their intellectual offspring. In this method of talking there is involved the whole philosophy of the best art of teaching; even as the word education by its etymological affinities plainly indicates, in so far as it signifies to “draw out,” not to “put in.” We see here again the practical issue of that fine erotic passion for human beings, that divine rage for humanity, which was the inspiration of his life, and put into his hands the golden key to the hearts of all teachable men. While he was the most exact and scientific, he was, at the same time, the least dogmatic and egotistic of moral teachers. He did not desire so much that men should placidly submit to receive his dogmas, as that they should be trained to the grand human function of shaping out the universal divine idea, or at least some part of it, each man for himself, according to his capacity. He wished to be no more than the trencher of the moral soil, not the planter of the seed; the seed lay already in the clod, which being broken, the outward influences of sun and air and dew excited, from within the growth of an essentially divine germ.

Let it be noted under this head, in conclusion, that it was essential to the reformatory mission of Socrates that he should teach without a fee. The man who practises a trade or a profession may justly demand the wages of his labour; but to preach moral truth, to protest against public sins, and convert sinners, is no profession for which the world can be expected to pay. Those who practise remunerative trades and professions supply the immediate wants of the world, and are paid in the world’s coin; but for this payment they become the slaves of the masters who employ them, and must give the rightful value for the stipulated reward. But a prophet, or an apostle, or a teacher of moral truth in any shape, knows that he is bringing an article to the market for which there may be no demand; he knows further that, by his mere attitude as a preacher, he is assuming a superiority over his brethren which is inconsistent with the equality of position and right which the act of buying and selling supposes in the parties concerned. He must, above all things, be free in his function; and to accept money from no one is the first condition of moral independence. Of this the father of the faithful, as we read in the Book of Genesis, gave an illustrious example, when he refused to take any of the booty offered to him by the king of Sodom, “lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich.” And for the same reason manifestly, neither the Hebrew prophets nor the apostle Paul were paid for their preaching, nor indeed in the nature of things could he. Savonarola was not paid for publicly preaching against the vicious lives of the Popes; Luther was not paid for his manly protest against the prostitution of Divine grace in the sale of pardons for tinkling silver; and in the same way Socrates was not, and could not be, paid for his mission of convincing the cleverest persons in Athens of ignorance, shallowness, and all sorts of inadequacy. In fact he did not come forward as a professional teacher at all. He issued no flaming advertisements. He only said that he was a man in search of wisdom, and would be glad of any honest man’s company and co-operation in the search. The Sophists in this and in so many other respects were altogether different. They made large professions and accepted large fees.

It remains now, in order to complete our sketch, that we give some indication of the theological opinions and religious life of Socrates; then that we point shortly to his political opinions and public life; and lastly, that we attempt a just estimate of the circumstances and agencies which led to his singularly notable and noble exit from the brilliant stage where he had for so many years been the prominent performer. That Socrates because he was a moralist should have been also a theologian is not absolutely necessary; it is natural, however; so natural, indeed, that when a great popular teacher, like Confucius, though not theoretically an atheist, practically ignores religion, we cannot but accept this as a sign of some mental idiosyncrasy alike unfortunate for the teacher and the taught. For to deny a First Cause, or not to assert it decidedly, is as if a man, professing to be a botanist, should describe only the character of the flower and the fruit as what appears above ground, while either from stupidity or cross-grained perversity, he ignores the root and the seed, without which the whole beauty of the blossom and the utility of the fruit could not exist; or, to take another simile, it is as if a man should curiously describe the cylinders and the pistons and the wheels, the furnaces, the boilers, and the condensing chambers of a steam-engine, and while doing so studiously avoid mentioning the name of James Watt. One would say, in such a case, that, while the describer deserved great praise for the clearness and consistency with which he had set forth the sequence of mechanical operations that make up the engine, he had left an unsatisfactory impression on the mind, by omitting the grand fact which rendered the existence of such an engine possible, viz., a creative intellect. We should say that he was a good mechanician and an eloquent expounder of machinery, but we could not call him a philosopher; he had stopped short, in fact, at the very point where philosophy finds its thrill of peculiar delight at the vestibule of ultimate causes. To the scientific man, in the same way, who is either a speculative atheist or who studiously avoids any allusion to an original plastic Intellect as the Ultimate Cause of all things and the Primary Force of all forces, the universe is merely a vast unexplained machine, performing a closely concatenated series of unintelligible operations, tabulated under the name of Laws; and to the moralist, who is only a moralist, society is a machine of another kind, whose wheels and pulleys and bands may be curiously described, and must be kept in nice order, but of whose genesis he can give no intelligible account. It follows, therefore, that a philosophical moralist must be a theist, and that not only on speculative grounds, but from this practical consideration also, that from no source can the Moral Law derive the unity and the authority which is essential to it, so efficiently as from the all-controlling and unifying primary fact which we call God. Any other keystone contrived by ingenious wits to give consistency to the social arch is artificial; this alone is natural.^[70.1] Accordingly we find that from the days of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, through Solon and Pythagoras to Socrates and Plato; from Socrates and Plato through the Apostles and Evangelists and the grand army of Church Fathers, to Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the other great Reformers of the sixteenth century; from the great Churchmen of the Reformation through Leibnitz and Spinoza, and Locke and Butler and Kant, down to the very recent and low platform of Paley and Austin, the foundation of Morals has been laid in Theology. And of all great theological moralists there is none who is at once more theoretically distinct and more practically consistent than Socrates. To him is to be traced the first scientific expression of the great argument from design,—an argument, no doubt, which is as old as the human heart, and exists in all unperverted minds without being formulated, but which, in a logical age and among a critical people, not the less demands to be set forth, link by link, and illustrated in detail as Socrates does in the following dialogue, a dialogue which we shall translate at length, at once as a notable landmark in theological literature, and as a good illustration of the philosopher’s favourite method of bringing out a grave truth from a familiar colloquy.

“There was one Aristodemus, a little man, well known in Athens, not only as one who never either sacrificed to the gods or used divination, but as laughing and jeering at those who did so. This man Socrates one day happened to meet, and knowing his tendencies addressed him at once thus. Tell me, Aristodemus, are there any persons whom you admire particularly for their wisdom? That there are, he replied. Well, said Socrates, let me hear the names of a few. Homer, said the other, for epic poetry; Melanippides for dithyrambs; for tragedy, Sophocles; for sculpture, Polycleitus; for painting, Zeuxis. Then tell me this, which is worthy of the greater admiration, the artist who makes figures which have neither life nor intelligence, or He who makes animals that have both life and intelligence? This artist, of course, said Aristodemus; for such animals would not be made by chance, but by calculation. Well then, of two classes of things, whereof the one has manifestly been constructed for some useful end, and the other, so far as one can see, for no end at all, which would you call the product of calculation? Of course the things made for some useful end. Now answer me this,—He who made men at first, and gave them senses to bring them into contact with the outward world, eyes to see and ears to hear, did He furnish them with these organs for a useful purpose or for no purpose at all? and as for odours and smells, if we had not nostrils, so far as we are concerned they might as well not have existed; and how could we have had any perception of sweet and sour, and all agreeable tastes, had we not been furnished with a tongue to take, cognisance of such sensations? Observe further, how the eye, being naturally a tender organ, is supplied with eyelids as a house with a door, which may be opened to receive pleasant guests, and closed when danger approaches; the eye-lashes also manifestly serve as a sort of sieve to prevent the passage of any injurious particles which the wind might drive against the pupil, while the eyebrows form a sort of coping or fence which prevents the sweat from the forehead flowing into the organ of vision. Not less wonderful is it that the ear is so formed as to be able to take in an uncounted number of various sounds, and yet is never filled; and in the mouth we are instantly met with the remarkable fact in all animals, that, while the front teeth, which take up the food, are formed for cutting, the back teeth, which receive it from them, are adapted for the after operation of grinding; observe also the situation of the great organ of nourishment, close to eyes and the nostrils, which keep a watch against the approach of unhealthy food; while on the other hand, that part of the food which is useless for nutrition, being naturally offensive, is carried off by ducts and passages placed at as great a distance as possible from the organs of sensation. All these contrivances, so manifestly proceeding from a purpose, can we doubt whether we should call works of chance or of intellect? Looking at the matter in this light, certainly, said the little man, I can have no hesitation in saying these are the contrivances of a very wise and benevolent designer. Consider further, continued Socrates, how there is implanted in all animals a desire of continuing their species, how the parents have a pleasure in breeding, and the offspring are above all things distinguished by the love of life and the fear of death. These also, he said, seem to be the contrivances of some Being who wished that animals should exist. Then, continued Socrates, consider yourself—do you believe that there is something in you which we call Intelligence? and, if in you, whence came it? is there no intelligence in the world outside of you? Your body, you perceive, is made up of certain very small portions of solid and liquid elements, of which vast quantities exist beyond you, and of