Produced by David Thomas FOUR PHASES OF MORALS SOCRATES, ARISTOTLE, CHRISTIANITY, UTILITARIANISM. BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE, F.R.S.E. PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH SECOND EDITION. EDINBURGH EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS 1874. TO SIR HENRY HOLLAND, BART., M.D., D.C.L., PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OP GREAT BRITAIN, ETC. ETC. DEAR SIR,--As the substance of this book was originally delivered in the form of Lectures before the Royal Institution, London, I was naturally led, in giving my notes a more exact expression and a larger illustration, to do so in connexion with your name--a name which, besides its official significance in all that concerns the Albemarle Street Institution, was recommended to me by that remarkable combination of rare experience of life, enlightened scholarship, and various knowledge of men and places, which, more than the greatest metaphysical acuteness, or the most extensive academical learning, enables a man to be a sound judge of those important practical questions with which the science of Ethics is occupied. As by the arrangements of the season--1869--of which my course formed a part, the number of Lectures was limited to four, and as I determined to treat the subject in the concrete historically, rather than in the form of abstract discussion, it necessarily happened that the four phases of morals to which I specially directed attention, viewed in reference to the whole system of ethical doctrine, presented an incomplete and fragmentary aspect. I endeavoured however, under these limitations, to bring forward those historical manifestations of moral truth which both afforded a ready occasion for discussing some of the most fundamental questions of Ethics, and, from historical and local considerations, were most fitted to be presented to a British audience at the present day. At the same time, there runs through the four discourses a unity of thought and tendency beyond what the title indicates, and which those who are competent to judge will easily recognise. Hoping that you will find nothing in this book but what has been âattained with honesty, and maintained with moderationâ--the test of excellence in such matters which yourself have wisely indicated,--and that you may be able to accord to these Discourses in their written form some portion of that approbation which your presence conferred on their oral delivery, I am, DEAR SIR, Yours, with sincere esteem, JOHN STUART BLACKIE. UNIVERSITY, EDINBURGH, _October_ 1871. CONTENTS. SOCRATES ARISTOTLE CHRISTIANITY UTILITARIANISM SOCRATES. {1} AS there is no country which can boast the honour of possessing more names of a world-wide significance than Greece, so among those who hold this lofty position there is no name superior to Socrates, concerning whom the Delphic oracle in ancient times, and a great utilitarian authority in modern times, agree in testifying that he was the wisest of the wise Greeks.[1.1] And though stout old Cato, in ancient times, as Plutarch informs us, gruffly enough expressed his opinion that the son of Sophroniscus was a pernicious old babbler, whose breath was justly stopped by the cup of hemlock which he drank for his last supper--in harmony with whom the benign old dogmatist whom the modern utilitarians revere as their patriarch declares that Socrates and Plato wasted their lives in talking nonsense under the pretence of teaching philosophy,[1.2]--yet these negative utterances, few and far between, against the fair fame of the father of moral science, have died away almost as quickly as uttered, and are now no more heard in the grand organ-swell of the general admiration of more than two thousand years. {2} Unquestionably if there be any name, after the great Founder of the Christian faith, which is entitled to claim the title of a preacher of righteousness for all times and all places, it is the name of Socrates; and it is with the view of bringing his high merits in tins respect before the general public, in as easy a way as is consistent with scholarly accuracy, that I have undertaken to write the present paper. The subject is one peculiarly attractive to a thinking man, not only on its own merits, but because of the ample and thoroughly trustworthy materials which we possess for forming a correct judgment. We are not here, as in the case of Pythagoras, sent to fish for fragments of truth among fanciful writers who lived several hundred years after the death of the object of their transcendental laudations; but, as in the gospel history, we have to deal with the intimate disciples and daily companions of the great hero of the story. We gather our knowledge of the life and philosophy of Socrates from Xenophon and Plato, both of whom have reported their intercourse with the philosopher in a tone of mingled admiration and sobriety which leaves no ground for suspicion. Only with regard to Plato we must take with us this caution, that he was both a poet by temperament and by mental habit a system-builder; and, as he chose to set forth his own speculations in a series of dramatic dialogues wherein Socrates is the chief speaker, we must beware of accepting, as standing on one common basis, the facts with regard to the life of Socrates brought forward in these compositions and the doctrines which are put into his mouth. With regard to the former, we may accept Platoâs evidence as a contemporary authority with the {3} utmost confidence; with regard to the latter, we must be constantly on our guard; and indeed, according to my view, it is wise never to accept any statement of Socratesâs doctrine from Plato, of which the germ at least does not lie plainly in Xenophon. For Xenophon, just because he was a less original man than Plato, a pleasing and graceful writer, somewhat on the level of our Addison, was for that reason free from the temptation, or rather had not the capacity, to interpolate anything into his account of the philosopher which was not consistent with the actual fact. He was a plain man, with no theories to support, and no pretensions to maintain; and as a faithful contemporary recorder of what he heard and saw, a more capable and trustworthy witness could not be desired. We shall therefore draw our sketch of the life and sayings of the great Athenian preacher mainly from his pleasant little book, introducing the idealist of the Academy only where he cannot be suspected of using his revered master as a mere dramatic engine, or where his superior literary powers have enabled him to paint a more effective picture. The age of Socrates was the age of Pericles, the culminating epoch of Athenian glory; he was contemporary with Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Aristophanes, Phidias; but, while he shared all the elevating influences of this ascendant age, growing with its growth and blossoming with its blossom, he was not spared the sorrow of quitting the scene beneath the first dark shadows of its decay. That military ambition which is as much the besetting sin of democracy as of autocracy, had precipitated the Athenians, during the latter part of the fifth century {4} before Christ, into a distant expedition which crippled their energies and exhausted their resources; all this, and certain violent revolutionary changes which arose out of it, Socrates had to live through, till at last, a few years before his death, he saw the pride of Periclean Athens laid prostrate at the feet of Lysander and the rude oligarchy of LacedÃ¦mon. He was born in the year 469 B.C., eleven years after the naval battle of Salamis which freed Europe for ever from the apprehension of Asiatic servitude, exactly at the time when the brilliant but sober policy of Pericles commenced its long period of happy sway over the fortunes of the Athenian state. At this time Simonides and the other great poets who had seen and sung the glorious victories of Marathon and Salamis were swiftly departing from the scene; but the memory of those patriotic achievements still burned vigorously in every Athenian breast, and conspired, with the birth of new and ambitious intellectual aspirations, to surround the youth of the philosopher with an atmosphere the most favourable to social and intellectual progress. The importance which the achievements of the democracy at Marathon and Salamis gave to the middle and lower classes of society at Athens, broke down the barriers which ancient aristocratic exclusiveness might have raised against the pretensions of mere character without position; so that Socrates, though the son of a stone-cutter, and not, like Plato, drawing his blood from the old Attic aristocracy, seems to have found free entrance into the society of the most distinguished public and literary men of his age. His mother, as he himself took care to inform the world, was a âright worthy and worshipful {5} Î¼Î±á¿Î±,â or lady-obstetrician; a âwise woman,â as the French say, in matters where it seems most natural that women should be specially wise; her name was PhÃ¦narete; but in social position, according to our aristocratic way of talking, she was nobody. What Socratesâs own profession was, or how he supported himself, a very important point in the history of all public men, we unfortunately do not know exactly; that he practised stone-cutting in his early years is not improbable; and this may have given rise to the belief mentioned by Pausanias, that a group of the Graces at the entrance of the PropylÃ¦a was his work; but there is not the slightest indication either in Xenophon or Plato that he continued to practise this art, or any other art, in after life. He had therefore no profession; and, as he made no money by his philosophy, we must believe that he had been left some small competence by his father, or some relation, on which he was content to live. That he was extremely poor we know, both from Xenophon and from his own account of himself before the jury at his trial. We know also that his habits of life were remarkably plain and frugal, that he required little money, and coveted none. That he was in a position to have made money if he had chosen there can be no doubt; but he expressly states that he had relinquished all projects for increasing his income, in order that he might devote himself without distraction to the great work of his life. However, with his philosophical notions about mere external grandeur, he seems to have been rich enough to live comfortably with a wife and family. This wife was the noted Xanthippe, not always the most pleasant companion, and, perhaps not altogether {6} without reason, from her point of view, at variance with a husband who showed such utter indifference to worldly aggrandizement and domestic display; but for this touch of sharpness in the temper only, as he argued, the better fitted to be the wife of a philosopher, or to make a philosopher of her husband; for, as men who wish to learn to ride do not choose the meekest and most docile beast that they can find, but the most spirited, so the husband who wishes to rule a wife well should have such an one as it is not easy but difficult to control. This character of the philosopherâs wife rests on the authority of Xenophon; Plato nowhere alludes to it; and whatever her temper might have been, Socrates certainly did not consider it so bad as to justify his sons in withholding from her the usual love and reverence due from children to their parents; for âyou may be sure,â he said, âif she is a little cross sometimes, it is for your good; and there is a reason in her objurgations which a wise son ought to acknowledge.