Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/155

 Rh in it. What is beauty? This was an important question for a Greek thinker; and to find the ideally beautiful life might be worth our effort also. An act is made just by the justice in it. What is the essence of justice? We and Socrates alike want to know that. Socrates found such inquiries puzzling, and was reduced to a kind of despair.

Perhaps it was at this time that the Oracle of Delphi which was controlled by influences highly sensitive to all the life of the time, said one day to an inquirer that Socrates was the wisest of men. This declaration was very perplexing to Socrates himself, who felt keenly his own ignorance. Eagerly questioning all kinds of men, to see if they could not give him wisdom after all, he soon found that their notions about the real essences of things were confused and contradictory. He realized that his mission was to clear up the thoughts of men. This is the first step in rational thinking, to define clearly our thoughts and agree about the essential nature of the things which our words denote.

The "Apology," "Crito," and "Phædo" of Plato present to us dramatically, in Plato's words, the thoughts of Socrates. They all deal with the last days of his life, in which his thoughts may well have been at their ripest. Very probably Plato developed some of the thoughts of Socrates to their logical results, going beyond what the master actually said, and giving the tendencies of his thinking. But we shall hardly get nearer to the essence of the real Socrates than by reading these dialogues. For instance, he would seem to have felt that souls are the permanent things; their very essence is to live and give life; justice, temperance, piety, beauty, and such ideas are eternal essences which give reality to the human world. Possibly the greater flights of imagination in the "Phædo" belong to Plato, and the perfecting of the whole theory; many have supposed that all the philosophy of the dialogue is Plato's. To disentangle his thought from his master's is hard; the two are really one great