Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/123

Rh dialectical victory by silencing his opponent. In doing so, he commits himself to the position that "good" is a relative idea, and that he has no conception of any absolute good. An antagonist worthy to encounter him would have followed him up into this position, and would have asked, "If goods are manifold and relative, how do you account for their common name?" And to this Socrates would have had to give an answer which would have revealed to us his exact opinion on the nature of universal terms.

Aristippus, however, relinquishing this point, took up another, and asked Socrates "if he knew anything beautiful?" He replied, "Yes, many things." On which it was asked "whether these were all alike?" and Socrates said, "On the contrary, very unlike." "Then how can they be all beautiful?" To this Socrates replied by giving a theory of the Beautiful, which identified it with the relative good, or, in other words, the Useful. "What!" said Aristippus, "can a dung-basket be beautiful?" "Of course it can," said Socrates; "and a golden shield can be very ugly, if the one be well fitted for its proper use, and the other not." Pursuing this theme, he applied his doctrine to beauty in architecture, asserting that it simply consisted in the adaptation of buildings to the use for which they were intended. Thus he said that paintings and frescoes on the walls of houses often detracted from the comfort, and therefore from the beauty, of those houses, by necessitating the building of the walls in a particular way, by which the sun was too much excluded. We have here the first statement,