â Having no special occupation or profession in life, Socrates might perhaps have passed in Athens for an idle man, a lounger about the streets, and public talker, had there not sprung up about this time a class of men professing to be teachers of eloquence and of all wisdom, with whom he was brought into connexion. These were the Sophists, a name which means nothing more than professors or teachers of wisdom. Like these men, Socrates was always seen in the streets and public places of Athens, conversing with the clever young men, and publicly debating all points of speculative and practical interest. He was therefore in outward appearance and to the {7} general eye a mere Sophist among Sophists. For it is not everybody who cares to know that two men who fight with the same weapons and in the same style of fence may be fighting for very different causes, on opposite sides, and with altogether contrary results. But the truth behind the appearance was, that while the majority of these Sophists taught eloquence as a trade, and logical training as an affair of intellectual exhibition, Socrates preached virtue as a mission, and the exercise of right reason as the only means of obtaining virtue. We say _mission_ here not as a fashionable phrase of the day, but with a special emphasis; for it is quite certain, both from the speech of the philosopher at his trial, and from not a few passages in Xenophon, that he devoted his life to self-improvement in the first place, and to the improvement of his fellow-citizens in the second place, with the conscientious devotedness of a man who was strongly impressed with the conviction, that this employment was assigned to him direct from God, whose high injunction he was not at liberty to neglect. His language with regard to this is in a precisely similar tone to that of St. Paul when he writes, â_Woe is me if I preach not the gospel_.â The human source through which he got this mission some writers have been curious to trace, alleging that his master was Anaxagoras, and other things to that effect; but there is no hint of this either in Xenophon or Plato; and in fact it is foolish to go in search of a master for a man so thoroughly original, so distinct and decided a protester against all who had gone before him. We may be assured, at least, that in the moral philosophy which was the burden of all his teaching, he had no master but {8} himself (as indeed Xenophon makes him say in express words) and the God to whom he habitually referred his highest inspirations; while in regard to other matters he had enjoyed the common training of all Athenians in music, poetry, gymnastics, and a little mathematics to boot--a science which, since the days of Thales (600 B.C.) and Pythagoras (550 B.C.), had occupied a conspicuous place in the higher culture of the Athenians. Of the exact date when he assumed a prominent position as a public teacher of wisdom and virtue we have no exact account; it is natural however to suppose, from the sobriety and solidity of his character, and from the long-continued quiet search after truth which occupied him in his early years, that he did not suddenly emerge into notoriety, but grew up step by step into that general acknowledgment of superior wisdom, on which, according to a well-accredited account, the Delphic oracle was not afraid to put its seal. Certain it is that in the year 423 B.C., when he was about forty-seven years of age, he was such a notable character in Athens as to have been brought upon the stage by the broad license of Attic comedy as the representative of the whole class of Sophists, with whom, by the superficial eye, he was naturally confounded. We must suppose therefore that his reputation as a great public talker and debater had been gradually growing, up to that period. And no doubt, even if he had been a man of less original talent, there was something about his personal appearance and character that could not fail to make him the mark of general observation among the busy-idle community of Athens. He was no less odd in his features and in his manner than in his doctrines; an á¼ÏÎ¿ÏÎ¿Ï or {9} eccentric person In the general opinion, whom no man knew exactly what to make of. His features, the very reverse of classical, are familiar to all the frequenters of our public museums; and are, besides, minutely described by both his illustrious disciples. His general appearance was that of a Silenus or Satyr, with a flat, somewhat turned-up, nose, full prominent eyes, big lips, and in later life, as appears from the monuments, a bald head; but these defects were of no avail, even with the beauty-loving Athenians, to diminish the charm of his conversation and the power of his address. For, as Alcibiades says in the Platonic dialogue, where he is one of the chief speakers, he was a Satyr only externally, but internally full of wonderful shapes and sights of gods, like certain hollow figures full of pipes and tubes, seen in the statuariesâ shops, which outwardly were shaped like Sileni, but within contained a machinery of beautiful sacred images. So, as is wont to happen to wise men, his loss became his gain, and his uncomely physiognomy, to all that entered into conversation with him, was the cause of an agreeable surprise. Very different in this from a great modern poet, who was sensitive about his club-foot, the Athenian philosopher made a jest of his unclassical nose, saying that if noses were to be valued as they ought to be, by their fitness for performing the proper functions of a nose, his olfactory organ was better than those noses whose shape was vulgarly accounted more classical; for the upward cast of his open nostrils made them more ready to receive smells from all quarters, while the comparative flatness of his nasal protuberance removed it from the possibility of interfering with the free {10} vision of his eyes; and as to the prominency of these his organs of vision, this was a manifest excellence even more than the conformation of his nose, inasmuch as it enabled him to look, not only straight before him in the way that most eyes do, bat sideways also, and almost all round, so that he could see when no one suspected him of looking at them. But