Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/359

No. 3.] for Socrates not a familiar spirit attending him, nor the voice of an indwelling deity, but the personal remnant or overplus of his psychical nature remaining after the recognition and deduction of the purely rational or intellectual element of that nature. Conceiving the psychical subject as fundamentally intellectual, and not fully comprehending, intellectually, tact, conscience, feeling, instinct, he styled it, metaphorically, in allusion to the external oracle at Delphi, a, or the, "daemon." Any other view of the daemon given in the Xenophontic account is purely Xenophontic and "fictitious." – Of piety and worship we can properly attribute to Socrates only an ethical conception: for him mere observances were not of serious import. Prayer had, as its proper object, not any special good but the good in general (a doctrine peculiar to the Memorabilia alone of all Xenophon's writings, and therefore all the more certainly Socratic). The purely anthropopathic conception of the gods, common in the Memorabilia (and other writings of Xenophon), is Xenophontic. With Socrates, on the contrary, this conception gives place to that of a moral world-order: the 'favor of the gods' depends not upon material sacrifices, but upon ethical excellence. And, in general, in their religious opinions Xenophon and the real Socrates have little in common.

The religious views of Socrates form but a subordinate part of his philosophy. That philosophy was ethical rationalism, rationalism being the primary, ethicism the secondary, element of it. The fact that the rationalism of Socrates applied itself essentially to human life alone is explained by the nature of the rationalistic principle: historically, reason first perceived itself in the mind of man and in human action, and hence upon its first stage rationalism is anthropologico-practical. The principle of the Socratic philosophy precisely corresponds to the conditions of Attic life as the centre and centralization of Greek life in the age of Socrates. While the life of the colonies was a life of the senses, of action, a life with nature, Attic life was a life of thought, of historical reminiscence, of social intercourse: it was an intensive, spiritualistic, rather than an extensive and naturalistic life. The rationalism of Socrates was already immanent in Greek art, in Greek education and industry as forms of art. It was the first form of the philosophy of spirit, and as such was one-sided; i.e., purely rationalism, the first step in any form of philosophical knowledge being, universally, the bare conception of phenomena under a single, simple principle.

Neither Xenophon nor Plato excites confidence as a principal