Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/496

 474 HISTORY OF GREECE. man that mere good feeling would be totally insufficient, unless he were prepared and competent to carry it into action, is a bsson which few parents would wish to discourage. Nor would any generous parent make it a crime against the teaching of Sokrates, that it rendered his son wiser than himself, which prob ably it would do. To restrict the range of teaching for a young man, because it may make him think himself wiser than his father, is only one of the thousand shapes in which the pleading of ignorance against knowledge was then, and still continues occasionally to be, presented. Nevertheless, it is not to be denied that these attacks of Any tus bear upon the vulnerable side of the Sokratic general theory of ethics, according to which virtue was asserted to depend upon knowledge. I have already remarked that this is true, but not the whole truth ; a certain state of the affections and dispositions being not less indispensable, as conditions of virtue, than a cer- tain state of the intelligence. An enemy, therefore, had some pretence for making it appear that Sokrates, stating a part of the truth as the whole, denied or degraded all that remained. But though this would be a criticism not entirely unfounded against his general theory, it would not hold against his precepts or prac- tical teaching, as we find them in Xenophon ; for these, as I have remarked, reach much wider than his general theory, and incul- cate the cultivation of habits and dispositions not less strenuously than the acquisition of knowledge. The censures affirmed to have been cast by Sokrates against 'he choice of archons by lot at Athens, are not denied by Xen- ophon. The accuser urged that " by such censures Sokrates excited the young men to despise the established constitution, and to become lawless and violent in their conduct." 1 This is just the same pretence, of tendency to bring the government into hatred and contempt, on which in former days prosecutions for public libel were instituted against writers in England, and ilvai Kal uE?i.iftuTaTov, orruf, iuv re vird -Karpbf EUV TE into udstyov iuv re &JT' uXAow T bf 8ov2.T/Tai n/iuadai, ftij TU OLKEIOC elvai maTEVuv aue/.y, mpurat, b' uv uv povlijTai Tipaadai, rovroif a>E?it[j.of elvat. 1 Xen. Mem. i, 2, 9. roi>c 6s TOMV~OV<; Aoyouf tiraipeiv I$TI rot'f tararftpovEiv rf^ xadeai '<>ar)<; 7ro3.m'af, Kal TTOIEIV