it was not only his general oddity, his pleasant humour, and his wisdom seasoned with salt that made him a noticeable man amid the brilliant society of Athens: he was moreover a thoroughly healthy man, of great powers of endurance, a valiant soldier when his country required his services, and a good bottle-companion when piety towards Dionysus, or any occasion of social festivity, according to Attic usage, demanded that men should drink largely. On these points we have a graphic picture put by Plato into the mouth of Alcibiades, which, to complete our personal portrait here, it will not be amiss to translate. âWhen we were together in the campaign at PotidÃ¦a, and I messed with him every day, I found that in the power of enduring toil he surpassed not only me but all the soldiers in the camp. For when, as sometimes will happen on the march, we might be at a loss for a dinner, Socrates could always fast with the least complaint; while, on the other hand, at our banquetings and junketings he always enjoyed everything in the most hearty way; and when he was forced to drink, even though not willingly, he could drain cup for cup with the stoutest bottle-companion in the camp; and, what is strangest of all, even after our stiffest bouts no one ever saw Socrates drunk. And as to cold and frost, I remember {11} well, one night in one of those severe Macedonian winters, when there was a very biting frost, and every man either stayed within or went out well encased in warm sheepskin jackets and felt shoes, Socrates alone went about in the open air with no other covering than his common mantle, and trod the frosted ground with his bare feet more lightly than others did with their warm shoes. But I must tell you something more notable of his doings at PotidÃ¦a. One morning he went out early to indulge some contemplations; but not succeeding, as it would appear, in his object, whatever that might be, he remained standing and looking right out before him till it was near mid-day; and then the soldiers began to notice him, and said one to another that Socrates had been standing there in a brown study from sunrise. Thereafter some of the Ionians about the evening, after supper, took their quilts and carpets out, for it was then mild summer weather, and, shaking them on the ground, slept in the open air, keeping an eye at the same time on Socrates to see whether he would remain all night standing in that reverie; and when they awoke in the morning with the sun, lo! Socrates was standing in the same spot; and, after saying a prayer to the sun, shortly retired. So much for his contemplative oddities; but it is only fair that I should tell you how he was as good a soldier as a sophist, and could achieve no less notable things with his hand than with his head. For when the battle took place, for my conduct in which the generals gave me such honourable marks of distinction, I, who knew the real state of the case, insisted that if any man had distinguished himself in the fight it was Socrates, to whom on that occasion {12} I should willingly resign the intended laurels. But though this was quite true, the judges were inclined to favour me; and Socrates came forward and asserted with the greatest emphasis that my claims were superior to his; and so I carried off the reward of valour which none but he could with perfect justice claim. Then again when we retreated from Delium, after the defeat I was riding off on horseback, while Socrates and Laches followed, as hoplites, on foot, and coming up to them I cried, Fear not, good friends, I will keep alongside of you and defend you from the pursuit. On that occasion I admired even more than at PotidÃ¦a the conduct of this man; for while both were in danger of being overtaken it was manifest that Socrates during the whole retreat displayed far more coolness than Laches, who was by profession a soldier. ... Instead of hurry and trepidation we saw in him only the large full eye that with wise wariness turned to this side and to that in a fashion that seemed to say to all comers that they would find a steady nerve if they came within swordâs length of him. And thus he got out of the rush safely; for so I have always observed that in a retreat the men who are most afraid always fare the worst. And many other things there are I might relate, which would show clearly what a strange and truly admirable creature this Socrates is. Individual persons, behaving in individual cases as excellently as Socrates, it might be easy to point out; but such a compound, a thing in the shape of a man so utterly unlike any other man, you will find nowhere, either among famous ancients op illustrious moderns. One might make an adequate portraiture of Achilles, or Brasidas, of Pericles, or {13} Nestor, or Antenor, and other famous characters; but such a unique mortal as this son of Sophroniscus no man can describe, unless, indeed, he chooses to steal my simile, and say that he is a Silenus superficially, both in his appearance and in his talk, but to those who look deeper his soul is a shrine of most excellent, beautiful, and worshipful divinities.