Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/599

Rh T H I 577 sophists and philosophers were commonly regarded, by those who refused to recognize their higher claims, as teaching an &quot; art of words &quot; It is easy to see how this came about ; when the demand of an art of conduct made itsalf felt, it was natural that the rhetoricians, skilled as they were in handling the accepted notions and principles of practice, should come forward to furnish the supply. Nor is there any reason to regard them as conscious charla tans for so doing, any more than the professional journalist of our own day, whose position as a political instructor of mankind is commonly earned rather by a knack of merely writing than by any special depth of political wisdom. As Plato s Protagoras says, the sophists in professing to teach virtue only claimed to do somewhat better than others what all men are continually doing ; and similarly we may say that, when tried by the touchstone of Socrates, they only exhibited somewhat more conspicuously than others the deficiencies which the great questioner found everywhere. ites. The charge that Socrates brought against the sophists and his fellow-men generally may be viewed in two aspects. Oil one side it looks quite artless and simple ; on the other it is seen to herald a revolution in scientific method, and to contain the germ of a metaphysical system. Simply stated, the charge was that they talked about justice, temperance, law, &c., and yet could not tell what these things were ; the accounts of them which they gave when pressed were, as Socrates forced them to admit, inconsistent with their own judgments on particular instances of justice, legality, &c. This ignorance&quot; of the real meaning of their terms was not, indeed, the only lack of knowledge that Socrates discovered in his contemporaries, but it was the chief, and it was in the exposure of this that. the philosophic importance of his work lay. For the famous dialectic,&quot; by which he brought this ignorance home to his interlocutors, at once exhibited the scientific need of exact definitions of general notions, and suggested that these definitions were to be attained by a careful comparison of particulars. Thus, we can understand how, in Aristotle s view, the main service of Socrates to philosophy consisted iu &quot; introducing induction and definitions.&quot; This descrip tion, however, is both too technical and too positive to represent the naive and negative character of the Socratic dialectic. For that the results of these resistless arguments were mainly negative is plain from those (earlier) Platonic diilogues in which the impression of the real Socrates is t &amp;gt; bs found least modified. The pre-eminent &quot; wisdom &quot; which the Delphic oracle attributed to him was held by himsulf to consist in a unique consciousness of ignorance. And yet it is equally plain, even from Plato, that there was a mo.it important positive element in the teaching of Socrates ; had it been otherwise, the attempt of Xenophon to represent his discourses as directly edifying, and the veneration felt for him by the most dogmatic among subsequent schools of philosophy, would be quite inexplicable. The union of these two elements in the work of Socrates Ins caused historians no little perplexity; and certainly we cannot quite save the philosopher s consistency, unless wo regard some of the doctrines attributed to him by Xenophon as merely tentative and provisional. Still the positions of Socrates that are most important in the history of ethical thought are not only easy to harmonize with his conviction of ignorance, but even render it easier to under stand his unwearied cross-examination of common opinion. For the radical and most impressive article of his creed was constituted by his exalted estimate of this knowledge that was so hard to find, his conviction that ignorance of the good and evil in human life was the source of all practical error. If his habitual inquiries were met by the reply, &quot; We do know what justice and holiness are though we can not say,&quot; he would rejoin, &quot;Whence, then, these perpetual disputes about what is just and holy ?&quot; True knowledge, he urged, would settle these quarrels, and produce uni formity in men s moral judgments and conduct. To us, no doubt, it seems an extravagant paradox to treat men s ignorance of justice as the sole cause of unjust acts ; and to the Greek mind also the view was paradoxical ; but if we would understand the position, not of Socrates only, but of ancient ethical philosophy generally, we must try to realize that this paradox was also a nearly unanswerable deduction from a pair of truisms. That &quot;every one wishes for his own good, and would get it it he could,&quot; an arguer would hardly venture to question ; and he would equally shrink from denying that justice and virtue generally were goods, and of all goods the finest. How then could he re fuse to admit that those who knew how to do just and righteous acts would prefer nothing else, while those who did not know could not do them if they would,&quot; 1 which would land him at once in the conclusion of Socrates that &quot; all virtues were summed up in wisdom or knowledge of Good Observe that we are not to understand this knowledge of good &quot; as if it were knowledge of duty as distinct from interest. The force of the above argument depends upon a blending of duty and interest in the single notion of good. This blending Socrates did not, of course, invent he found it in the common thought of his age; but it was the primary moral function of his dialectic to educe and exhibit it, to drive it home and trace its practical consequences. A resolute assertion of the coincidence of different elements of good, as commonly recognized, forms the kernel of the positive moral teaching that Xenophon attributes to him. He could give no account that satisfied him of good in the abstract ; when pressed for one he evaded the questioners by saying that &quot; he knew no good that was not good for something in particular;&quot; but that good is con sistent with itself, that the beautiful is also profitable, the virtuous also pleasant, he was always ready to prove in concrete cases. If he prized the wisdom that is virtue, the good of the soul, above all other goods, if in his unre served devotion to the task of producing it in himself and others he endured the hardest penury, he steadily main tained that such life was richer in enjoyment than a life of luxury; if he faced death rather than violate the laws of his country, he was prepared with a complete proof that it was probably his interest to die. This many-sidedness in his view of good is strikingly illustrated by the curious blending of elevated and vulgar sentiment which his utterances about friendship show. If goodness of soul is the &quot; finest of goods,&quot; a good friend must be the most valuable of external possessions; no effort is too great to keep or win such. Still, the good of friend ship must be shown in its utility ; a friend who can be of no service is valueless; and this &quot;service&quot; Socrates on occasion interpreted in the most homely and practical sense. Still, the highest of services that friend can render to friend is moral improvement. To sum up, then, we may describe the relation of Socrates to the common sense of his age as that of per petual particular scepticism, combined with permanent general faith. He is always attacking common opinion, and showing it, from its inconsistencies, not to be knowledge ; but the premises of his arguments are always taken from common opinion, and the knowledge which he seeks is something that will harmonize, not overthrow it This knowledge is not merely knowledge of Good, though that is the chief and crown of it ; he is continually inquiring for 1 Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia, ix. 4, where Xenopbon fully confirms what Plato s dialogues abuudautly illustrate. VIII. - 73