Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/196

 1/2 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Socratcs's positive doctrines amounted to little : he clung to a paradoxical belief that Virtue is Knowledge ; a view refuted before him by Euripides, and after him by Aris- totle — in its ordinary sense, at least: to him, of course, it meant something, not ordinary. He had no accom- plishments, and did not as a rule care to acquire them ; though, when it occurred to him, late in life, to learn music, he went straight to a school and learned among the boys. He was working incessantly at a problem which he never really could frame to himself, which mankind never has been able to frame. He felt that the big truth he wanted must be visible everywhere, if we knew how to look for it. It is not more knowledge that we want : only the conscious realising of what is in us. Accept- ing the jest at his mother's profession, he described his process of questioning as assisting at the birth of truth from spirits in travail. Along with this faith in a real truth inside man, Socrates possessed a genius for destructive criticism. Often unfair in his method, always deeply honest, in his purpose, he groped with deadly effect for the funda- mental beliefs and principles of any philosopher, poli- tician, artist, or man of the world, who consented to meet him in discussion. Of course the discussions w'ere oral ; Athens had not yet reached the time for pamphlet criticism, and Socrates could not write a con- nected discourse. He objected to books, as he did to long speeches, on the ground that he could not follow them and wanted to ask questions at every sentence. Socrates was never understood ; it seems as if, for all his insistence on the need of self-consciousness, he never understood himself. The most utterly divergent schools of thought claimed to be his followers. His