â This passage will make it plain that Socrates was no mere idle speculator or subtle talker, such as might be found in ancient Athens or in any modern German university by scores--but a practical man, and an effective citizen of prominent merit. But if he showed courage in the field of battle not inferior to the stoutest and coolest professional soldier, he displayed a civic virtue on other occasions, which only the fewest on all occasions have been able to exhibit. This virtue was moral courage; a quality which, when exercised in critical circumstances, raises a man high above the average of his kind, whereas with mere physical courage he is only a more cool and calculating rival of dogs and cocks and tigers, and other ferine combatants. On that memorable occasion, when the whole of Athens was fretted into a fever-fit of indignation on account of the neglect of the dead and dying slain by the victors at ArginusÃ¦ (B.C. 406), and in the torrent of what appeared to them most righteous wrath, were eager to overbear all the customary forms of fair judicial trial, Socrates happened to be serving as one of the senators whose duty it was to put the question to the assembly of the people in the case of great public trials; and, a motion having been made that the generals who were guilty of the alleged neglect of pious duty should be condemned to drink the hemlock, and have their property {14} confiscated, it fell to the senators to perform the preparatory step in the prosecution. But as the proceedings in the case had been dictated by violent excitement, and were decidedly illegal, Socrates refused, in the face of violent popular clamour, to have anything to do with the matter, and lifted up his single protest--one amongst fifty--against violating the sacred forms of law at the dictation of an excited populace. On this, as on other similar occasions when he came into collision with the public authorities, he maintained a truly apostolic bearing, using in almost identical terms the language of the apostles Peter and John, when they were forbidden to preach by the Sanhedrim: â_Whether it be right in the sight of the gods to hearken unto you rather than to the gods, judge ye; but as for me, I have sworn to obey the laws, and I cannot forswear myself_.â With all this faithfulness, however, in the public service, Socrates was very far from wishing to be what we call a public man; on the contrary, he kept himself systematically out of places which were eagerly coveted by less able men, and refused to have anything to do with the party politics of the day. This withdrawal from the service of the State, to the majority of Greeks, with whom the State was everything, could not but appear strange, and tend to increase their prejudice against philosophy and philosophers. But Socrates acted here, as in all other matters, with admirable good sense; he felt that to be a politician and a preacher of righteousness was to combine two vocations practically incompatible; for the popular measure which it might serve the immediate need of the political man to advocate it might not seldom be the first duty of {15} the moralist to condemn. Besides, if he took office with men who habitually acted on principles of which he could not but disapprove, he would be forced to waste his strength in a fruitless opposition to measures which he could not prevent; and in this way it came to pass that, while he utterly disapproved, in the general case, of a good citizen, whether from the love of selfish ease, or from false modesty, or from moral cowardice, refusing to take part in public life, in his own particular work he felt that political activity would be a hindrance, and that it was his duty to abstain. In these few paragraphs are summed up all that from indisputable authority we know of the personal history of the greatest of heathen preachers. The circumstances connected with his death are too closely interwoven with the character of his teaching to be intelligible here. We shall therefore enter now directly into a short exposition of his ethical teaching; after which we shall be in a condition to consider with an intelligent astonishment how it came to pass that the preacher of the noblest doctrine that Athens ever heard, before the preaching of Paul on the Hill of Mars, after living in high repute and popularity for seventy years, should at last have been made to quit the scene of his moral triumphs, publicly branded with the stigma which was wont to be attached to the lowest of malefactors and the vilest of traitors. The two first questions to be asked with regard to any great moral or political reformer are--What had he to reform? and then, In the work of reform who were his antagonists? The first of these questions is answered intelligibly and plainly enough in {16} the current knowledge of every schoolboy, that Socrates brought down philosophy from heaven to earth, or, as Cicero has it more fully in the Tusculan questions, â_Socrates primus philosophiam devocavit e cÅlo, et in urbibus collocavit, et in domos etiam introduxit, et coegit de vitÃ¢ et moribus, rebusque bonis et mails quÅrere_.â Now there cannot be any doubt that, both relatively to the time and place where he taught, and absolutely for all times and all places, Socrates by this step did one of the highest services to human progress. By a natural vice of the human imagination we are led to seek in the misty distance for some pleasant excitement to thought, while neglecting the direct lessons of familiar wisdom from things under our eyes, which appear contemptible only because they are common. We attempt ambitiously to measure the remote movement of the spheres, and to note their imagined music, before we have brought any order or harmony into the daily course of our own lives; we climb all the highest mountains in Europe for a fine prospect, when there is likely a much better one to be enjoyed not five miles from our own door. In obedience to this tendency of the human mind the early philosophy of Greece was occupied principally (not altogether certainly, for Pythagoras was a great moralist) with cosmical and metaphysical speculations which amused the fancy and raised interesting and puzzling problems for thought, without any valuable practical result. When Thales, for one, said that the first principle of all things was water, he enunciated a great truth; it is true that wherever there is life there must be humidity; with dryness dwells only dust and death and frost. But this was a truth {17} leading to no applications; it could neither purify the wells nor improve the wines; no man would be the better in his body or his soul for formulating a cosmical generality of this kind. And if Heraclitus, the sombre sage of Ephesus, advanced a step further in a true