Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/514

 492 HISTORY OF GREECE. rather, which he denies ; and on the negation of which, hia whole method and purpose turn. He denies, first, that men can know that on which they have bestowed no conscious effort, no delib- erate pains, no systematic study, in learning. He denies, next, that men can practise what they do not know ; ' that they can be just, or temperate, or virtuous generally, without knowing what justice, or temperance, or virtue is. To imprint upon the minds of his hearers his own negative conviction, o'i these two points is, indeed, his first object, and the primary purpose of his multi- form dialectical manoeuvring. But though negative in his means, Sokrates is strictly positive in his ends ; his attack is undertaken only with distinct view to a positive result ; in order to shame them out of the illusion of knowledge, and to spur them on and arm them for the acquisition of real, assured, comprehensive, self-explanatory knowledge, as the condition and guarantee of virtuous practice. Sokrates was, indeed, the reverse of a skeptic ; no man ever looked upon life with a more positive and practical eye ; no man ever pursued his mark with a clearer perception of the road which he was travelling ; no man ever combined, in like manner, the absorbing enthusiasm of a missionary, 2 with the acuteness, the originality, the inventive resource, and the gener- alizing comprehension, of a philosopher. His method yet survives, as far as such method can survive, in some of the dialogues of Plato. It is a process of eternal value and of universal application. That purification of the intellect, which Bacon signalized as indispensable for rational or scientific progress, the Sokratic elenchus affords the only known instrument for at least partially accomplishing. However little that instrument may have been applied since the death of its 1 So Demokritus, Fragra. ed. Mullach, p. 185, Fr. 131. oiire Te%vr], ovre coirj, ItpiKTov, fjv pj [i<L$ri Tif Plato (compare Plutarch, Lysand. c. 2) among those to whom he ascribes tjtvaiv fie^a-yxoAiKtjv, the black bile and ecstatic temperament. I do not know how to reconcile this with a passage in his Rhetoric (ii, 17), in which he ranks Sokrates among the sedate persons (a-u.aifj.ov). The first of the two assertions seems countenanced by the anecdotes respecting Sokrates (in Plato, Symposion, p. 175, B ; p. 220, C), that he stood in the same posture, quite unmovoi, even for several hours continuously, absorbed in meditation upon some idea which had seized his mind.
 * Aristotle (Problem, c. 30, p. 953, Bek.) numbers both Sokrates and