CHAP. I.

Bravery of Socrates.

15

the civic crown as the prize of valour-the Victoria Cross of those days. His second campaign was no less honourable. At the disastrous battle of Delium he saved the life of Xenophon, whom he carried from the field on his shoulder, fighting his way as he went. He served in another campaign, after which he devoted himself for a time to the civil service of his country.

He was as brave as a senator as he had been as a soldier. He possessed that high moral courage which can brave not only death but adverse opinion. He could defy a tyrant, as well as a tyrannical mob.

When the admirals were tried after the battle of Arginusæ, for not having rescued the bodies of the slain, Socrates stood alone in defending them. The mob were furious. He was dismissed from the Council, and the admirals were condemned.

Socrates then devoted himself to teaching. He stood in the market-places, entered the workshops, and visited the schools, in order to teach the people his ideas respecting the scope and value of human speculation and action. He appeared during a time of utter scepticism. He endeavoured to withdraw men from their metaphysical speculation about nature, which had led them into the inextricable confusion of doubt. "Is life worth living?" was a matter of as much speculation in these days as it is in ours. Socrates bade them look inwards. While men were propitiating the gods, he insisted upon moral conduct as alone guiding man to happiness here and hereafter.

Socrates went about teaching. Wise men and pupils followed him. Aristippus offered him a large sum of money, but the offer was at once declined. Socrates did not teach for money, but to propagate wisdom. He declared that the highest reward he could enjoy was to see mankind benefiting by his labours.

He did not expound from books; he merely argued. "Books," he said, "cannot be interrogated, cannot answer, therefore they cannot teach. We can only learn from them what we knew before." He endeavoured to reduce things to their first elements, and to arrive at certainty as the only standard of truth. He believed in the unity of virtue, and averred that it was teachable as a matter of science. He was of opinion that the only valuable philosophy is that which teaches us our moral duties and religious hopes. He hated injustice and folly of all kinds, and never lost an occasion of exposing them. He expressed his contempt for the capacity for government assumed by all men. He held that only the wise were fit to govern, and that they were the few.

In his seventy-second year he was brought before the judges. The accusers stated their charge as follows: Socrates is an evil-doer, and corrupter of the youth; he does not receive the gods whom the state receives, but introduces new divinities. He was tried on these grounds, and condemned to die. He was taken to his prison, and for thirty days he conversed with his friends on his favourite topics. Crito provided for him the means of escaping from prison, but he would not avail himself of the opportunity. He conversed about the immortality of the soul,* about courage, and virtue, and temperance, about absolute beauty and absolute good, and about his wife and children.

He consoled his weeping friends, and gently upbraided them for their complaints about the injustice of his sentence.

* "If death," he said, "had only been the end of all, the wicked would have had a good bargain in dying, for they would have been happily quit, not only of their bodies, but of their own evil, together with their souls. But now, inasmuch as the soul is manifestly immortal, there is no release or salvation from evil, except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom."-JOWETT'S Dialogues of Plato, i. 488.

CHAP. I.

Socrates and Plato.

17

He was about to die. Why should they complain? He was far advanced in years. Had they waited a short time, the thing would have happened in the course of nature. No man ever welcomed death as a new birth to a higher state of being with greater faith. The time at length came when the gaoler presented him with the cup of hemlock. He drank it with courage, and died in complete calmness. "Such was the end," said Phædo, "of our friend, whom I may truly call the wisest and justest and best of all the men whom I have ever known."

"After ages have cherished the memory of his virtues and of his fate," says Mr. Lewes ; "but without profiting much by his example, and without learning tolerance from his story. His name has become a moral thesis for schoolboys and rhetoricians. Would that it could become a Moral Influence !" *

Socrates wrote no books. Nearly all that we know of him is derived from his illustrious disciples, Plato and Xenophon, who have embalmed the memory of his actions, lessons, wrongs, and death. Plato lived with him for ten years, and afterwards expounded his views in the famous "Dialogues"; but in these dialogues it is difficult to know which is Plato and which is Socrates. After they had been separated by death, Plato, in his fortieth year, travelled into Sicily. He there became acquainted with Dionysius I., the Tyrant of Syracuse. Owing to a difference of opinion about politics, for Plato was bold and free in his expressions about liberty, the tyrant threatened his life. Dion, his brother, interceded for him, and his life was saved; but he was ordered to be sold as a slave. He was bought by a friend, and immediately set at liberty.

Plato returned to Athens, and began to teach. Like his

*

Biographical History of Philosophy, i. 213 (first edition).

C

master, he taught without money and without price. It is not necessary to follow his history. Suffice it to say, that he devoted himself to the inculcation of truth, morality, and duty. He divided the four cardinal virtues into (1) Prudence and wisdom; (2) Courage, constancy, and fortitude; (3) Temperance, discretion, and self-control; and (4) Justice and righteousness. He assumed this division. of virtue as the basis of his moral philosophy. "Let men of all ranks," he said, "whether they are successful or unsuccessful, whether they triumph or not-let them do their duty, and rest satisfied." What a lesson for future ages lies in these words!

Plato devoted the end of his days to the calm retirement of his Academy. The composition of the "Dialogues," which have been the admiration of posterity, was the cheering solace of his life, and especially of his declining years. He has been called the Divine Plato. His soul panted for truth. This alone, he said, should be man's great object. Like his master, he connected with Supreme Intelligence the attributes of goodness, justice, and wisdom, and the idea of direct interposition in human affairs. He disliked poetry as much as Carlyle.* The only poetry he ever praises is moral poetry, which is in truth verified philosophy. Let it be remarked that he lived about four hundred years before Christ. Coleridge speaks of him as

* Carlyle says, “If you have anything profitable to communicate to men, why sing it? That a man has to bring out his gift in words of any kind, and not in silent divine actions, which alone are fit to express it well, seems to me a great misfortune for him. It is one of my constant regrets in this generation, that men to whom the gods have given a genius (which means a light of intelligence, of courage, and all manfulness, or else means nothing) will insist, in such an earnest time as ours has grown, in bringing out their Divine gift in the shape of verse, which now no man reads entirely in earnest." On the other

CHAP. I.

Ideal of Duty.

19

the genuine prophet of the Christian Era; and Count de Maistre was accustomed to say of him, " Let us never leave a great question without having consulted Plato.

do, much better But the Duty is

The New Testament gives a glorified ideal of a possible human life; but hard are his labours who endeavours to keep that ideal uppermost in his mind. We feel that there is something else that we would like to than the thing that is incumbent upon us. there, and it must be done, without dreaming or idling. How much of the philosophy of moral health and happiness is involved in the injunction-"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might." He that does his best, whatever his lot may be, is on the sure road of advancement.

It is related of one, who in the depths of his despair cried, "It is of no use to be good, for you cannot be good, and if you were, it would do you no good." It is hopeless, truthless, and faithless, thus to speak of the goodness of word and work. Each one of us can do a little good in our own sphere of life. If we can do it, we are bound to do it. We have no more right to render ourselves useless than to destroy ourselves.

We have to be faithful in small things as well as in great. We are required to make as good a use of our one talent as of the many talents that have been conferred upon us. We can follow the dictates of our conscience, and walk,

hand, Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his Introduction to The English Poets, says that our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay in Poetry. "There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, it has attached its emotions to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion."