Page:A Day in Athens with Socrates (1884).djvu/12

iv tive thought, whence, to use Plato’s words, “they look down with exceeding contempt upon us common men, and make but small account of us; nor even when they hold discourse do they take thought whether we keep pace with them or are left behind: each man of them goes on his own way.”

But the day was at hand when “common men” would no longer submit to entire exclusion from the world of philosophy. By this time, however, the inadequacy of systems which strove to “explain the unexplainable” had become but too apparent. An inevitable re-action took place in favour of the practical; and, answering to the new requirements of the day, a new school arose, which proclaimed the instruction of men in the right conduct of life as its chief end and purpose, and cultivated the arts of rhetoric and argumentation, which were yet novelties, as a help towards the attainment of this end.

It is easy to see, that to the active and subtle Greek mind, studies such as these would offer a peculiar attraction, and, pursued with a dangerous facility, might prove fatal to the end which they were at first intended to serve. “The Greek,” says Taine, “is a reasoner even more than a metaphysician or a savant. He takes pleasure in delicate distinctions, in subtle analyses. He delights in splitting hairs, in weaving spiders’ webs. In this his dexterity is unrivalled. Little matters it to him, that, alike in theory and in practice, this too-complicated and fine-drawn web is of no use whatever: he is content to watch the separate threads as they weave themselves into imperceptible and symmetrical meshes. Here the national vice is a final outcome of the national talent. Nowhere else has been seen a group of eminent and popular men who taught with success and