generalization, when he said that fire or heat is the fundamental force which makes water possible, as modern chemistry has amply demonstrated, this doctrine did not advance human nature one step either towards outward comfort or inward satisfaction. And of what avail was it to tell men, as he did, that âall things are in a perpetual flux,â if he did not teach them how to regulate that flux in the flow of their own lives, and to prevent the tidal currents of their soul from getting into a plash and jabble of conflicting waters in the navigation of which no seamancraft could avail against miserable shipwreck? More useless still was it to assert, as Anaxagoras is reported to have done, that the sun is a large mass of glowing stone or metal, so many times bigger than the earth--a proposition which, if it were true, would not teach a poor cowering savage to kindle a stick fire, nor make one olive-tree brighter with blossoms that promised a purer and a richer oil; while, if it were not true, then the whole of your lofty heliacal philosophy is only a blaze of lies. The whole history of modern science, indeed, before the establishment of the close and cautious method of experiment introduced by Bacon, shows that all physical inquiry starting from unproved assumptions, and ending in sweeping speculations, is only a sublime sort of idleness, and a procreation of cloud-phantoms. Socrates therefore acted wisely for his own time and place in saying to a people fond of {18} curious subtlety and unfruitful speculation. Let us have done with this lofty-sounding but essentially hollow talk about sun and moon and stars, and let us know something certain, and do something useful. This we shall achieve if we keep within our own lower sphere, and attend to our own work as men; let us order our houses well in the first place, and after that concern ourselves with the order of the universe; if, indeed, this does not rather belong to the gods, who may safely be left to do their cosmical work quietly, without any Anaxagoras or Archelaus to tempt with adventurous guesses the principles of their administration. Such was the thoroughly practical, and, if you will, thoroughly utilitarian tone which, taught by Xenophon, we justly view as the starting-point of the Socratic philosophy. And there can be no doubt man is so essentially a practical animal, that if even the accurate and curiously verified physical science of these latter days were as destitute of social applications and as barren of practical results as Greek science was in the days of Socrates, nine hundred and ninety-nine persons of those who now delight to dabble in chemistry and geology would leave these interesting sciences to the few men of a purely speculative character with whom mere knowledge is loved for itself. But when by geology we are enabled to unearth coals and gold, and know where to sink wells much more certainly than by the mediÃ¦val magic of the divining-rod; and when by chemistry we improve our stores, bleach our clothes, purify our infected chambers, and dye our cloth with hues of which even the most skilful of the lichen-gatherers in the Highland glens never dreamt--then, to use a booksellerâs phrase, you are {19} sure to interest a large public. But there is another view of the case, which places the Socratic philosopher on a much more lofty and honourable pedestal. For notwithstanding all the surprising discoveries and brilliant achievements of modern physical science, it must still remain true that âThe proper study of mankind is man,â and that no kind of knowledge ever can surpass either in interest or importance the knowledge of man as a social being, as the member of a Family, of a Church, and of a State. The depreciation of moral science which we have lately heard from Mr. Buckle and other members of that school is a transitional phenomenon arising out of the one-sided culture of the understanding, and a defective emotional, volitional, and imaginative organization. If new discoveries are not every day trumpeted in the domain of moral philosophy, it is just because this science, like Euclid, is too certain, too fundamental, and too indispensable to have been left to the happy chance of being found out after the lapse of long centuries. Morals are as necessary to the acting man as the sunâs light to the growing plant; they are not discovered, because they always have been and always must be; and the only great result that we have to look for then in them is that they shall be more universally recognised, more scientifically handled, and more practically applied. Socrates therefore was right, not only for Greece in the fifth century before Christ, but for England at the present moment, and for all times and places, when he proclaimed on the house-tops that the first and most necessary wisdom for all men is not to measure the stars, or {20} to weigh the dust, or to analyse the air, but, according to the old Delphic sentence, to know themselves, and to realize in all the breadth and depth of its significance what it is to be a man, and not a pig or a god. And in attaining this knowledge, while he would certainly find that, though a stable physical platform to stand on and a healthy physical atmosphere to breathe are necessary for the production of a normal humanity, yet in general the measure of a manâs manhood is to be taken not so much from what he attaches to himself from without as from what he brings with him from within. âThe kingdom of heaven is within youâ is a pregnant Socratic maxim as well as a profound evangelic text, and, in reference to our present subject, simply means that, while the most brilliant discoveries of physical science only minister to our comforts, our conveniences, and our furnishings, moral science alone can teach us to be men; for we are men by what we are, not by what we have. Gas-pipes, and water-pipes, spinning-jennies, steamboats, steam-coaches, submarine