Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/22

Rh cases of great difficulty; and he had no doubt that if a man were diligent in learning all that the Gods permitted to be learnt, and if besides he was assiduous in paying pious court to them and in soliciting special information by way of prophecy, they would be gracious to him and signify their purposes to him.

Such then being the capacity of man for wisdom and virtue, his object was to impart that wisdom to them; and the first step necessary, he considered to be eradicating one great fault which was a barrier to all improvement. This fault he described as “the conceit of knowledge without the reality.” His friend and admirer Chærephon had consulted the oracle at Delphi as to whether any man was wiser than Socrates; to which the priestess replied that no other man was wiser. Socrates affirms that he was greatly disturbed at hearing this declaration from so infallible an authority; till after conversing with politicians, and orators, and poets, and men of all classes, he discovered not only that they were destitute of wisdom, but that they believed themselves to be possessed of it; so that he was wiser than they, though wholly ignorant, inasmuch as he was conscious of his own ignorance. He therefore considered his most important duty to be to convince men of their ignorance, and to excite them to remedy it, as the indispensable preliminary to virtue; for virtue he defined as doing a thing well, after having learnt it and practised it by the rational and proper means; and whoever performed his duties best, whether he was a ruler of a state or a husbandman, was the best and most useful man and the most beloved by the Gods.

And if his objects were new, his method was no less so. He was the parent of dialectics and logic. Aristotle says, “To Socrates we may unquestionably assign two novelties—inductive discourses, and the definitions of general terms.” Without any predecessor to copy, Socrates fell as it were instinctively into that which Aristotle describes as the double tract of the dialectic process, breaking up the one into the many, and recombining the many into the one; though the latter or synthetical process he did not often perform himself, but