Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/459

 FALSE CONCEIT OF KNOWLEDGE. (rf7 analysis of these last-mentioned words : the " Laches" and " Protagoras" on courage, the " C.'iarmides" on temperance, the " Euthyphron" on holiness. By these and similar discussions did Sokrates, and Plato am- plifying upon his master, raise indirectly all the important ques- tions respecting society, human aspirations and duties, and the principal moral qualities which were accounted virtuous in in- dividual men. As the general terms, on which his conversation turned, were among the most current and familiar in the language, so also the abundant instances of detail, whereby he tested the hearer's rational comprehension and consistent application of such large terms, were selected from the best known phenomena of daily life ; l bringing home the inconsistency, if inconsistency there was, in a manner obvious to every one. The answers made to him, not merely by ordinary citizens, but by men of talent and genius, such as the poets or the rhetors, when called upon for an explanation of the moral terms and ideas set forth in their own compositions, 2 revealed alike that state of mind against which his crusade, enjoined and consecrated by the Delphian oracle, waa directed, the semblance and conceit of knowledge without real knowledge. They proclaimed confident, unhesitating persuasion, on the greatest and gravest questions concerning man and society, in the bosoms of persons who had never bestowed upon them sufficient reflection to be aware that they involved any difficulty. Such persuasion had grown up gradually and unconsciously, partly by authoritative communication, partly by insensible trans- fusion, from others ; the process beginning antecedent to reason as a capacity, continuing itself with little aid and no control from reason, and never being finally revised. With the great terms and current propositions concerning human life and society, a complex body of association had become accumulated from count- less particulars, each separately trivial and lost to the memory, knit together by a powerful sentiment, and imbibed as it were by each man from the atmosphere of authority and example around 1 Xenoph. Memor. iv, 6, 15. "O.rorc 6? auri> lyu olda, ore At"yot, rovf (iKovoi-TZi 1 Plato, Apol. Sok. c. 7, p. 22. C : compare Thto, Ion. pp. 533, 534.