which your body is a part; and if your body is taken from such a vast storehouse of matter, is your mind the only part of you which is underived from any source, and which you seem to have snapped up somehow by good luck? and is it possible, or in any way conceivable, that all this gigantic and beautifully ordered form of things which we call the world should have jumped into its present consistency from mere random forces without calculation? Scarcely; but then I do not see the authors of the world as I do of works which men produce here. As little do you see your own soul, said Socrates, which yet is the lord of your body, so that, taking your own logic strictly, you must conclude that you do all things by chance and nothing by calculation. Well then, said Aristodemus, the fact is that I do not despise the Divine Power,^[74.1] but I esteem all Divine natures too mighty and too glorious to require any service from me. For this reason rather they justly claim our regard, said Socrates, their might and their glory being the natural measure of the honour which they ought to receive from us. Well, be assured, Socrates, that if I could only imagine that the gods had any concern for us, I should not neglect them. And do you really mean to affirm that they actually have no concern for us? Why, consider what they have done for you; in the first place giving you an erect stature, which they gave to no other animal, a stature by virtue of which you not only see better before you, but can look upwards also, and defend yourself in many ways which with downcast eyes were impossible; and in the next place, not content with giving you feet, like other animals, they have furnished you with hands also, the organs by which we practise most of those acts which manifest our superiority to them;^[75.1] and, to crown all, while other animals have a tongue, man alone possesses this organ of such a nature that by touching the hollow of the mouth with it in various ways he can mould the emitted voice into articulate speech, significant of what thought wishes to communicate to thought. Again, the love which is a passion that stirs other animals only at certain seasons of the year, man is capable of enjoying at all seasons; and not only do our capacities of bodily efficiency and enjoyment so far surpass those of other animals, but God (ὁ Θεός) has implanted in man a soul of the most transcendent capacity. For what other animal, I ask, has a soul which enables it to own and to acknowledge the existence of the gods, who have disposed all this mighty order of things of which we are a part? What race of animals except man pays any worship to the gods?^[75.2] What animal possesses a soul so fit as that of man to guard against the inclemencies of the weather, to prevent or cure disease, to train to bodily strength or to intellectual acuteness? and what animal when it has learned anything can retain the lesson with equal tenacity? Is it not rather plain that, compared with other animals, men live really as gods upon the earth, so strikingly superior are they both in bodily and intellectual endowments; for neither could a creature with man’s reason, but with the body of an ox, have been able fully to execute its purposes; nor, again, could a creature with human hands, but without human intellect, be able to go beyond the brute stage of animal life; and after all this, heaped up as you are with bounties and blessings from all sides, will you still persist in thinking that you are a creature neglected by the gods? What, I ask, do you expect them to do for you before they shall have any just claim to your regard? I shall expect them, replied Aristodemus, to do for me what you say they do for you, to send me advisers as to what I ought to do and what I ought not to do. Be it so; and do you think that your case is not already provided for, when the gods on being consulted through divination give an answer which concerns all Athenians? or do you imagine when the Greeks, or the whole human race, are warned of coming evil by a portent, that you are specially excluded from the benefit of that divine indication? Do you imagine that the gods would have implanted in all human breasts the feeling that they are able to do us good or evil, if they did not possess this power, or that men constantly being deceived by this notion would not by this time have discovered the delusion? Have you not observed also that the wisest nations and the most stable governments are those which are the most religious, and that individual men are then most piously inclined when their reason is strongest and their passions most under control? Believe me, my dear young friend, that as your soul within you moves and manages the body even as it wills, so we ought to believe that the Intelligence which indwelleth the whole of things makes and designs all things according to its good pleasure, and not to imagine that while our human eye can reach many miles in vision, the Divine eye should not be able to see all things at a glance, nor that, while your soul can manage matters not here in Athens only, but in Egypt and Sicily, the intelligence of the Divine Being (τοῦ Θεοῦ) is not able to exercise a comprehensive care at once over the whole and each individual In the same way therefore as by performing acts of kindness to men you come to learn those who are disposed to show kindness to you in return, and as by conferring with men on important matters you know who are able to give sound advice on such matters, if with this disposition you approach the gods, making trial of them if belike they are willing to reveal to you any of those things which are naturally unknown to men, then you will certainly learn by experience that the Divine nature (τὸ θεῖον) is of such a kind as to be able to see all things, and to hear all things, and to be everywhere present, and to have a providential care of all things.”

So concludes this interesting dialogue, and the sympathetic reporter in winding it up adds, “The tendency of such discourses appears to me plainly to induce men to abstain from unholy and unjust and foul deeds, not only when they are seen of men, but also in a lonely wilderness, living constantly under the conviction that whatever men do, and in whatever place, they can in nowise escape the eye of the Omniscient.”

Let us now make a few remarks on the theological argument, or the argument from design, here sketched in such broad and masterly lines. It is an argument, when taken in the gross, and in its grand outline, so striking and so convincing, that it is only by confining the eye to a few minute and unessential points that certain precise and puzzling minds have conceited themselves that they were able to blunt the edge of its force. One class of objectors, unfortunately not at all uncommon in recent times, have imagined that they have refuted Paley’s famous argument from the watch found on a waste heath, by saying that there is no analogy between a piece of human manufacture like a watch, and a living growth like a plant or an animal. Very true, so far; a growth is a growth, and a manufacture is a manufacture; the one possesses inherent divine vitality, the other no vitality at all; but what follows? Not that an animal and a plant have nothing in common, but only that they have not the principle of vitality in common; not that the animal may not be constructed on the same principles of design and adaptation on which the watch is constructed, but that the animal to the curious machinery has something superadded which we call life. The fact of the matter is, that Dr. Paley’s argument would hold equally good if the designing soul that made the supposed watch, instead of being outside in the shape of a watch-maker, had been inside, as the principle of vitality is in a plant; then we should have called the watch a plant or an animal, and the design would have spoken out from its structure as manifestly as before. There is therefore no difference, so far as design and calculation are concerned, between a cunningly constituted growth and a curiously compacted machine. Another class of objectors are fond to tell us that things are not what they are by virtue of any inherent calculated type, but by a combination of complex conditions and circumstances, which in the course of millions of millions of ages work themselves happily into a consistent organism. This is just Epicurus back again in his naked absurdity, almost indeed in the same senseless phraseology; as we may see, for instance, in the following passage from the Westminster Review, on which in the course of my reading I accidentally stumbled:—“The positive method makes very little account of marks of intelligence; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that these incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it absorbs them in the singular conception of Law.” Let us attempt to analyse this utterance. It is the boast of the Comtian philosophy to find intelligence in the works of Auguste Comte, but not in the works of the Architect of the universe. Let that pass. In the next place it is indicated that it is a narrow view of things which discovers design in creation; a larger view reveals law; and the few incidents that may seem to indicate design are perhaps better explained by the old Epicurean method of the “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” Never was a greater amount of incoherence crammed into a short sentence. The inference which Dr. Paley drew from his watch is not in the least affected by the narrowness of the view which the inspection of a watch necessitates; nor would the striking evidence of a design in the structure of that little telescope the human eye, be diminished in the least by extending the view to the largest telescope ever made, or to the largest human body in the watch-tower of which a human eye was ever placed. The only legitimate consequence of mounting from the contemplation of an eye, merely as an eye, to its consideration as part of a large organism called the human body, would be to increase admiration by the discovery that the little design of the instrument was subservient to the large design of the body, as if, after admiring a small chamber in a vast building, and praising the cunning of the architect, we should walk through the whole suite of rooms and then discover some new beauty in the chamber having reference to the great whole of which it was a part. But instead of this our author informs us that this wider view “absorbs the original feeling of design into the singular conception of Law.” Applied to the supposed case of the small chamber in the large palace, this is flat nonsense. For the “singular conception of Law,” in this case, is just the large plan of the whole building, which, along with the small plan of each part, proceeded from the comprehensive intellect of the architect. What is