Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/370

* SOCRATES. 316 SOCRATES. ot a more enthusiastic than judicious disciple, had pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Conscious that his only wisdom was self-knowl- edge, the knowledge that he knew nothing, he proceeded to test those reputed wise at Athens, the poets, the statesmen, the artists. He found in each case that the value of the specialist's particular talent was more than nullified by his inability to render a rational account of it, and the false conceit of a larger knowledge not possessed, and he inferred that it was his divine- ly appointed mission to force upon his fellow men self-knowledge and conviction of ignorance as the first step toward self-betterment. Such a profession exercised for thirtj' or forty years amid a gossipy and jealous population brought him more notoriety than popularity. The effect was heightened b}- the startling con- trast, to Greek feeling, between Socrates's ex- terior and the dignified and impressive demeanor to be expected of a great teacher and leader of men. The ungainly figure; the protulierant belly; the Silenus-like mascjue with bald head, promi- nent eyes, and wide, upturned nostrils; the beg- garly garb; the vulgar instances and homely parables in which his wisdom disguised itself; the personal oddities of the man ; his hour-long fits of staring abstraction : his ingenious art of cross-examination enirapping the cleverest into self-contradiction; the mysterious admonitions of his 'Daemon' or inner voice; the habitual as- ceticism of this barefoot philosopher, content with bread and water and one garnuMit summer and winter, yet able on occasion to outdrink and outwatch and outtalk the boldest revelers and most brilliant wits of Athens — all these traits as felt b}' the inner circle of disciples and por- trayed by Plato's art only add piquancy to the demoniac personality thus half revealed and half concealed. But to the multitude they only made up a figure of comedy. In the Clouds of Aristophanes (423), the man whom we conceive as the anthithesis of the Sophistic rhetoric and the founder of moral and mental as opposed to physical philosophy appears as the master of a 'tliinking shop' in which pale-faced disciples burrow into the bowels of earth, and where un- scrupulous fathers can have their sons taught the art of making the worse appear the better reason, while he himself aloft in an aerial basket "treads the air and contemplates the sun." The comedian is not bound to make nice distinctions. For Aristophanes. Socrates was an apt comic embodiment ot the new learning which the con- servative poet detested. Like the Sophists, he occupied the young men with something else than the care of healthy bodies, and he resembled the Sophists in the unsettling efl'ect of his question- ing of the estalilished order. Plato, for artistic reasons, puts these attacks of comedy as mani- festations of the popular prejudice in the fore- front of the Apolnfiji. The immediate causes of Socrates's condemnation were probably the hos- tility aroused by his ironical comments on the democratic method of deciding great questions by the lot or the show of hands, and the distrust felt by the average man for the leader of the traitor Alcibiades, the tyrant Critias, and the Philo-Laconian Xenophon. In 390 a poet, Mele- tus, a demagogue, Anytus fa prominent demo- cratic politician), and an orator, Lycon, pre- sented a formal charge in the Court of the King (Archon) : "Socrates is guilty of rejecting the gods of the city and introducing new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth." The first charge relates to the 'JDa'inonion,' or di- vine something of Socrates about which a large and unprofitable literature exists. In Plato, it is merely the voice of an inward spiritual tact always operating negatively as a check to ac- tions, however trifling, opposed to the true inter- ests of the soul. Other writers have reported it with superstitious, psychological, or patho- logical flourishes after their kind. Corruption of youth was the serious charge. The case came before a jury of about 501 members. Socrates declined (the story goes) the professional aid of the orator Lysias, and defended himself in a speech of w'hieh the spirit is preserved in the Platonic Apology, a masterpiece of art in its seeming simplicity. Condemned by a small ma- jority, he took still higher ground when it came to fixing the penalty, and proposed, so Plato says, that it be maintenance in the Prytaneum as a public benefactor. At the solicitation of Plato, Crito, and other friends, he finally pro- posed to pay a fine. The jury naturally voted by an increased majority for the alternative jienalty of death, which Socrates doubtless ex- pected and was willing to accept as an appro- priate crown of martyrdom and a release from the approaching infirmities of age. The rest is told in two immortal dialogues of Plato. The Crito shows us Socrates in the interval of res- pite caused by a religious festival and the absence of the sacred ship at Delos, resisting the importunities of his friends that he should escape by bribing his jailers, and so, as he says, in very deed teaching young men by his example to violate the law. The Plicptlo depicts the long^ final day spent with friends in conversation on the immortality of the soul, and the last scene of all, "how bravely and cheerfully the first great martyr of intellectual liberty met his doom," The self-control which he exemplified and the self-knowledge which he inculcated are the key- note of Socrates's philosophy. The basis of his ethics was the principle or paradox that all vice is ignorance, and that no man is willingly bad. In logic Aristotle tells us that there are two things which we may justly attribute to him: inductive arguments and the quest for general definitions. But, as he left no writings, we can- not tell what system of tliought. if any, he con- structed on these presuppositions and by this method. We may divine that he was much more than the homely .Johnsonian moralist of Xeno- phon. and something less than the poetic dia- lectician and metaphysician of Plato. But we cannot know. Plato was a cunning dramatic artist, and the seeming simplicity of Xenophon's Memorabilia is no warrant of its historical fidel- ity. Ten years of adventure presumably separate Xenophon from the conversations which he pro- fesses to record. Both the I[eniorahilia and the minor Platonic dialogues doubtless contain many genuine reminiscences of the 'real Socrates.' But we cannot use them to construct a liody of doc- trine for him. The tremendous influence of his personality remains one of the great facts of history. Through the 'complete Socratic' Plato and his pupil, Aristotle, he determined the entire subsequent course of speculative thought. The 'imperfect .'^ocratics.' the founders of the other schools of ancient philosophy, drew' their in-