Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/565

 NKW Bi> -,.-, | t.uph.uies. It is all very well to say tli.it Vnstoph.uies was n comic poet, and it is quite certain that, if his portrait of Son-airs ha.i it would not have been comic. Hut, on the other huml. if So always held himself aloof from cosmological speculations, the I. ml would have been too remote. As ( liaTcphon 1ms left no l. we cannot know exactly what Socrates was doing when he and Plato and Xenophon were babies ; but we may lie sure that Aristo- phanes knew, and that liis audience knew too. There is no reason, then. to doubt the very circumstantial account of his intellectual .1. el..|.ment which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates in the I'huxlu, ami the ironical denials of the Ajiolnii;/. if read aright, confirm this quite in accordance with this that Dr. Piat accepts the interview with Parmenides and Zeno as a historical fact. I have show i, that the chronological difficulties that have been felt an to this are illu and Dr. A. 1'atin has just come to the same conclusion on th grounds. 1 The account given of the teaching of Socrates is distinguished by lucidity and sanity. Dr. Piat is not one of those who regard Xenophon as more trustworthy than Plato, though he is quite able to distinguish what is specially Platonic from what is Socratic. Socrates was conscious of a divine mission, and Dr. Piat is prepared to believe with him that the taiftanAv TI really was divine. This makes his interpretation all the more sympathetic. The end of life, he taught, was Happiness, that is, the possession of the Good and the Beautiful, which, rightly und;rsto< one with the Useful. Happiness is to be secured by right action, but " Goodness is knowledge," and there is nothing stronger than n The only way to make men better is by developing their reasoning power through dialectic. Here we have the paradox of Socrates and its ooln- tion. His interest was above all ethical and practical, but his activity was entirely dialectical and speculative. No one seems to value knov. less for its own sake, and yet no one sought it more exclusively or in a more disinterested way. If only we know, he held, right action follows as a matter of course. We gee the effect of this when we look at the " radiation " of Socratic thought through the future ; JUnli-rtii- did not, as Socrates had hoped, make men's actions better; it hardly influenced them at all. Hut it did what Socrates never meant it to do it gave birth to Greek philosophy. The paradox of Socrates repeated itself on a larger scale, and the theo- retical life gained the victory over the practical. The result was Scejit ieism in theory and Quietism in practice. Yet great ideas had been won, though they had no effect upon life. It was only when Christ appeared that a synthesis of those ideas began which gave them life and made them a principle of moral progress for the peoples. In ipao vita rrat. These words, with which Dr. Piat concludes, ore as it were the motto of the series. Some will think otherwise as to the historical conn and many will suspect the apologetic tendency thus openly confessed The tendency is certainly there, but I have not been able to discover that, in the present volume, it has led to any perversion of historical trut i the contrary, I doubt very much whether a more adequate or convincing portrait of Socrates has yet been drawn. .Ions Hi KNBT. 1 Early Greek Philnxojiliii, j? 70, 129.
 * Parnwnidrs i,,i K,, n >f,- ,////- fferaklit (Leip/ig, 1899).