telegraphs, photographs, oleographs, oxyhydrogen, blowpipes, and the thousand and one devices for using and controlling nature which we owe to advanced physical science, may adorn and improve life in many ways, may multiply production of all kinds infinitely, and facilitate the diffusion of intellectual as well as material benefits; but they have no originating power in what is highest; they can create neither thought nor character; they are the most useful of ministers, but the most unmeaning of masters. And there can be little doubt that, if Socrates were to rise from the grave at the present moment, while, with his, strong {21} common sense and keen eye for the practical, he would joyfully recognise all the wonderful material progress of which England and America make their boast, he would not the less feel himself constrained to utter an emphatic warning against the danger of estimating our national grandeur by the visible pomp of gigantic machinery and complex apparatus rather than by the invisible power of noble purpose and lofty design. Such was the attitude of Socrates to the great teachers who since Thales downwards had preceded him in leading the intellectual advance of the most intellectual people of the ancient world. He stood forward as a teacher of moral science, as a preacher and philosophical missionary also; for in morals, the separation of theory from practice is an inconsistency of which only a feeble and imperfect nature is capable. Who, then, and of what quality, were his antagonists in the great regenerative work which he undertook? Not so much the physical philosophers, who might still pursue their researches or pamper their imaginations in their own speculative corners without disturbing the busy world, except in so far as they now and then might come into collision with theological orthodoxy, but the great untrained mass of the people themselves, and the pretentious array of a class of men who put themselves forward as their instructors,--the famous SOPHISTS. The word Sophists signifies professors of wisdom, in which sense Lucian calls our Saviour Ïá½¸Î½ á¼Î½ÎµÏÎºÎ¿Î»Î¿ÏÎ¹ÏÎ¼Î­Î½Î¿Î½ á¼ÎºÎµá¿Î½Î¿Î½ ÏÎ¿ÏÎ¹ÏÏÎ®Î½--_that crucified Sophist_--because He came forward as a public instructor professing to teach men wisdom. But as wisdom is a vague word (in fact ÏÎ¿ÏÏÏ in Greek signifies _clever_, and even {22} _cunning_ as often as _wise_), we must consult the circumstances of time and place to know what it exactly meant in any particular instance. The generation immediately preceding Socrates, when the Sophists first became prominent, was the era of the great Persian wars, and of the notable uprising of national spirit and of popular power which that memorable struggle called forth. How fiercely the strife between the old aristocratic and the new democratic element in Greek society had been raging in the immediately preceding epoch, the poems of Theognis may serve sufficiently to indicate; and now that by the battle of Salamis the political importance of the middle and sub-middle classes had been blazoned forth before universal Greece in glowing characters, the democracy in great commercial cities like Athens at once started into an attitude of hitherto unsuspected significance. New aspirations had been created, new pretensions were put forth, and new guides were required for a large class of people who felt themselves as it were suddenly shooting up from pupilage into majority. Now what guides had a people, circumstanced as the Athenians then, were, to look to for direction? The Church in those days--if we may call it a Church--was not a teaching body; its moral efficacy was exercised through sacred ceremonial and pious hymns; its intellectual agency was almost null. And though gymnastics and music, including a certain amount of the most popular literary culture, were common, there were no institutions like our Universities, for the severe and systematic discipline of the thinking faculties. A cry went up from the heart of the people for prophets to enlighten them; but there were no schools {23} of the prophets. This state of things was the natural soil from which a class of self-constituted popular teachers would grow up; and these teachers were the Sophists. And if we ask further in detail what they taught, the answer will be furnished from the same sources that explain their existence. As the democracy brought them into existence, the demand of the democracy would be the measure of the kind and quality of the article which they were expected to supply; and the article which a democracy demands for the use of its public spokesmen is always the same,--a certain practical knowledge and shrewdness in the conduct of affairs, a certain ready sympathy with, popular prejudices and passions, a certain superficial dexterity in argument, and above all, a fluent and effective style of popular oratory. To supply these wants the acceptable teachers of the people would require to profess a knowledge of the great leading principles of law, a familiarity with political forms and the best methods of controlling masses of men into habits or fits of co-operation, a practical command of logic, so as to be able to turn the point of an argument, or entangle in a net of subtleties an inexperienced jury, and, as the crowning accomplishment, a faculty of speech, alert and unscrupulous, which might never lack a shift to give plausibility to a bad case, and should ever be ready to confound, overwhelm, and dazzle where it was hopeless to refute. Now it is easy to perceive that the lessons delivered by the professors of this wisdom, however acceptable to clever and ambitious young gentlemen eager to enter upon the arena of public life, could not, in the nature of the case, be conceived in any very exalted tone of morals or be framed so as to inculcate the formation {24} of any strictly honourable rules of conduct. The Sophists were mere tradesmen; they were paid for the furnishing of a certain article, and