Law? The reasoning in the above passage implies that it is something contrary to design, something that absorbs it, nay more, something that reduces it to the category of a “happy coincidence.” But Law is only a steady self-consistent method of operation, which explains nothing; it is only a fact; and if in this method of operation there be manifest order and purpose of producing a reasoned and consistent result, the law then becomes a manifestation of design, as in the original application of the word to the work of a lawgiver, a Solon or a Lycurgus whose laws certainly implied a calculated purpose of reform and re-organization; or, to take again the watch, the law by which this tiny worker goes, is only the single word which, describes that ordered complex of calculated movements which the design of the maker puts into play, for the purpose of marking the regular lapse of time. The discovery of a great law, therefore, in an ordered and calculated system of things, such as the world, may enlarge the field in which design is exhibited, but, so far from absorbing, can only tend to make that design more prominent. So much for Comte. But what shall we say of Darwin? If that original and ingenious investigator of nature really does mean to say that there are no original types of things in the Divine mind (I use Platonic language purposely, because it is the only language that satisfies the demands of the case), and that a rose became a lily, or a lily a rose, by some external power called “natural selection,”—I reply that I shall believe this when I see it; that a modifying influence is one thing, and a plastic force another; and that, as an able Hegelian philosopher remarks,^[81.1] a selection producing not a random but a reasonable result always implies some principle of selection, and a selecting agency—that is, the Socratic designing Intellect.

But there are greater names than those of Comte and Darwin, who have been quoted as oracular denouncers of all teleology—two of the greatest indeed of all modern names. Bacon and Goethe. The dictum of the great father of modern physical science, that teleology is a barren virgin, has been often repeated. Now, as Bacon was a pious man, at least a religious philosopher, he certainly cannot have meant Atheism by this; what then did he mean? This question will be best answered by considering what Bacon’s attitude as a philosopher was. He was not, like Aristotle, a calm judicial speculator, making a tabulated register of all knowledge; he was rather like Martin Luther, a man of war; and as the ecclesiastical reformer’s life and doctrine derive all their significance from the abuses of the Papacy which they overthrew, so Bacon’s position as a polemical thinker is to be interpreted only with reference to the school of thinking which he attacked. That school was a school fruitful in theories, discussions, and sounding generalities of all kinds, which afforded ample exercise to intellectual athletes, but produced no practical result. To put an end to this vague and unprofitable talk, the British Bacon, with the same practical instinct which guided the Attic Socrates, though in an opposite direction, set himself to establish a scientific method, a method specially calculated by the interrogation of nature to ascertain facts, and from the careful comparison of facts to educe laws. With these investigations into elementary scientific facts the general philosophical principle of final causes had nothing directly to do; nay, it might even act perniciously in an age which had not yet learned the art of careful experiment by accustoming men in an indolent sort of way to spin ingenious theories about the final causes of certain arrangements in the universe, before they had taken pains to ascertain what these arrangements actually were. And when we consider how vast a machine the Cosmos is, and how great the ignorance of us curious emmets who set ourselves to interpret its hieroglyphics, and to spell its scripture, it will be obvious that a warning against the ready luxury of speculating on final causes was one of the most necessary utterances that might come from the mouth of a reformer of scientific method. However far men may rise through the long gradation of secondary causes up to the First Cause, and by the slow steps of progress which we call means to a final result, the preliminary question of course always is, What are the facts? and till these be accurately ascertained Bacon was fully justified in saying that speculation about final causes is a barren virgin and produces no offspring. But this wise abstinence from assigning final causes at any particular stage of physical research is a quite different thing from saying absolutely that there are no marks of design in the universe, and that those most obvious things which from Socrates downwards have been generally esteemed such, may in the phraseology of a higher philosophy “rank as happy coincidences.” The humble admiration of final causes in the world by the intelligent worshipper is one thing, the hasty interpretation of them by every forward religionist is another thing. The works of God are not to be expounded, nor His ends and aims descanted on by every talker who may discourse with fluent propriety on the works of a human toy-maker like himself. Such we may feel confidently was Bacon’s point of view in reference to teleological questions. As for Goethe, who was a scientific investigator of scarcely less note than a poet, his remark to Eckermann on this subject shows that his point of view was exactly the same. Not why, or for what purpose, or with what object, he says, is the way of putting the question by which science may be profited; the true scientific question is always How. Of this there can be no doubt, “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas!” the physical inquirer is primarily concerned to know—how did this come about? by what curiously concatenated series of operations, starting from a certain point beyond which we cannot rise, are certain results produced? Answer this and science is satisfied; but in being so satisfied it proves itself to be a thing of secondary and ancillary significance, resting, like the mathematician’s demonstrations, on principles which it belongs to a superior science to evolve. The whole doctrine of causes, efficient as well as final, belongs to philosophy, to that grand doctrine of fundamental realities which dictates to mere science both its starting-point and its goal. But not even in this view is it altogether correct to say that the consideration of design has nothing to do with purely scientific investigations, and by the purely scientific man had better be ignored. All we can say is, that it is better that it should be ignored in certain cases than falsely presumed. But in a world where everything is under the government of Law, which is merely the expression of reason and the manifestation of design, nothing could be more Arbitrary and more perverse than the systematic exclusion of final causes from the philosophy of nature. So far from this, it is certain there can be no philosophy of nature without them; if indeed atheism can be called a philosophy, and in this nineteenth century, Moses and Plato and the Apostle Paul may be cast from their throne to make way for a resuscitated Greek Epicurus in the person of a conceited French dogmatist! We shall therefore conclude, in accordance with the teaching of Socrates, that an open eye for final causes not only belongs to wisdom, but may often advance science, when proceeding cautiously upon the due observation and connexion of facts; inasmuch as, in the words of an able metaphysician, “this universe is not an accidental cavity in which an accidental dust has been accidentally swept into heaps for the accidental evolution of the majestic spectacle of organic and inorganic life. That majestic spectacle is a spectacle as plainly for the eye of reason as any diagram of the mathematician. That majestic spectacle could have been constructed, was constructed, only in reason, for reason, and by reason; and therefore everywhere, from the smallest particle, to the largest system, moulded and modelled and inhabited by design.”^[85.1]

The theological convictions of Socrates being so strong and so decided, it followed as a necessary consequence, in a person of so practical a character, that he should be a pious man, and that he should practise those rites and services by which the dependent position of man towards the gods is most naturally and effectively expressed. If man, as was taught in the above extract, is the only animal capable of religion, then the worship of the Supreme Intelligence becomes the peculiar sign, privilege, and glory of his humanity. An irreligious man, a speculative or practical atheist, is as a sovereign who voluntarily takes off his crown and declares himself unworthy to reign. Religious worship, therefore, being an act which a man is specially bound to perform in virtue of his humanity, neither Socrates nor any other pious heathen thinker could have any doubt as to the peculiar forms and ceremonies that ought to constitute this act. For all the heathens,—certainly all Greeks and Romans,—held that religion was an essential function of the State, that Church and State, as we phrase it, are one and inseparable, consequently that every good subject owed allegiance to the religious traditions and observances of his countrymen, just as he did to the civil laws.