Thus perished the “
Greek Vase
It has been often customary to exhibit Socrates as a moral preacher, in which character probably he has acquired to himself the general reverence attached to his name. This is, indeed, a true attribute, but not the characteristic or salient attribute, nor that by which he permanently worked on mankind. On the other hand, Arcesilaus, and the New Academy, a century and more afterwards, thought that they were following the example of Socrates (and Cicero seems to have thought so too) when they reasoned against everything—and when they laid it down as a system, that against every affirmative position, an equal force of negative argument might be brought up as counterpoise. Now this view of Socrates is, in my judgment, not merely partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such systematic distrust of the powers of the mind to attain certainty. He laid down a clear (though erroneous) line of distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. About physics, he was more than a sceptic; he thought that man could know nothing: the gods did not intend that man should acquire any such information, and therefore managed matters in such a way as to be beyond his ken, for all except the simplest phenomena of daily wants; moreover, not only man could not acquire such information, but ought not to labour after it. But respecting the topics which concern man and society, the views of Socrates were completely the reverse. This was the field which the gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and acquisition of knowledge; a field, wherein, with that view, they managed phenomena on principles of constant and observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains might know them.
Nay, Socrates went a step further—and this forward step is the fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things, but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well, unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Socrates felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety, patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it—yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Socrates found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was, that universal “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” against which he declares such emphatic war; and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards—“