they had to supply that article, of the quality and in the way and manner which might be most agreeable to those on whose patronage they depended. They were therefore, as Socrates constantly pointed out, the slaves of the parties by whom they were paid; and if what their employers wanted was the show of wisdom rather than the substance, a ready command of words and arguments in preference to an earnest and severe search after truth, it was not to be expected that the majority of them would give themselves much concern to inculcate a severer wisdom. Tradesmen are seldom found acting upon principles which have a direct tendency to frighten customers from their shops. Not that there was anything necessarily bad or immoral in the profession or teaching of a Sophist; some of them, evidently, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, even on the witness of their great adversary Plato, were very proper and respectable gentlemen; few of them, perhaps, grossly immoral; and with those of them who, like Gorgias of Leontium, confined themselves strictly to the teaching of the rules of pure rhetoric and elocution, no fault could justly be found any more than with Quinctilian among the later Romans, or Principal Campbell of Aberdeen among ourselves. But it is plain, from the very nature of the case, that the Sophists, so far as they went a step beyond the province of strict rhetoric, were placed in a position which rendered their moral and philosophical teaching a matter of just concern to all who were interested in the education of the youth of Athens, and in the {25} character of her public men. Besides, among an impressible and excitable people like the Athenians, fond of display, and ambitious of popularity, the mere methodized art of talking, apart from any solid knowledge, and without any high moral inspiration, was a very dangerous engine to put into the hand of ambitious young politicians. And the fact unquestionably is, according to the concurrent testimony of Xenophon, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle,--in fact, of all antiquity,--that these public teachers generally did dispense very shallow and often very dangerous doctrine. They were the natural birth of an age of movement and innovation; and in such an age, along with much that may operate as a healthy stimulant to progressive thought, there is always present a drastic admixture of the merely analytic, sceptical, and destructive element, a negative force, strong to impugn the validity of ancient foundations, but weak to establish anything equally stable and effective in their place. By the negative and sceptical teachings of these men, Socrates found the youth of Athens shaken from their old moorings, and tossing about amid seas of perplexing doubt on the one hand, and unprincipled libertinism on the other. Every great principle of social order and human right that formerly had been received from venerated tradition, and believed by the co-operation of a healthy instinct with a hoary authority, was now denied; and the field was waiting for the appearance of a great constructive prophet, who should bring people back through steps of scientific reasoning to a living faith in those maxims of immutable morality which they had originally inherited with the blood from their fathersâ veins and the milk from their mothersâ breasts. {26} Such a great prophet now appeared, and his name was Socrates.[26.1] We have now clearly before us the battle-field in which Socrates had to appear, and the opponents with whom he had to contend; we see also the cause for which he had to fight. This was nothing {27} less than the establishment of a firm philosophy of human life, a sure guide for human conduct, and a strong regulator of society. The way now lies open to inquire what special doctrine he taught in order to achieve victory in this struggle; and a careful perusal of Xenophonâs book, which we regard as the {28} only safe authority in the matter, leads to a generalized statement of the Socratic moral philosophy, comprised in the following two propositions:-- (I.) Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and spiderhood consists. (II.) Man is naturally a reasoning animal, and is only then truly a man when his passions are tempered and his conduct regulated by reason. The function of reason is the recognition and the realization of truth; truth recognised in speculation is science; {29} truth realized in action is a moral life and a well-ordered society. These two propositions may appear to many persons now-a-days to contain nothing that is not very vague and very cheap; nevertheless, when looked into accurately and followed out unconditionally, they lead to most important practical consequences; in fact, while their consistent assertion under all circumstances necessarily leads up to a noble and a heroic life, their habitual denial as necessarily leads down to a base and a brutish life. Let us look at them therefore sharply in detail. The first proposition, as the reader will readily perceive, is levelled directly against the selfish theory of morals which was advocated with more or less openness by many of the Greek Sophists, and was prominently put forth in this country, as is generally known, at the time of the great Civil War, by the celebrated Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. That stout speculator, in his treatise on âthe Philosophical Elements of a True Citizen,â lays it down with a distinctness which admits of no qualification, that âall society is either for gain or for glory; that is, not so much for love of our fellows as for love of ourselves;â and again, a few pages further on in the same treatise, he puts forth the famous dictum that âthe natural state of man is a war of all men against all men.â Against such a one-sided, unhuman,
{'title': 'Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism by Blackie', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}