^[86.1] The gods were to be worshipped by every good citizen in every state,—νόμῳ πόλεως,—or, as we would say, according to the law of the land; and as the religions of Greece and Rome were not fenced with bristling dogmas in the shape of what we call a Creed and Church Articles, but floated quite freely in the region of reverential tradition, while, at the same time, in those days, no man ever dreamed of haying a religion for himself any more than of having a civil government for himself, the conformity even of great thinkers to the popular faith was not naturally accompanied by any taint of that species of insincerity which has so often attached to the subscription of modern articles of belief. The right of private judgment was exercised by the Greeks only in the domain of philosophical speculation; for teaching the results of these speculations they established schools; but the idea of protesting and dissenting and making a private business of religion, for the maintenance of certain ceremonies, forms of church-government, or favourite doctrines, could never have occurred to them. Neither are we to think it strange if, even as a matter of speculation, minds of great original power, like that of Socrates, should feel no intellectual repugnance to the main principles of a polytheistic faith. There is nothing fundamentally absurd in Polytheism, provided only a wise superintendent Providence be established somewhere to overrule the democratic assembly of subordinate gods; and this the Greeks had prominently in the person of Zeus.^[88.1] The other gods, like the angels in the Christian theology, however much their power might be exaggerated by the reverence of particular localities, were in the comprehensive survey of a philosophic mind only the ministers of his supreme will, working harmoniously along with him in the sustainment of the divine fabric of the universe. With this view of Polytheism, pious-minded men such as Socrates, Xenophon, and Plutarch could be perfectly satisfied; and the extravagant and immoral stories about the gods, which excited the bile of Xenophanes and Plato, needed not necessarily to give them any offence. For why? these stories were matter of popular belief, not of intellectual decision or of sacerdotal dictation. A great national poet, like Pindar, might explain, or explain away, in the public assembly of the Greeks, any legends that appeared to him to contain matter unworthy of his lofty conception of the gods. So of course might a philosopher like Socrates. The peasants round Athens believed that the Wind Boreas came down in human form, and carried off the nymph Oreithyia from the banks of the Ilissus; this might or might not be true; Socrates certainly was not bound te believe it; and, as he himself tells us in the Phædrus, he was too busy with more important matters to trouble himself with inquiring into the truth or falsehood of sacred legends in a country where every fountain had its peculiar worship, and every river its divine genealogy. This easy dealing with questions about legends, however, did not in the least imply any want of sincerity in the attitude of doubting thinkers towards the main articles of the Polytheistic creed; on the contrary, the more pliable the legend the less danger was there of its standing in the way of an honest acceptance of the broad fundamental points of the general creed; and it is an altogether gratuitous supposition in a late distinguished writer^[89.1] to suppose that when Socrates at his death gave as a dying injunction to his friends to sacrifice a cock, which he had vowed, to Æsculapius, he did this merely from the effect of habit, and that he really did not believe in the existence of the god whom the injunction immediately concerned. While the general evidence of the adherence of Socrates both in theory and practice to the popular creed is so strong, we have no right in any particular instance to set him down as insincere. Of his general sincerity on these matters there certainly can be no doubt. It is set forth distinctly in more than one dialogue of Xenophon, and harmonizes exactly with all that we read in Plato. The philosopher used the common kinds of divination practised by his countrymen, and gave special directions as to the subjects on which a wise man should consult the gods, and on which he should seek for direction from them rather than from his own reason. We have special testimony to the fact that on one occasion (see above, [page 11]) he, after a long period of pious meditation, offered up a prayer to the Sun; and one of the Platonic dialogues concludes with a prayer of Socrates in the following curt and significant style:—

“O dear Pan, and ye other gods who frequent this spot, grant me, in the first place, to be good within; and as for outward circumstances, may they be such as harmonize well with my inward capacities. Grant me ever to esteem the wise man as the alone wealthy man; and as for gold, may I possess as much of it as a man of moderate desires may know to use wisely.”

So much for the theological belief and unaffected piety of this great man. How intimately he held Religion and Morality to be bound together will best appear from the following dialogue with the Sophist Hippias, on the foundation of natural right and positive law. We give it at length, as it has a direct bearing on some fundamental principles of general jurisprudence which have been largely debated in this country, from Locke down to Bentham and Mill.