Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/438

 416 HISTORY OF GREECE. tic, or cross-examining god, to use an expression which Plattl puts into his mouth respecting an Eleatic philosopher going about to examine and convict the infirm in reason." ' Nothing of ihia character belonged either to Pannenides and Anaxagoras before him, or to Plato and Aristotle after him. Both Pythagoras and Empedokles did, indeed, lay claim to supernatural communica- tions, mingled with their philosophical teaching. But though there be thus far a general analogy between them and Sokrates, the modes of manifestation were so utterly different, that no fair comparison can be instituted. The third and most important characteristic of Sokrates that, through which the first and second became operative was his intellectual peculiarity. His influence on the speculative mind of his age was marked and important ; as to subject, as to method, and as to doctrine. He was the first who turned his thoughts and discussions dis- tinctly to the subject of ethics. With the philosophers who pre- ceded him, the subject of examination had been Nature, or the Kosmos, 2 as one undistinguishable whole, blending together cosmogony, astronomy, geometry, physics, metaphysics, etc. The Ionic as well as the Eleatic philosophers, Pythagoras as well as Empedokles, all set before themselves this vast and undefined problem ; each framing some system suited to his own vein of imagination ; religious, poetical, scientific, or skeptical. Accord ing to that honorable ambition for enlarged knowledge, however, which marked the century following 480 B.C., and of which the professional men called sophists were at once the products and the instruments, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, as much as was then known, were becoming so far detached sciences as to 1 Plato, Sophistes, c. 1, p. 216 ; the expression is applied to the Eleatic stranger, who sustains the chief part in that dialogue : Tu%' av ovv Kdl aol Ttf OVTOG TUV KpElTTOVUV OVVETtOlTO, (JHlvXoVf f/flUf OVTdf V TOlf 3,oyOtf iTro^io/ifvof KOI iXryguv, tie be uv Ttf A e y KT ticof . TUV a}JXuv ol irfaloToi, 6i?.yeTO, aKOiruv oiruf 6 Katoiifievof v-$ T ooQiffTuv Kofffiof x l > etc. Plato, Phaedon, c. 45, p. 96. B. TavTrjf -riff aofiaf, v 6tj na^oin laTopiav.
 * Xenoph. Mem. i, 1, 11. Ovde "yap irepl Tijf TUV KUVTUV Qvceuf,