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540 by the side of physics, in the philosophical systems of the Greeks. In those of Plato, of Aristotle, and of the Stoics, that is, of all the genuine Socratic schools of any importance, we again meet with physical investigations, and ethics were exclusively cultivated only by those followers of Socrates who themselves never attained to any eminence in philosophy. And if we consider the general tendency of the abovenamed schools, and review the whole range of their tenets, nothing can be pointed out, that could have proceeded from a Socrates, endowed with such qualities of mind and character as the one described to us, unless it be where their theories have been reduced to a familiar practical application. And even with regard to the elder Socratics, we find more satisfaction in tracing their strictly philosophical speculations to any other source rather than to this Socrates ; not only may Aristippus, who was unlike his master in his spirit as well as his doctrines, be more easily derived from Protagoras, with whom he has so much in common, but Euclid, with his dialectic bias, from the Eleatics. And we find ourselves compelled to conclude, that the stem of Socrates, as he is at present represented to us, can have produced no other shoot than the Cynical philosophy, and that, not the cynism of Antisthenes, which still retains many features which we should rather refer to his earlier master Gorgias, but the purer form, which exhibits only a peculiar mode of life, not a doctrine, much less a science : that of Diogenes, the mad Socrates^ as he has been called, though in truth the highest epithet due to him is that of Socrates caricatured. For his is a copy in which we find nothing but features of such an original: its approximation to the selfcontentedness of the deity in the retrenchment of arti- ficial wants, its rejection of mere theoretical knowledge, its unassuming course of going about in the service of the god to expose the follies of mankind. But how foreign all this is to the domain of philosophy, and how little can be there effected with such means^ is evident enough.

The only rational course then that seems to be left, is to give up one or other of these contradictory assumptions. Either let Socrates still stand at the head of the Athenian philosophy, but then let those who place him there undertake to establish a different notion of him from that which has been long preva- lent : or let us retain the conception of the wise and amiable