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SOC and he is said, in the Apology and Symposium of Plato, to have been engaged in three different battles. In the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when he was about forty years of age, he was employed at the siege of Potidæa, a revolted Athenian colony in Thrace. Though Potidæa was besieged during a Thracian winter, Socrates, in his usual clothing, walked barefoot through snow and ice. In another and later campaign, we find him at the Bœotian town of Delium, applauded by the Athenian generals for his courage and constancy in a defeat. When he was nearly fifty, we hear of him engaged in military service at Amphipolis, an Athenian colony. Socrates loved Athens, which he hardly ever left except thus to serve his fellow-citizens in war, and he refused flattering invitations from other places; but though he seems to have been a member of senate, he avoided the chances of a call to the public service of the state, either as a political or military leader, being satisfied that he was called by divine appointment to seek for wisdom, and to help others in seeking for it. He was indifferent to country life, finding more attraction in this sort of intercourse with living men than in external nature. When some one charged him with being unacquainted with the very suburbs of Athens—"Forgive me," he said, "I long to discover something; this I cannot do among fields and trees, but I may from observing human beings in the city." Accordingly we hear of his being away from Athens only on those military expeditions, and once or twice at the Isthmian games and at Delphi.

It is in early youth that Socrates is said to have become conscious of his peculiar mission. He was probably forty years of age before he became a recognized public teacher and moral missionary at Athens, thus devoting the remaining thirty years of his life to the development of the judgment and conscience of his fellow-citizens, by means of that "wise questioning" in which he discovered to them their one-sided prejudices, their half-views of things, and their real ignorance under the show of knowledge. The noble and wise enthusiasm of Socrates expressed itself in his faith in a divine calling to this office of philosophical prophet and missionary, inducing him to work his own way, in company with others whom he was assisting by his questions or his sympathy to an insight of the true principles of logic and ethics, as they he hid in the very roots of human nature. He is said to have been moved by the "Know thyself" inscribed on the wall of Delphi; and his inspiration was perhaps quickened by the celebrated Delphic response, "Sophocles is wise, Euripides is wiser, but Socrates is the wisest of men." Stories of his meditative insight were current, as well as of his sagacious observation, both being combined as elements of his power. In the camp at Potidæa he is said to have stood fixed in reverie, motionless, and regardless of all attempts to interrupt him, from early dawn until the evening of a summer day, and then over night until the sunrise of the following morning, when he started from his waking dream, and retired, offering his morning prayer. This profound abstraction from the world of sense has in some degree been found at the basis of those characters by whom the world of mind has been strongly moved.

With ample means of enriching himself, Socrates, in pursuance of his mission, led a life of poverty, in contempt of wealth, and in marked contrast to the prevailing profusion and selfishness of his time. He is said to have inherited a small patrimony, and seems to have possessed a house at Athens. But his home was in the streets, and his family included the Athenian people, his own children being left to the care of his wife Xantippe. According to Xenophon, he was constantly in public. Early in the morning he frequented the public walks, the gymnasia for bodily training, and the schools of the youth. When the market-place was crowded, Socrates was to be seen there; constantly during the remainder of the day he would be where he was most likely to meet with citizens; and there he would talk, while all who chose might hear him. He never either asked or received any reward, and he made no distinction of persons, never withholding his conversation from any one, and addressing all in the same style of fruitful inquiry. How strange a spectacle on the streets of the brilliant city was this uncouth utterer of wisdom, in his threadbare attire, unlike the Sophists who professed for money, and who withdrew with their pupils apart from the crowd. This enthusiastic teacher of wisdom made his voice heard in the streets. He renounced academical exclusiveness and philosophical monasticism, and professed a philosophy which should commingle with common life, elevating and purifying it. No one, says Xenophon, ever saw Socrates doing, or heard him uttering, anything profane or irreligious. For not only did he refrain from the common discussions about the nature of things, and the laws of the external universe of sense, but he inveighed against the folly of those who engaged in them. The first question he would put to such persons was, whether they pursued those studies from fancying themselves already sufficiently familiar with human things. He would wonder too that they did not see how impossible it is to find truth on such matters; since even those who were most vain of what they could say about them differed widely in opinion, and seemed to look on one another as madmen. Some of them thought that Being was one, others thought it was infinite in number; some thought that all things were in perpetual motion, others that it was impossible for anything to be moved; and whilst some supposed that things were in a course of generation and destruction, many imagined that nothing could by possibility be either generated or destroyed. And then he would inquire whether, as the learners of human things think they can turn their knowledge to some good account for themselves and others, these astronomical and astrological inquirers expected to be able to produce at pleasure winds and waters and seasons, or whether they were satisfied with a merely speculative knowledge. For his part he confined himself to human life and its affairs, inquiring what was pious and what not, what honourable and what mean, what just and what unjust, what moderation and what wild fanaticism, what courage and cowardice, and other such matters, a knowledge of which he thought would make men honourable and virtuous, while ignorance left them in bondage.

Socrates did not aim at the establishment of a particular school or sect in philosophy, but at the formation and diffusion of the philosophical spirit. He thought to breathe a higher tone into the search for knowledge, and to establish a truer standard of its nature, than was recognized by the merely professional teachers of his day—the Athenian Sophists. His whole public life is a proclamation of the distinction of the sophist and the philosopher—the conceited dogmatist who assumes the truth of an uncriticised system of opinions, and the genuine truth-seeker who is awakened to a consciousness of human ignorance, and who recognizes self-knowledge as the basis of that progressive and imperfect science, suited to his place and circumstances in this life, which alone is open to man. He did not profess a system of wisdom, he only professed that he was in search of it; and the depth and earnestness of his research gathered round him a crowd of affectionate and enthusiastic youths—Plato and Xenophon conspicuous among the throng—thus sowing the seed of the great Grecian philosophical systems of the most opposite schools which flourished in the seventy years that followed his death. The "intellectual midwifery" of Socrates sought not to put propositions into, but to draw mental and moral power out of, those who surrounded him. It aimed less at satisfying than at disturbing and dissatisfying the system-mongers and dogmatists. When he wanted to test the effects of his teaching, he would find out not only what intellectual peace, but also what intellectual disturbance, it had created; what fresh longing to go beneath the surface of words and common opinions it had developed; what new conviction of an end in life it had formed, or what old one it had deepened. The vain show, or even the reality of much miscellaneous information, was the sham science against which he waged unceasing war. And he carried it on less by presenting to his audience intellectual results than by making them feel the need for such, and the impossibility of the attainment except by reflecting often and long on familiar judgments, and on the meaning and application of forms of words which were current among them. When we watch him as he comes before us in a dialogue of Plato, we find at its close, instead of having gained an answer to the question with which we started at the commencement, that we have not gained it—not perhaps that it cannot be found at all, but that the chase is longer and harder than we had supposed; that one discussion, or even a series of discussions, cannot convey it; that it cannot really be conveyed at all from without, but must be drawn forth by reflection from within; and that this very work of reflection itself, to be successful, must not be the work merely of a day or a year; that it is rather the very work of all high human life, to be persisted in from day to day and from year to year, the symptom of a growing strength of intelligence, but of a strength which must become weakness if it is separated from moral courage in the service of God and men. It was thus that Socrates illustrated the higher or liberal education of the human mind.